I’ll probably never forget the day I found out.   It was around the middle of October ‘“ our daughter’s birthday weekend ‘“ and we had gone camping. Since we were expecting quite a few well-wishers calling for our daughter, I’d forwarded our home telephone number to my cell phone.

At one point during the weekend, it rang, and a heavily-accented woman asked for my wife.

‘œWho is calling, please?’ I asked.

The caller was somewhat evasive, again asking for, and mispronouncing, my wife’s name.

‘œShe’s my wife,’ I answered, ‘œHow can I help you?’

The woman was clearly surprised by my female-sounding voice laying claim to another woman as wife.   She hemmed and hawed, but wouldn’t give me any information.   At that moment, I realized it was a collection call.   I passed the phone to my wife, who answered, but the campground had poor cell coverage.   The call dropped.

‘œWho was that?’ I asked, concerned.

My wife was evasive.   She immediately denied it was a bill collector, but I knew better.   She had, a number of years ago, run up quite an expensive bill when she’d ordered a secret credit card and went on a shopping spree.   Despite my wife’s noisy protests to the contrary, I knew that she’d committed an act of financial infidelity.

Financial infidelity, according to Wikipedia   is defined as the ‘œsecretive act of spending money, possessing credit and credit cards, holding secret accounts or stashes of money, borrowing money, or otherwise incurring debt unknown to one’s spouse, partner, or significant other.’   Lawyers.com and Redbook magazine discovered in a 2005 survey that nearly a third of adults in committed relationships lie about their spending habits.   Of those folks, women tend to engage in financial deceit more frequently than men because (at least in heterosexual relationships) they are often responsible for the household budget.

Common marital problem or not, I was mad.   I contemplated jumping into my truck and driving off into the sunset.

What made the betrayal seem even worse was that we had gotten married just a few months before.   Although we’d been together for almost ten years, we had waited until marriage was legal for everyone in California (until Prop 8 passed!).   Before the ceremony, I asked, ‘œDo you have any other debts I don’t know about?’

My sweetie lied.

Despite being a tempting alternative, divorce really wasn’t an option.   We have been together for ten years, we love each other, and we have a home, a business and a life together.   More importantly, we are in the process of adopting a teen from the foster care system, and going our separate ways would not only destroy our lives, it would also destroy our soon-to-be daughter’s as well.

In hashing things out, there was much crying and yelling, and quite a few tearful apologies from my wife.

Making the decision to stay together was only the first step.   We both realized that we have a tough road ahead.   Not only are there financial consequences that come from my wife’s actions, there are emotional ones as well.   Trust has been undermined.

But we do love each other, and that’s the starting point.

My goal in writing about our family’s struggles with financial infidelity is not to demonize or vilify my wife.   Rather, I’d like to share our story because it is a common problem, and the solutions are not always easy.   Have you had a relationship hurt by financial infidelity?   Were you able to overcome it?   What did you do to make things better?

Next in the series: Assessing the Damage

Photo credit: stock.xchng.