Not showing up?

A follow up to last week's post

A reader texted me last week.

“There’s always one spouse who just doesn’t want to be involved in the money at all. It’s tough to get the second spouse interested.”

You probably already know which one you are in your relationship. And if you’re the one who keeps trying to get the other person to the table, whether that’s scheduling the money date, opening the laptop, or asking for thirty minutes on a Sunday, I want to offer you something before we get into any tactics.

Your partner isn’t opting out. They’re protecting themselves from something, and until you understand what that something is, no tactic is going to work for very long.

Here’s the thing about money conversations. They’re never really about the money.

When one person shuts down or disappears from the conversation, they’re not thinking about interest rates or savings targets. They’re feeling something. Maybe it’s shame about where things stand. Maybe it’s dread that looking at the numbers will make a fear real. Maybe every time money has come up before it turned into something that felt bad, and somewhere along the way they learned to be somewhere else when it starts. The disengagement made sense at some point, got reinforced over time, and now it’s just how things are.

It shows up in small ways. One spouse does all the talking when money comes up, and the other goes quiet, or changes the subject, or suddenly has somewhere else to be. It would be easy to read that as not caring. In my experience, it’s almost never that.

This reminds me of what I’ve studied in financial therapy training. When a spouse resists going to couples therapy, the person who suggested it may take it personally and hears something like: you don’t care about us. But therapists will tell you that’s rarely what’s happening. More often, the resistant partner is scared of what might come out, feels that being asked implies they’re the problem, or has decided things are fine enough that opening that door feels riskier than leaving it closed. The care is usually there. The avoidance is doing a job. Money works exactly the same way.

So what do you actually do with this?

John Gottman’s research found that 69% of couples’ conflicts are perpetual, meaning they’re rooted in differences in personality, values, or history, and they don’t go away. They just keep coming back, and money almost always falls into that category. What people miss is that Gottman also found this is true for happy couples. The difference between couples who are doing well and couples who aren’t isn’t that the thriving ones solved their perpetual problems. It’s that they learned to talk about them without shutting down, which means the goal isn’t to fix the thing. It’s to be able to sit with it together.

The intervention Gottman developed for this kind of gridlock is called Dreams Within Conflict. The premise is that underneath most recurring conflicts is an unspoken fear or hope that hasn’t been heard, and the exercise asks each partner to get curious about what the issue actually means to the other person. Not what they want to do about it, but what they’re afraid of, what they’re hoping for, what enough would actually feel like. That question lands differently than asking if you can just look at the budget this weekend.

What the Gottman conversation actually asks of you is not a technique. It is curiosity. A real interest in what your partner is carrying that you did not already know.

That sounds simple, and it rarely is. Curiosity in a money conversation means slowing down when everything in you wants to explain or defend. It means treating your partner’s resistance as information rather than an obstruction.

I keep coming back to this because it keeps being true. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat is about what happened when one couple replaced debate with a 30-day experiment. What Listening Does for Hard Money Conversations explores why curiosity can be a strong predictor of whether a hard conversation goes well or sideways.

Last week, I wrote about research showing that couples consistently predict their money conversations will go worse than they actually do. That finding sits differently now. The spouse who won’t show up isn’t being difficult. They’re bracing for something they’ve decided will hurt, and knowing that, really knowing it not as a strategy but as something true, is usually the only thing that changes what’s possible.

The door isn’t on the spreadsheet. It’s in the question underneath it.