A relationship can be undone by finances

Gary Clement for The National

Financial abuse. It’s not as simple, or obvious, as you’d think. And it’s happening every day, in your neighbourhood.

Read on. Your preconceived ideas of it might be challenged.

Case I – To love and live

“If I didn’t love him, I’d leave,” she says.

She has thought about leaving. Many times. Because her husband is emotionally abusive and a bully. She once mustered the courage to ask whether she’d continue to receive her company salary if she was no longer married to him – they started up a business decades ago and she is on the board – he said he’d have to think it over. Just as well, she thinks she loves him. She can’t afford to go anywhere.

A salary is more than the next woman gets – she is a stay-at-home mum. Albeit lacking nothing.

Case II – Well-off but not free

“I have no financial privacy, but I’m not sure why I want it,” says case II. “Am I living in financial abuse or luxury?”

She has to provide spreadsheets of all her spend – that her husband looks at almost daily. His salary is in eight figures.

“A friend of mine tells me this is financial abuse,” she goes on. “Even though my husband has never criticised me for overspending or attempted to limit the amount.

“My husband works such long hours that I hardly see him and we live pretty separate lives, so I do feel like a paid housekeeper sometimes and maybe that is the heart of my problem ... the spreadsheet makes me feel like an employee providing receipts to be honest.

“Should I be insisting on financial privacy or not? Is this accountability reasonable and normal, or is it a strange way to live? Or am I simply very lucky?”

What do you think?

Now take on board that this man also chooses his wife’s clothes and jewellery.

My thoughts are: controlling at best, abusive at worst.

What started the questioning is that this woman wants her own laptop. But she can’t bring herself to buy one, or to let her husband know that she wants one. That in itself is telling.

Financial abuse is limiting someone’s access to money so they cannot live the life they want to live. A free life. Limiting is a loose word – in the case of case II it means she doesn’t feel she has the “right” to a laptop.

But it’s not about that, is it? She doesn’t feel she has the right to her husband’s money because that’s how it is framed: his money, not theirs. The same goes for case I.

Everyone has the right to financial dignity. The second case I feel epitomises a significant strata of expat life: well off, but not free.

More serious forms of financial abuse include your partner controlling your money or running up debts in your name.

The way it can happen isn’t always so clear.

Case III – Turning tables

She was the higher earner, he a stay-at-home partner. He was bored. Their unconventional set-up saw him ridiculed as “unmanly”, his wife accused of being controlling.

When he asked her for money – her savings that she’d brought into the marriage – to invest with someone they both knew, she, wanting him to have a greater sense of self and worth, and for them to have a better relationship, agreed, provided there were legal papers drawn up and a structure in place.

Except that never happened.

Lawyers have said she was insane for not having a watertight legal contract in place. But they were married. Had a toddler. And he had his pride back.

All the bills were in her name – and we know the legal implications this has in the UAE. He promised capital paid back in certain time-frames. She had to increasingly put her head down to earn because every deadline passed with no payments. Instead she was told they “had” to continue pumping in money, else they’d lose the lot.

She went from having savings to being in debt and increasingly isolated from her support network. She questioned her sanity, and whether she was being fair asking for full disclosure and financial transparency.

It is difficult to get into the mindset of people who are stuck. They cannot see the obvious.

This husband put his wife’s shares in his name, opened up an offshore account with the “friend”, brought no money back into the relationship – then lost the lot. When asked for updates and concrete information, he became abusive and threatening.

It is complicated. It always is. Financial abuse is horrible, and always complex.

Here is another definition of financial abuse: the illegal or unauthorised use of a person’s property, money, pension or other valuables (including changing the person’s will to name the abuser as heir), often fraudulently obtaining power of attorney, followed by deprivation of money or other assets.

It can be that your partner:

• makes important financial decisions without you.

• uses your credit or debit card without asking.

• controls your access to money.

• refuses to contribute to household bills or children’s expenses.

• puts bills in your name, but does not contribute to them.

• takes out loans in your name – but does not help with repayments.

• takes money from your purse or bank account

•stops you from having, or keeping, a job.

• makes you account for every penny you spend – for example by showing receipts.

Let us make no bones about it. The vast majority of victims are women. To protect against it, there are recommendations that people have joint accounts for paying bills, but individual ones for their salaries.

Personally, I like this split. But not if it’s due to a lack of trust. In this case, I’d say find out the details of a refuge for you and your children, while you figure out what’s best to do.

It is a difficult, complex and vicious circle – not having access to money. The less you have, the more isolated, disempowered and vulnerable you become.

Especially as financial abuse usually includes other forms of abuse too. If this is what you are going through – forget love. Cut your losses. Get your dignity back.

Nima Abu Wardeh describes herself using three words: Person. Parent. Pupil. Each day she works out which one gets priority, sharing her journey on finding-nima.com

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