The #1 Threat To Millennial Relationships Is Mental Health
Issues like Depression and Anxiety are more direct threats to relationships than money.
Myths about money in marriage
Squabbling over bills is not the leading cause of divorce. Neither is financial compatibility. (It’s not a real thing in the world of psychological science, either.)
These are common misconceptions. While we’re debunking erroneous pop culture statistics:
- Divorce rates also aren’t 50%. (That was a forecast at one point, never a measured statistic.)
- Even better, divorce rates are declining overall.
What will harm relationships, however, is slow and invisible mental health erosion and deterioration of intimacy and trust over 10 years. Why do I say ten years? Because that’s how long, historically, it has taken a couple to seek help once there’s conflict.
A decade.
Crisis is coming
As millennials and Gen Z (recently dubbed Zoomers) drive the destigmatization of mental health down, it is likely they will be far more proactive in seeking couples counseling.
However, this piece of information tells us something important.
If we don’t fix the major problem quickly, the stability of an entire generation is at risk because problems may simmer under the surface. Even if younger couples take a few years to seek out professional help, damage to the relationship may require significant work to repair.
And these relationship challenges aren’t a future hypothetical — they’re already happening. As of 2016, couples in this age group reported stress in their relationships as a result of making financial decisions.
This shouldn’t be surprising given the economic realities young families are facing. The compounding factors in play now are:
- student loans
- stagnant wages
- lack of healthy coping skills
- soaring unemployment
- abysmal American financial literacy (across all age groups)
- stigmatization of communication about money
Trial and error
As the market exists today, couples require years of trial and error to find what works for them. Where do couples turn in that process? Reddit. Quora. Books. Really bad blogs. Aunt Susan. Mom, dad, siblings, friends. Not therapists. And not financial advisors.
In that process, sadly, conflict can overtake healthy habits. To use a love language example, this might look like constant eye-rolling replacing words of affirmation.
So, what if couples could systematize and accelerate the process to discover “what works for them” instead of trial and error over many years? What happens if there is nothing when couples go searching for a solution to stop this problem’s evolution?
Distress. Maybe divorce.
What if couples learned about themselves while they were at it? (People love to learn about themselves!) What if it made learning about money less scary, too?
We know this from robust research on evidence-based cognitive-behavioral therapies, premarital counseling, and fascinating new research by Mercer (among others) on “financial confidence.”
In other words, the broader crisis can be prevented — we can unring the bell if we act now.
Couples must build trust-based teamwork from an amalgam of core values, histories, and habits with money, mental health, and relationship skills. Not budgets. Not math.
Instead, let’s prevent distress
It took couples 10 years to go to therapy historically because couples will not rock the boat after a certain equilibrium is reached, even if painful.
People change when changing and the new end-state is less painful than the status quo.
The bigger the change, the more effortful it is. This is often overlooked in change management practices, interestingly. I observed this in my corporate SaaS sales/consulting and healthcare technology career.
Its assumed new end-states are enough incentive for change because it fixes a pain point. But that invisible factor (psychological replacement cost/effort of change) is unaccounted for in corporate projects. As a direct result, technology implementation projects are often poorly adopted.
So what if partners knew just a little bit more, just a bit sooner?
That would be distress prevention.
Annette Miller is the Cofounder and CEO of Enriched Couples, a financial therapy platform that uses psychology to guide couples through unifying their values, financial priorities, and future goals.
