Debts – Relationship Deal Breaker?






The very popular male website Guyspeak.com has recently bought to attention one of the most important parts of a relationship – money! It doesn’t matter how much in love you are, or how great your relationship is; money will either make it or break it. We came across the following question, and decided to investigate further:

Is my extortionate student loan debt a turn-off/dealbreaker? It afforded me the chance to access higher education and work in a career field I enjoy. I accept full responsibility for it/fully intend to pay it off.”

So, it begs the question – Are debts a big turn off to the opposite sex?

More and more people these days have at least one form of debt. The recent economic crisis has shown the whole world how bad money troubles can hit, and it would seem as if more and more people were choosing to borrowing money just to get by. This makes it a tough time to answer the question in hand – at the moment, it would seem that everyone has debt, so finding someone to love that would not have one form of debt or another would appear almost impossible.

The New York Times ran a pretty shocking story about this exact topic. The story went a little something like this - “…but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days.”

A guy had found out about his partner’s debts and actually broke off an engagement. This seems a little hard to take, doesn’t it? This was a student loan; not just random sums of money that the female had built up – it was a loan that was setting her up for life with her education. Is it really that acceptable to “ditch” someone just for the student debt?

The New York Times also goes on to discuss another important point – at what point in the relationship do you disclose such personal information about yourself? Why many would feel it a little suspect that you had failed to mention the debt at such an early point in the relationship, others would believe it to be too “crass” to discuss such personal effects to anyone that you haven’t known for a long time. Perhaps waiting until they were engaged was a bit of a wait, but at the same time, the girl in the story had miscalculated her debt, rather than hidden it from her partner.

Statistics from around the world have shown the true shocking effect that debt can have on a relationship. In the UK, for example, over a quarter of all divorces are based on monetary reasons. In Canada, one in four marriages actually ends before the end of their first year. If you say that around a quarter of those are down to money reasons as well, which is highly likely when you consider that Canada is fast soaring into rising debts, that’s a lot of divorces!

In conclusion, it would seem that it certainly pays to be honest about your debts to a partner, especially if they are going to impact you in the long term, such as when you get married. Ideally, you are going to want to talk about this fairly early on in the relationship – perhaps some point between the third date and getting engaged?

 

 


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