My finance (24/M) wants to sell his possessions to surprise me with expensive shared item, I (27/F) see this as a betrayal of trust. What's reasonable?

Hi Reddit,

Hoping for some insight into an issue my partner and I are having. While I’m the one posting, he’ll be reading this too!

For background – we’ve been engaged for 9 months and are planning our wedding. We met online and are living in separate countries. The wedding is planned for Spring, and I have my visa to move over to him soon. I know getting married without living together isn’t ideal, but it’s impossible with our visa situation. We do manage extended visits to each other pretty regularly.

Anyway… We’re planning our wedding and my move and so struggling financially. We do have savings (about 1/3 his, 2/3 mine) but all this and having a safety net until I get a job is likely going to wipe them out. We therefore decided to hold off on the rings we’d fallen in love with - $4500 for the pair. This would be about 20% of what we have saved jointly. We talked a lot about it, but ultimately it didn’t make sense financially.

Yesterday, my partner told me that he’d been planning to sell his possessions in order to pay for the rings, and surprise me with them. This would likely have been him just paying the deposit, and committing us to paying the balance in installments over the next year or so. He's not going ahead with this, but it's brought up some bigger issues about managing our shared finances.

My perspective is that if he’d done this, it would have been going behind my back on a big financial decision and a big betrayal of trust. We agreed going into this that we would become a shared financial unit – that everything would be shared, money, assets, etc included. That once we were able to live together we’d have a shared account, with separate spending money each month to do as we like with. And that until then we’d at least discuss large purchases, as we’ve been doing. To me, marriage is about being one unit that makes decisions together.

I would see this as no different from taking money out of savings and unilaterally spending the money. It’s still assets that he is bringing into the relationship, they just aren’t liquid at the moment (same as if I had an apartment or car in my country and sold it before moving, I would expect that money to go into the ‘joint pot’). It feels like he would be going behind my back to spend a significant amount of money.

Even if he hadn’t ‘liquidated’ those assets now, we would still have them to sell if we needed to later (eg. If I struggle to get a job for a while). Fwiw, I wouldn’t have this issue for a small amount of money – it’s that it’s a really significant amount.

His perspective is that they are his possessions – that he wouldn’t otherwise have sold them, and that he was only doing so to make possible something we had both agreed we wanted. He saw it as a loving and romantic gesture. And that as they are his possessions coming into the marriage (things I have no real interest in), the loss would only really affect him.

When we discussed the above, he said that he felt like our agreement should only apply to assets that are already liquid (ie. Our savings). He felt like he no longer had autonomy over his possessions, to use them as he sees fit – they are his things he is bringing into the relationship so his choice what he does with them.

He also talked feeling vulnerable and about feeling like his was losing himself, about not having control over his life / possessions / having to ‘run things by me’ first and me having a ‘veto’ over his choices.

Reddit – it would be great to get your perspective, your experiences on either side, and any thoughts you have on how we can navigate this.

Thanks!

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TL;DR My finance (24/M) wants to sell his possessions to surprise me with expensive shared item, I (27/F) see this as a betrayal of trust. What's reasonable?

Submitted December 01, 2018 at 06:56AM by Sea_Confection https://ift.tt/2Rsvsqn