My husband and I have been married for ten years and have one child, who is 7. We are both lucky to have good, stable jobs and while we aren’t wealthy, we’re very comfortable. We live below our means and have a healthy emergency savings account as well as well-funded retirement accounts and a college fund for our daughter.
My husband was brought up in a family where money is basically the only thing that matters. His parents view thrift as the equivalent of moral good. Even though they had plenty of income when my husband was growing up, they reused their tea bags and purchased everything secondhand. It was pathological. They once got their house infested with bedbugs by bringing home a mattress his dad found behind a dumpster. When my brother-in-law divorced and his ex moved two states over with their sons, he decided not to exercise his monthly visitation because it was too expensive to pay for the gas to drive to see them. When he said this, his parents just nodded, like saving $100 was a valid reason to abandon his children (well, okay, he does see them once a year). My husband is nowhere near this bad (he agreed to buy a new mattress) but he still insists on saving money wherever possible. I don’t usually mind — used cars and gently used children’s clothes are okay with me — but when I do want something new, even something small, it always turns into a big deal. Always. Cue the suitcase incident.
I work in HR. Pre COVID I traveled once or twice a month overnight for work to do training at our branch locations. The old handheld suitcase I was using got pretty beaten up so I purchased a hard-sided wheeled bag to replace it. I wanted something durable that would work in an overhead compartment or a car trunk and that I wouldn’t have to physically carry. I bought it at a department store and spent around $70 on it.
I’m not traveling for work anymore, but last week I was in the attic looking for something and noticed my suitcase wasn’t there. I asked my husband if he had seen it, and he nonchalantly said he had returned it. When I asked why, he said it had been too expensive and he had found one just as good for $10 at Goodwill. He got it for me and it turned out to be an oversized softsided suitcase with no wheels and a broken zipper. When I saw it, it was like something snapped. I completely lost it. I screamed at him that I was tired of working my ass off and not being able to spend any money on something I needed. I yelled that the suitcase was shit and that he needed to go to counseling to deal with the baggage he had from being raised by his crazy ass money-obsessed parents. I said I wasn’t going to let him dictate my purchases anymore and that if I wanted to buy something new at a store other than Walmart or the Dollar Tree I was damn well going to do it. Then I stormed out. (Our daughter was with my parents at the time, so she didn’t hear anything.)
Since then, we’ve been polite in front of our daughter but have basically ignored each other otherwise. When we tried to talk about it he said I’m in the wrong for causing such a huge fight over a suitcase. I know I can’t get him to understand that it isn’t about the suitcase, and I’m not sure I have the energy to try. I can’t live like this anymore and I am thinking of leaving him. Am I being stupid? What should I do?
tl;dr! My husband’s cheapness is ruining my marriage.
Submitted January 05, 2021 at 01:16AM by Packmywoesandgo https://ift.tt/39hTKgX
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