The suffocating weight of debt is a unique kind of dread, one that strains even the strongest bonds of love and trust. I still vividly recall the day I stood in our New York apartment, clutching my husband’s checkbook in disbelief, yelling, “Why are we in even more debt? What kind of interest did you agree to pay?” As a poet turned freelance writer who was notoriously lousy at math, even I could see that something was terribly wrong. My husband had been diligently making monthly payments on a loan for five years, yet the principal we owed had somehow ballooned by five thousand dollars. We had borrowed the down payment for our home from one of his wealthy, charming relatives—a decision that was meant to secure our future but had instead trapped us in an endless financial sinkhole. We were not just house poor; sixty months later, we were entirely over our heads, burdened by a growing debt and the suffocating obligation of having to visit this family benefactor every holiday with a smile on our faces to mask our quiet desperation.
This deeply personal financial claustrophobia came rushing back to me as I read Belle Burden’s Strangers, a divorce memoir soon to be adapted into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow. In her book, Burden recounts marrying an older man in the late nineties and handing him total control of their finances, a decision she deeply regretted. While critics expressed shock that a highly educated lawyer could surrender her financial autonomy, I felt an instant, poignant wave of empathy. I, too, had married an older man in my field in New York during the nineties, and although my background was modest—my Grandma Yetta was a Yiddish-speaking window-shade maker’s wife in Florida, a far cry from Burden’s high-society, Harvard-educated grandmother who rubbed shoulders with Truman Capote—I had swallowed the very same cultural narrative. I genuinely believed that a marriage functioned best when the husband took charge of the money, seeing it not as recklessness, but as a comforting compromise in exchange for building a life with a good partner.
Finding love in the big city was no easy feat, especially for an ambitious, outspoken woman who was not a slim, easygoing young beauty. As an amateur matchmaker who has since set up thirty couples who went on to marry, I knew then—as I know now with today’s exhausting cyber-dating scene—that finding a genuine connection is rare. By thirty-five, I feared my big mouth, big family, and fierce independence would intimidate or emasculate potential mates, as had happened with previous partners. After painful public breakups and years of therapy to heal my bruised heart, I was set up with a tall, handsome, kind-hearted mensch. When he proposed, I was so thrilled and eager to make the partnership work that I was willing to defer to him. While I fully intended to keep working, paying my own way, and keeping my own small bank account, the brutal realities of the New York real estate market quickly complicated our egalitarian dreams.
When a realtor showed us a charming two-bedroom apartment that we desperately wanted but couldn’t afford, my husband’s wealthy relative stepped in, insisting that renting was a waste of money and offering to loan us one hundred thousand dollars for the down payment and closing costs. Because my husband’s salary was significantly higher than mine and the purchase was terrifyingly large, I felt a wave of relief when he told me, “I got this,” and assured me he was handling the details. Having lived alone for fifteen years and managed every crisis by myself, it felt like a luxury to let someone else take the lead. Even my male therapist, who had guided me through overcoming addictions and publishing books, advised me to let my husband take care of me, suggesting it would make me feel nurtured and secure. It seemed like wise counsel, right up until five years later, when I looked at the checkbook and discovered that despite our regular payments, the compound interest rate was so punishing that we now owed one hundred and five thousand dollars.
My husband was a brilliant, honest, and creative soul, but he lacked business acumen and was far too trusting. Desperate to escape this financial trap, I turned to a trusted mentor in the real estate world who advised us to double-mortgage our apartment to pay off the relative immediately. My husband was initially outraged and hurt by my sudden intervention in “his” domain, but I firmly argued that after five years of his management, it was my turn to protect us. With the help of a lawyer friend, I quickly educated myself on the complex language of loans, finalized the refinancing, and presented our relative with a check for the full balance, along with a polite thank-you card. Interestingly, the relative seemed disappointed to lose his financial grip on us, immediately offering us a sketchy investment opportunity with a promised twelve percent yield—which my father dryly compared to a Bernie Madoff scheme—confirming my suspicion that his generosity was actually a tool for power and control.
Following that stressful ordeal, we successfully paid off our mortgage and stayed out of debt, though we eventually defaulted back to our old status quo of my husband managing the daily expenses. It took another unexpected crisis—not a emotional betrayal like Belle Burden experienced, but my husband’s sudden battle with a neurological disorder during the pandemic—to finally force me to take permanent control of our finances. Guided by my father’s protective advice, we shifted our accounts to online banking, put the bills in my name, and established my power of attorney. Today, my husband is happily recovering, and while I should have taken the financial reins much sooner, it was his vulnerability that ultimately shook me out of my ignorance. Burden’s memoir serves as an essential warning for women to keep their eyes wide open and establish financial safeguards from the start, a lesson that is vital not just when a marriage ends, but in the face of illness, tragedy, or sudden change. In marriage, as in writing, my ultimate philosophy has always been that you can do whatever works—and when it doesn’t, you take notes and rewrite the story.
