Hey! I recently started dating someone, and it is both of our first relationships. We have only been dating for 5 months. We both go to the same college in NY, and we recently decided to make a 3-day road trip in Early September.
The financial discussions for our upcoming trip have been a bit awkward, and we sorta decided that I will be footing the bill for the hotel, while he would cover gas and food. I felt like this was a bit unfair, as the cost of the hotel is probably ~3x what gas/food would cost us. I had brought this up and I noticed it was a bit of a trigger for him, and it was clear he wasn’t too keen on having the discussion. I don’t think this comes from malice, but more so that money discussions are always awkward, and this is both of our first relationships.
I had offered to split it so that he pays a quarter of the hotel charge, and he sort of reluctantly said yes, but mentioned he doesn’t have the money right now, so I didn’t really push further.
Both of us have different perspectives on money - he is a lot more frivolous than me in spending, while I’m pretty frugal. Even though we’re both in university, I have more disposable income than him (mostly because of my frugality).
I’m worried that I will resent him during and after the trip because of this, and I know I need to bring it up to him, but I don’t know how I should approach it. I do really want to go on the trip, and I realize that I may be too “cheap” and should let things go. At the same time, I’m feeling more and more resentful whenever he mentions how he spent money buying (non-essential) new clothes or books. I’ve been bottling it up for a bit since he’s going through a bit of a rough patch, but the date of the trip is approaching and I can’t keep my mind off things.
To clarify, my questions are:
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How do I bring it up to him? I’m worried if it feels like too much like an ultimatum, we’d have to cancel the trip.
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Should I just “suck it up”? I know in relationships things aren’t always equal. I would like to think if the roles were reversed he would do the same, but I’m not sure if he would.
I can not emphasize how much I like him. My post may have made this sound like a toxic relationship but it is anything but. It’s just one small part of an otherwise amazing relationship.
Without getting into the whole relationship side of things. My partner and I use the splitwise app for almost all our joint spending and find it works well to keep things fair and it keeps a record of things. Most things are split 50/50, but you can can do any percentage split based on the situation - like if one person uses the car most of that week, we might split fuel 70/30 or if one of us wanted to splurge on a shared expense and the other didn’t, we might agreed to split it 60/40 - that way the splurger gets what they want and it fits within the others budget.
I’m a huge fan of splitwise-like apps, but somebody (way before this relationship) convinced me that you shouldn’t count pennies in a romantic relationship. I feel like that was terrible advice and I should not have listened, because (ironically) I now spend a lot of time penny-counting (“last time he paid $20 for food, this time I paid $35”).
We had this discussion early on in our relationship and we opted to keep it more “”“natural”“”, but I think I may want to talk to him about splitting everything more evenly. I just feel like that’s an asshole thing to do once we’ve already started the relationship, but I’m probably wrong.
Nah, you’re alright. It took us a while before we committed to splitwise and yeah, it was mostly a convenience thing. Less stress over maths and keeping tabs. You could say that it’s causing you stress and you’d like to at least give a splitwise-like app a go. It’ll hopwfully free up your mind to focus on the romance and each other.
I know this is late but I wanted to provide some advice from my personal experience, in case it helps. My husband and I dated for 10 years before we got married and had a policy of splitting big items 50/50 (groceries/restaurants/hotels/tickets) and letting small items (coffee/drinks/snacks) work themselves out naturally. Early in our relationship I made more money and later on he made more but we always had a policy of splitting 50/50. It didn’t matter to us who made more because we didn’t want to burden the other with bills unfairly. This absolutely lead to times where we scaled back plans to fit the others budget.
The important thing is that we talked about it and agreed together in what was fair to us. I truly hope you can both have an open and honest conversation and come to a agreement you both feel is fair.