why i don't split the bills 50/50 with my husband

love doesn't keep score, but eventually, resentment does

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maybe you already know…

q+a: because you have the truth, and I have the echo

Hi Anna,

Do you have a joint bank account or separate accounts with Dave? And how do you manage shared bills? My boyfriend and I just moved in together and he wants to open a joint account where we both put in equal amounts of money every month that go towards our shared expenses (groceries, toiletries, etc.). This kind of annoys me because for the last two years of being together he’s basically been living with me at my apartment and we’ve never done this. When something runs out I just buy it even though he uses it. He was living with his parents outside of the city and crashing with me most nights so even though technically we weren’t living together, we basically were. Am I being irrational? I know a lot of couples who have joint accounts and I wish I didn’t feel like this, but I don’t know how not to.

Signed,
Annoyed

Dear Annoyed,

The best gift I ever gave myself in my twenties was the permission to want what I actually wanted and not what appeared reasonable to want. At some point, I watched my girlfriends who Venmo-ed their boyfriends for dinner, drinks, an eight pack of toilet paper, and decided: this is not for me. It may be for them, and it may look fair on paper, but I get to choose what’s fair for me, even if it makes me look like what we’ve come to brand as the archetypal anti-feminist: a gold digger.

What you’re feeling is a hundred plus years of social conditioning that have taught women we can’t possibly want to make our own money and simultaneously want a man’s money, too. There’s no terminology to shame ambitious men who strive to make more money while wanting the same for their female counterparts. There’s no phrase for that because men are allowed to want everything and women are only allowed to want what gives men the ability to control them.

In order to understand why you feel annoyed despite a voice telling you that you have no right to, you must understand our history. The term “gold digger” didn’t emerge because women started chasing men for money—it emerged because women stopped needing men to survive. After gaining the right to vote in 1920, women began pushing against every expectation that had kept them small. They moved cities, took jobs, danced without chaperones, cut their hair, drank in public, and—most scandalously—stopped pretending they didn’t care about money or sex. Enter the flapper: she’s independent, playful, and uninterested in being anyone’s property. She wasn’t asking for permission, she was asking for what she wanted, and in response, the patriarchy did what it often does when women start wanting too much: it gave them a label. Gold digger. A way to flatten the nuance, reframe agency as manipulation, and turn a woman’s desire for financial security into a punchline. Suddenly, if a woman wanted a man and his money, she wasn’t ambitious—she was predatory.

It didn’t matter that most women at the time couldn’t open bank accounts without a husband or were legally shut out of wealth. The myth of the gold digger let men keep control of the narrative: that they were the generous ones, and women should be grateful or, at the very least, quiet about their discontent. It’s not that women became more transactional, it’s that men lost their monopoly on being the providers—and couldn’t handle being expected to share.

You’re not being irrational. You’re noticing that for two years, you absorbed the cost of a shared life without a shared structure. And, now that he’s ready to formalize what has already existed, he wants to start from zero, not because that’s fair to you, but because it gives him the illusion of fairness without the inconvenience of accountability.

But you’re not really starting from zero, are you? You’re starting from two years of toilet paper, rent, groceries, and the generosity that you freely give to the ones you love. Opening a joint account now and expecting the future to be 50/50 ignores the past that was 80/20, 90/10, or whatever it costs to pay your rent and pretend like he doesn’t use triple the amount of toilet paper you do. You don’t need to punish him for the past, but you do need to acknowledge it, because equality that ignores history isn’t equality, it’s erasure.

And once you name it, you have to be willing to see what he does with the truth. Does he take responsibility, or does he flinch? Does he meet you in the discomfort, or does he call you ungrateful? Because if he can’t handle a conversation about money, he’s not ready to build a life that actually costs him something. And if the price of peace is pretending the last two years never happened—then you’re still paying, just with a different kind of currency. Two years of toilet paper is a sunk cost. The next two? That’s an investment. Spend wisely.

with love and aggression,
anna

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maybe this week…

my week, in a cracked nutshell

Dave and I took stock of our finances this week as we cut checks to the tile guy who just finished retiling our mudroom, the generator guy who installed an automatic generator so we never have to go without electricity for 48 hours in subzero temperatures again (we learned this the hard way), and our landscaper who loves to erratically bill us every eight and a half weeks or so. And, since I didn’t answer our reader’s first question of “Do you have a joint bank account or separate accounts with Dave? And how do you manage shared bills?” above, I thought I’d address this here, because we don’t have a shared bank account, but we do share everything.

I don’t know what works for everyone else, but I know what works for us, and after three years of marriage and seven total years together, I’ve learned that splitting everything doesn’t always mean combining everything.

We don’t have a joint bank account. Not because we’re secretive, but because we’re clear. And while this may be my own, possibly very unpopular opinion, the notion that a joint account is equivalent to trust and equality feels counterintuitive. Here’s exactly how we make it work—and why the only thing we’ve ever split 50/50 is dessert…