Money matters can deal marriage a harsh blow

Money matters can deal marriage a harsh blow

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Is it really hard for the fabulously rich to preserve their marriage? Is it harder for them to preserve their marriage than for ordinary people who do not feel the power of money?

These questions came to my mind after reading Ellen Goodman's article "Money Gives Its Views On Marriage", in the Dec. 21 edition of The Guardian Weekly.

Goodman wrote about a marriage that was wracked by money. It was a story about how a ruined marriage compelled the married couple to change the tales about their marriage, and how broken marriages in general force us to rewrite the idea of marriage itself.

In her article, Goodman discussed the famous divorce case of Lorna vs. Garry Wendt. The couple got married about thirty years ago. At the time Garry Wendt was a graduate student at Harvard Business School. They started with US$2,500 and high hopes. In Dec. 1997 their marriage ended in a Connecticut courtroom with bitter recriminations and a division of their $100 million.

Garry became rich from hard work at General Electric, where he became a top executive. Lorna took care of the kids and their home. Garry told his lawyer that $10 million would be all Lorna would ever need. However, Lorna claimed that she was entitled to receive $50 million, half of their accumulated assets, and that "need" had nothing to do with it. In the end, the judge rewarded Lorna an estimated $20 million and some of Garry's future earnings.

This case raised several important questions. First, it has become popular to ask the question "What is a wife worth?"

To Goodman the intriguing matter is that in this case both parties and the public focussed their attention on what Lorna did or did not do to deserve the marital millions, but that nobody questioned what Garry did or did not do to deserve the corporate millions.

The second question is "What changes the value of a marriage?" In the case of Lorna and Garry, the marriage was at the beginning a 50-50 proposition. "But when push comes to shove comes to split," Goodman wrote, "it may be rescripted as an 80-20 proposition. The equal relationship based on love suddenly is recast as an economic relationship based on pay slips."

Goodman went on saying that what was happening in this case was a collision of two value systems, those of marriage and the market, of love and money.

To dramatize her story, Goodman wrote that a year before the divorce proceedings were initiated, Garry still thanked his wife for all the support she gave him during their entire married life. At the annual banquet he thanked his "wife and partner without whom" he would never have reached the financial stratosphere.

However, a year later at his lawyer's office Garry insisted that Lorna "was not the helium in his rise to the top, but the old ball and chain."

"What a difference a year makes," Goodman wrote and "What a difference a divorce makes. One year, a homemaker wife is the co- author of a success story. The next year, she is the corporate welfare recipient."

This story by Goodman prompted me to reflect about a number of questions. Can such a conversion in a marital relationship happen to everybody, or is it only a "disease" among the fantastically rich?

If a marriage is still intact and functions harmoniously, does the "equal relationship" really rest on love alone? Does money indeed have such a strong corruptive influence on our value system?

I have been asked these questions many times before, except the last one. Whenever I went out together with my wife, and stopped at some shops to buy things, the young shop attendants -- in most cases young women -- usually made comments about us and asked a few personal questions.

"What has made you both remain together until such an old age?" or "I rarely see old couples of your age still going out and shopping together. What makes both of you so different?"

Some young people went even further and said that they wanted to live like us. "Could you tell us the secret of your successful marriage?"

I must admit that comments like this are very flattering to both of us. But not a single moment in our lives did we ever feel that we were a special case. These young people just do not know what it takes to preserve a marriage for forty-odd years. They do not know that in every marriage that lasts that long, continuous adjustments and readjustments have to be made. Any successful marriage that lasts until old age is the product of hard work by both wife and husband.

But I found it impossible to give lengthy explanations about meaningful marriage in encounters that last only ten to twenty minutes. My standard answer to questions like this has always been that in marriage love alone will not suffice. Besides love, mutual respect constitutes a very important ingredient.

"If you have respect for each other," I always told these young people, "you will not easily throw harsh words at each other. If you have respect for each other, you will do your best to rein yourself before doing something stupid that might hurt your spouse. But if such mutual respect does not exist, you can easily run out of control. You can easily hurt your spouse without feeling guilty or remorse. Such a situation is the beginning of a creeping change in the relationship. Uncorrected, such a situation can lead to a change in the mutual perception of each other. Your spouse will no longer appear to you as the 'loved one'. He or she may begin to look as the 'oppressive one', the 'troublesome one', or the 'hindering one'."

And from here on, I said to myself, it is but a small step to perceive one's wife as -- to borrow Goodman's words -- the "old ball and chain".

I hope that such a simple explanation will help these young people keep their faith in marriage.

After reading Goodman's article, however, I realize that my simple formula will not work with very affluent people. What these very rich people need to remain together in a meaningful way is, I think, integrity. Alas, integrity is not a commodity that can be purchased.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.