It turns out that not only does materialism hurt your kids, but it hurts your marriage, too. The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported on a recent study that looked at how couples’ attitudes toward money affected their marriages:
Couples who said money wasn’t important to them scored about 10% to 15% better on measures of relationship quality, such as marriage stability, than couples in which both partners were materialistic.
The effects are additive, too: couples where both spouses were materialistic were worse off than couples where only one spouse was.
"Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” says Jason Carroll, a BYU professor or family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”
Interestingly, it was the attitude to money that made the difference—regardless of how much money the couples actually had. So I guess money can’t buy happiness, after all.
One obvious question: how did they define materialism? I haven’t seen the actual study, but apparently the authors asked participants to rate how important it is to them to have lots of money and things. In a consumerist society, it is impossible not to have some level of interest in having money and things. I think the line is crossed when the pursuit or maintenance of stuff begins to crowd out human relationships. If your possessions are more important to you than people, then your marriage, or your relationship with your kids, is naturally going to suffer.
The late, great Steve Jobs was quoted in 1993 saying, “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me….Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.” Doing something wonderful isn’t limited to grand projects like upending industries and creating desirable electronic devices (as Steve did). Wonderful might be coming home earlier to help your spouse with dinner. Wonderful can be offering to take the kids for a morning so a spouse can have a break. Wonderful would almost certainly be putting down the Blackberry and listening to your kids talking to you.
I’ll bet you can think of at least one way where your focus on money or stuff is getting in the way of an important relationship. Why not try, just once, to put the relationship ahead of your wallet, and see what happens. Let me know in the comments how it works for you.
