Plus and Minus in Marriage

Audio By Carbonatix

When my wife and I were newly married, I was employed in finance, so we intentionally set up our marriage with Jane managing the money. After crunching numbers at work all day, the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was more of the same. So, Jane and I got ourselves into a nice routine where she handled the money. She did a good job of it too—so good that to this day, even long after I left the world of finance, she has continued to be the spouse who pays the bills and balances the books.

Most of the time, she makes sure that every i is dotted and every t is crossed perfectly. Most of the time. Years ago, we had been through a hectic time in the life of our family, to the point that Jane had left our checkbook alone for couple of months. When she eventually got around to it and added up the columns, our total balance was off nearly eight hundred dollars. Eight. Hundred. Dollars. That’s not a small amount for us today, but it was an even more substantial amount when we were thinking about college tuition and feeding our teenagers and their friends.

Needless to say, I flipped out a little bit. Even though I knew how busy Jane had been, I was still really bothered that she’d lost track of such big numbers. In spite of my best supportive husband efforts, my finance training kicked in, and I acted on it. In a word, I lectured. I started by reminding Jane that I had been the CFO at a hospital, just in case she’d forgotten. Then I went on about how important it had been for me to keep track of our accounts back then, matching them with the bank’s figures and such. I was even careful to use official words like “reconcile” and “ledger.”

“Honey,” I said, “if you’re going to be in charge of the checkbook, you have to make sure everything adds up every month. We simply can’t have these kinds of errors!” So, she checked and double-checked the columns and calculations, intent on discovering where the numbers had gone wrong. When she finally found the problem, it wasn’t what I had expected. There are rare occasions in our marriage when I have fussed with the numbers in our checkbook, adding and subtracting down the line. On one such occasion, apparently, my math hadn’t exactly been accurate.

As it turns out, when everything was busy and hectic, I had mistakenly subtracted the wrong amount, to the tune of—you guessed it—eight hundred dollars. Knowing the whole story, I started to feel like a royal jerk. I hadn’t treated Jane well; I had assumed she was wrong and then been condescending about it. Full of remorse, I went back to her and asked if she would forgive me for my mistake, and for blaming her afterwards.

She could have made me feel guilty about it. She could have held it against me or held it over my head for weeks. But do you know what she did instead? She looked at me with a smile and said, “Dan, it’s no big deal. Just let it go.” Even though my reaction had added negatives to our marriage all day, my wife was gracious enough to tell me that everything was still even. Such quick forgiveness wasn’t what I deserved, and it had a powerful effect. It made me want to be a better husband, to appreciate her more.

You see, people make mistakes. Lots of them. Even at our best, we subtract from relationships on a regular basis. So, if we constantly keep a tally going, we’ll rarely break even. But if we can learn to seek forgiveness and forgive, the good will add up. As Jane reminded me that day, it is grace that takes a relationship out of the red. With grace, our grand total feels surprisingly more than balanced.