Alison,* a 32-year-old mother of two in Huntington Woods, Michigan, has a weakness for shoes, blue jeans, and purses—and it drives her husband crazy. When their credit-card statement arrives, he scolds her "like I'm a little kid about my 'addiction to spending,'" she says.
He doesn't know the half of it. Alison secretly has five store credit cards, including the one from Barneys that her husband forced her to cut up in front of him. "Just because the physical card is gone doesn't mean the account is," she notes.
The issue is not their bottom line, but that they fundamentally disagree on how money should be spent. He wears jeans and T-shirts every day and can't understand why Alison, an interior designer, is not content to do the same. "He thinks I would look great in a sheet," she grumbles.
Although bickering over spending is as big a marital cliché as the who-changes-the-diaper one, hiding purchases from a spouse is a phenomenon that's both serious and common enough to have earned its own official name: financial infidelity. Like its more frequently chronicled counterpart in the bedroom, the act comes in varying degrees of depravity, from the seemingly harmless claim that you bought that $500 stroller "on sale" (equivalent to, perhaps, flirting with the tennis pro) all the way up to funding your passion for Tom Binns jewelry with your kids' 529 (akin to, say, banging your brother-in-law in the bathroom during Aunt Belle's 75th-birthday party).
While it's impossible to track the precise number of couples who grapple with spending subterfuge, some experts say it's an epidemic, with numerous root causes. For one, modern marriages no longer fit the traditional single-wage-earner model. Even stay-at-home moms usually walk down the aisle with careers and independent spending histories—so rule setting and restrictions become volatile issues. Factor in the money pits known as children as well as our culture of retail therapy, and you've got a combustible mix of entitlement, guilt, and not-so-cheap thrills that can lead to shopping bags stashed in the trash—and much, much worse.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the cheaters tend to be the wives. "Women are so busy taking care of everybody else that they often lose themselves," says Bonnie Eaker Weil, the author of Financial Infidelity: Seven Steps to Conquering the #1 Relationship Wrecker (Hudson Street). "Money, and hiding how it's spent, are the perfect way to take control and assert their identity." She notes that such actions are particularly therapeutic for a mom who feels she has made major sacrifices—either of her career or family time—since having kids: "A new pair of Louboutins makes her feel like her old self again," she says (an argument that might make sense to any evolved husband, if not for the $795 price tag).
Jennifer, 34, from Phoenix, is a classic example of a stay-at-home mom who compensates for her new life "in sweatpants" with Coach bags reminiscent of the old days. As a single woman, she made $125,000 annually and bought whatever she wanted, including a BMW, while socking away $120,000 in retirement accounts. When she married, the couple moved, Jennifer lost her lucrative recruiting position, and her next job wasn't worth keeping—financially or emotionally—once kids came along. That's when she started hiding. "My husband is so stressed about being the sole breadwinner, and he is fiscally conservative," she says. "I don't want to have a discussion about Bobbi Brown makeup. Buying trendy things makes me feel like I'm part of the outside world."
