[unhappiest2011]

Really need advice, please.
Let me say first, “I love her.” If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this, but I guess that is obvious. There isn’t a problem with sex here, or unfaithfulness.
It’s about money.
SUMMARY: In a relationship of 16 months, including 12 months living together, she has spent, or had spent on her, or squirreled away, $115,000+ directly from me, plus $20,000+ of state benefits, and still according to her nothing I do is enough, I “never give (her) money”, I am “mean”, I “love money not (her)”. She says it is correct or normal to get married within say 6 months of living together, so I am too slow, but then when I came round to getting married, it turns out she wants me to give her a further big payment beforehand.
I can’t talk about this to anyone who knows me personally because when I’ve tried they say just one thing.
I’m 50, male, reasonably fit and ok looking, worked hard all my life, worth $2m (most of it in very liquid assets, only mentioned as sadly it’s relevant…), divorced, kid 18, good independent ex-, no problems at all there. I’ve very little income because my work has dried up because of the recession/depression; so income comes almost all from my investments (and the stockmarket’s heading south soon, IMO).
She’s 40, pretty, East European, divorced with son 13 (her ex- is abroad and pays nothing), met her in winter 2009 on a dating site, started living together at her place (son’s school nearby) after 3 months. She’d lost her financial services job in early 2009, living off state benefits of about $1,400 pm including homeloan interest since.
I’m told she has no real savings, but I have no way of knowing (she knows my position very exactly). She owns 3 properties, one apparently in the name of her son and where her ex lives abroad, another is rented out and breaks even, and the third is where she lives.
Her son and I get on terrifically, so this isn’t about him at all. Unfortunately, he’s aware of the issues here, and tells me (heart-rendingly) how he would really, really like to help.
OK, here we go…
In our first year together, and not counting even a solitary dime that I spent exclusively on myself or on my house which is far away, I spent $101,000 on her. Yeah, $101,000 in exactly 12 months. 70% of which came from selling investments when their value was still rising (and so the last thing I wanted to do was sell). My spending on myself, my house and on my kid in the same period was under $10,000 (not included in the $101,000).
I can’t afford this. The stockmarket’s probably peaked, things are on the way down, it is a time to conserve and not burn money.
I only worked the $101,000 figure out in desperation, after she just would not stop spending on creditcards, of which she has had half a dozen. She’d keep saying the total was much less (spending someone else’s money is easy!) This $101,000 includes all the food, utilities, traveling, paying off a big loan she’d entered into before meeting me, and over $35,000 on clothes, bags and shoes. Plus she had gotten state benefits too, so the total amount she had coming in that year was $118,000 with no tax deductions.
If she’d done the grocery shopping, rather than me, the total would have been a lot higher still, as she “has” to have the very best of everything. If there’s a jar of jam that costs $3 and another that costs $20 but with a fancy label, it “has” to be the second one. I gave up with this and took over doing the weekly grocery shop.
I’ve cut back every possible way on things I want to spend on myself.
Even after I proved to her on paper how much I’d spent, she kept arguing it was much less, and I’m even embarrassed to repeat some of the nonsensical arguments she used (which made no accounting, finance or maths sense).
All along this time she would complain I’m mean, stingy, “never give her money” etc, and her constant threat was because of my alleged miserliness she’d have to get a job, which meant, she said, giving up the relationship because it would be a high-powered job and she’d given up trying to juggle home life and business in the past. So this was a bit like blackmail. Also, given what has happened in the financial services world since 2007, I think the kind of job she talks about barely exists and she could. I repeatedly said I had no objection to her getting a job, that I’d do (even) more of the housework, I’d be as supportive as possible, and that the vast majority of women who didn’t have small kids worked. I’d never had a relationship with someone who didn’t work.
She has no female friends who were born in the country, all her circle were from the same East European state as her, and I think that’s part of the issue. They are so unrepresentative it is unreal. Most of them allegedly don’t work except on shopping and have husbands who allegedly give them whatever they want (I kinda doubt the last bit, though).
I only met one of these “friends”, probably the one with the biggest influence, and found her appalling, as she made it clear she despised the man she was with and once drunk over the phone cursing him for some imagined infidelity asked me how she could screw him out of all his money. I was told he “did nothing for her” and “owed everything to her” (he was rich long before he met her, actually) but I found out he’d actually bought this friend a house in her own name. Obviously, that counts as nothing. This is the most influential friend by far, sadly.
Back to the GF. She “needs” a lot more sleep than I do. I work, she spends maybe an hour and a half per day with me on average, but I’m told I’m the cause she never has any time to accomplish anything.
As 2010 ended, I turned down the $$$ tap, and this caused break-ups. Since then it has been very rocky, with short stays together, rows etc.
One of most riling things is that she has the nerve to BLAME her wildly irresponsible spending (over $35,000 on clothes, bags, shoes in one year, you remember) ENTIRELY ON ME. Yes, she says if I’d have just given her the cash instead of paying her endless stream of creditcard and other bills, she’d have invested it instead. This is like unreal, as at any point in time from spring 2009 there were 3 creditcard bills owing and about 15+25=40 days of her spending on each of them (she just would not stop; even holidays were marred by her insistence she HAD to go and spend say $1,500 in some tourist-trap shop selling vastly overpriced, poor-quality junk; when “that perfect jacket” broke its zip within a week of the holiday ending, do you think she’d have learned? Not at all.).
Partly or largely because I’ve worked really hard teaching her son, he’s managed to get a scholarship for a new school. She’s given me the clear impression that I “owe” her the school fees saved, since otherwise it would have been down to me to pay them.
Why, you may ask, didn’t I set a budget and refuse to pay for more? Well, it was clear that whatever I set and gave her would be spent as she chose, and it would have been left to me to additionally pay for all the essentials, as I repeatedly pointed out. So it wouldn’t be “all inclusive” at all.
Seven months into the relationship, she has begun to insist that the relationship cannot go on like this, “we cannot go on living like this”. She clarified this means she, coming from a very traditional background, needs to be married. Her siblings lived with their partners for years (in one case, over 5) without being married, but…
So, I swallowed my fears and said fine, let’s get married. I said we’d have an all-inclusive spending budget of $4,100 a month, but that had to include food, gas etc.
Then the tune changed somewhat, to first there has to be a financial settlement. She proposed I pay off her mortgage of about $350,000. I flat-out refused. It then changed to I should pay her two years’ worth of budget up front (so $4,100 x 24 = $98,000) which she would invest and also use to pay for household things from month to month. But what’s to stop her just dumping me as soon as she gets such a lumpsum, and who says she’d use the money as agreed? Note this is even before marriage. What later, then? And when her benefits dry up – she’s pointed out how much she’ll lose and that I must make that up to her financially.
I’ve said I do not buy a woman. I deserve better, and it is below me, and should be below her, but that doesn’t cut any ice, and it is presented as further “evidence” of how bad, uncaring, mean etc I am, and how insecure I make her etc. This forces me to calmly repeat how much has been spent, that it cannot go on, etc.
The latest is repeated reminders I must start the promised $4,100 per month allowance immediately, but it has just been revealed that I should also make pension contributions for her at the same time. So, “all inclusive” is not at all “all inclusive”, and there’s other add-ons, so the idea of limit or budget is an epic fail.
I am unendingly reminded she spends “all (her) time on (me)”, but IMO that it is BS. She basically does what she wants, off dancing several times a week, shopping, endless chats with her innumerable friends. No doubt she’s a good mom to her son, but that isn’t relevant. She cleans obsessively, and probably I’m a bit messy, but I do more housework then most men. (Yes, she wants a maid…)
Her latest pattern is to calm down, settle me in, and then re-start a fusillade of complaints against me for my meanness etc. (In total since we started dating in winter 2009, so counting the first few months too, and the start of 2011, my spend on/with her, not counting anything just for me, or all the state benefits she collects, now totals well over $115,000 in 16 months – how the Sam Hill is that being “mean”?).
The threat that she will “go back to work” (a job that exists only in her imagination, they’re laying-off fast in the banking sector, hardly recruiting) and therefore end the relationship is often repeated. The job she would be likely to get, and I do know this sector well, would give her at most $30,000 per year after taxes and traveling.
I have never ever been in anything like this before. I’ve never before been told I’m mean, selfish, stingy and that *I* LOVE MONEY FAR TOO MUCH. Well, it is solely my careful ways with money (I worked 100 hour weeks for much of my life) that permitted all her spending sprees and extravagances. And now it is that she “cannot trust me”… boy, do I see it the other way around. Who paid for everything?
She flat-out refuses to come to joint counseling, saying the counselor will not be of the right class and will not be able to understand.
I have tried to interest her in running a joint business (IMO half the problem is she’s got too much time on her hands) which I could buy as a going-concern, but her interest in this is near zero. She wants get-rich-quick schemes (no end of books on this), not hard work that will be needed. She’s never run a business (I’ve run four).
I have been getting suicidal. The world’s in for and experiencing bad times, and a lot of this is down to greedy bankers. (Oops!)
Needless to say, there have been some great times. But.
When I try talking to her that this is abnormal, it is not how it happens in the West (I’m pretty certain it doesn’t happen in East Europe either), I get told I am talking nonsense and that she has a headache. Heard that a hundred times. If I ask how this panned out in her previous marriages, she says then she was naive, now she is not.
Whatever I do is not good enough for her.
I can hand her $2,000 cash on Monday and on Tuesday she would say “You never give me money.”
IS THERE ANY HOPE OF SALVAGING THINGS?
It is not that I think I can’t find anyone else. I’m fitter, better-looking and kinder than many 50 year olds.
Am I just making the inevitable hurt even worse by dragging this out, hoping against hope?
Advice, please. Say the obvious by all means. Perhaps I will show the replies to her and perhaps it might make her see some sense, or even make me see that she is right (?)
Thanks. I am desperate at her endless threats to end things. )-:

OR SHE’S ENDED IT, EVEN.

[AskApril Masini]

I’m not sure what it is you want to salvage! 😯 She’s using you for your money, and you have a problem saying no. As long as you continue not saying no, nothing will change, except that you’ll eventually run out of money and she’ll leave you.

My advice is that you stop seeing her and move on. Read Date Out of Your League, [url]https://www.askapril.com/relationship-dating-advice/date-out-of-your-league.html[/url], and follow the tips and advice there so you can find a woman who wants you, respects you and is worth your time and money. This one isn’t.

Don’t bother showing this to her. It’s none of her business. YOU are the one who needs to change your behavior. No is a complete sentence. Use it.

And follow me @AskAprilcom on Twitter as well as on Facebook at this link: [url][/url]. 🙂

[Lune David]

Whew… this isn’t a relationship, this’s a long-term subscription with surprise holiday fees. If love had a receipt, yours would be longer than a CVS one during the holidays.

When someone drains $115k, still calls you “stingy,” and then asks for a marriage down payment like you’re financing a car — that’s not romance, that’s a business deal you never signed up for. And the fact that saying “no” turns every conversation into drama? That’s your red flag waving like it’s holiday season.

AskApril nailed it: this isn’t about love, it’s about entitlement. Love doesn’t come with invoices, guilt trips, or emotional Black Friday sales. Especially not during the holidays, when partnership should feel lighter, not more expensive.

Hard truth, but a freeing one: you don’t have to bankrupt yourself — financially or emotionally — to prove love. Sometimes the best holiday gift you can give yourself is peace, boundaries, and walking away with your sanity intact.

[Member]

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