Indeed. It’s also bloody hard if the one carrying the mental load of the finances (and suffering for it) can’t see they are also creating the problem in the first place, by living well beyond their means, and not managing it terribly well.
My XDH added a good 5-10k a year to ‘our’ debts by spending extravagantly on wine, takeaway, ready-made food and technology, and insisting on living in a house much more expensive than we needed or could really afford. He often ‘gave’ these things to me, and also complained that I was both ungrateful and equally contributing to this debt and ‘not dealing’ with it, when I had literally no say in whether he turned up with a takeaway, drank a shitload or bought some fancy new thingy for his PC. He complained I was unsupportive because I refused to fiddle while Rome burned and change from a Tesco delivery to (me, naturally. He wasn’t offering his time or effort) going to Aldi or cancelling the 30 quid a week cleaner (which he also refused to muck in with at all) when he wouldn’t address the issue of the house, his drinking or his impulse buying. He thought he was frugal because he didn’t spend on clothes, going out or holidays, but mentally discounted the thousands he was spending on booze, cigarettes and tech. He also put responsibility on me, saying things like ‘I just don’t think you’d be happy in a small house’ and ‘I’ve give you this big house’ when I had expressly, clearly and repeatedly said I would prefer less stress in a cheaper house or area. He didn’t ‘count’ I paid DDs nursery fees, (which exceeded the mortgage) out of my salary before he even saw it and didn’t count it as ‘contributing’ anyway (because I couldn’t trust the money to be there any other way, and even though I obviously ‘had’ to work full time because we ‘needed’ the money). He refused to sit down and work out a budget (either because he didn’t want me that involved or because deep down he knew it would show we had plenty of money, he was just pissing it all up the wall), and wouldn’t have stuck to it anyway. Even when we agreed something for, say, the rest of month and I didn’t count his drinking, I’d find out that I’d been scraping by and he’d bought new graphics cards or whatever. He wanted all to make all the choices, while I made all the sacrifices. He genuinely thought he was in debt because he paid all the bills, not because of his mom-essential spending on top, and I wasn’t in debt because he was paying all the bills ‘for me’ (we each had money coming into a personal account, and then our set amounts into a joint house account. I stopped putting in after I had DD, because I had next to nothing left to put in after nursery, car expenses, the cleaner and food bills.
He would likely have said I refused to discuss it and allowed him to cope with it all alone. But I couldn’t get involved, because he wouldn’t allow any equality, so I don’t see why I should have had equal stress over it. They were his damn choices, not mine. I didn’t have all the information and also couldn’t rely on him to stick to an agreement. AND he was the one living beyond his means (all the debt but the mortgage was in his name). He saw it as me refusing to help fix the problem by not allowing him to control my spending. I saw it as him refusing to stop creating the problem.
When we split, I never got a penny off him, and was perfectly happy living in an average house, completely able
to pay my own bills and reduce my hours at work. I had no debt and adequate, if not extravagant, spending money. He continued to spiral into debt, and then burn through a substantial inheritance. I can see in retrospect how it was utterly doomed, and there was no way we could have been financially compatible unless he was prepared to compromise his priorities (he wasn’t) or make some sacrifices like giving up smoking, not just impose sacrifices on me. I contributed by declining to make sacrifices when I wasn’t ‘permitted’ set priorities and I could definitely have tackled that more authoritatively, but I DEFINITELY wasn’t the main problem.