Wealth Can be Hazardous to Your Marriage
A 2018 CNBC headline didn’t surprise me at all: “Being Rich May Increase Your Odds of Divorce.” I’ll never forget a very successful businessman telling me, “Our marriage began falling apart when I went from earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to millions of dollars a year.”
Divorce statistics are notorious to deconstruct, but news reports confirm that even extreme wealth doesn’t guarantee a marriage’s success. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the two richest men in America, both rather recently announced divorces. Donald Trump’s three wives, Larry Ellison’s four wives, and Richard Perelman’s five wives further show that being a billionaire doesn’t guarantee marital happiness. Warren Buffett didn’t divorce his first wife, but he did live with his mistress, Astrid Menks, for years, and then married Astrid after his wife died. Sergey Brin and Michael Bloomberg are two more of the “top ten” in wealth with a divorce on their resume.
And then there’s Elon Musk, who is among the supremely wealthy. Justine Musk, who was married to Elon for eight years, believes the super successful can be notoriously difficult spouses because the very qualities that help them succeed in business can work against their relationships. According to The Financial Times, shortly after divorcing Justine, Elon “married an actress, only to divorce and remarry her in quick succession. Now he is in the process of divorcing her again.” As I write this, the fifty-year old Elon Musk has moved on to father a child with yet another different woman, though they haven’t announced any plans for marriage.
I once had the opportunity of spending some time with a different kind of billionaire couple. They wish to remain anonymous, but the truth behind the strength of their marriage is worth celebrating. It aligns with the message I share in A Lifelong Love: Discovering How Intimacy With God Breathes Passion Into Your Marriage.
The Finest Christian Man
One of the first things this wife ever told me wasn’t how brilliant her billionaire husband is, how good he is at amassing wealth, or how he handles all his possessions. It was something very different:
“My husband is the finest Christian man I’ve ever known.” She admires him more than she admires his wealth.
When a wife of several decades says something like this with such conviction, I listen. So I asked them what makes their marriage different. Two things stood out: faith and mission.
“The good habits for us are faith in the Bible; going to church, tithing, prayer–we pray first thing in the morning before we get out of bed—serving in church and teaching a Sunday school class for married couples.”
These are the bedrock practices of their lives, and I’m convinced they’d be true whether they earned $50,000 a year or $50,000 an hour. Their faith, not their money, shapes what they do. Their schedule is determined by their belief in God, not their devotion to their business.
They’ve seen individuals and couples ruined by making a lot of money because money starts to compete with the relationship instead of serving it. This couple has decided they’d rather be an intimate couple who worship God than a wealthy couple who forgets God and eventually hates each other.
The second thing they stress is mutual mission for God. Even though they could retire and enjoy the best this world has to offer, the husband told me, “Eternity is what’s important. Don’t live for this world; live for the other world.”
The husband is an avid evangelist, sharing his faith wherever he goes. He has led hundreds of people to the Lord, and though MBA professors would advise never mixing business and religion, this man is always more concerned about an investor’s soul than he is with getting him to agree to another contract.
Because this couple is known to have a lot of money, people try to hang around them to get some of it, but this husband and wife realize they have something more valuable than money to pass on and that’s their faith. “They just don’t know it yet.” It’s always inspiring to me to see a couple live with the sense of mission that Paul writes about to the Corinthians:
“For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view…
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:14-20).
Here’s the difference: this couple doesn’t focus on what their money does for them; they focus on how their faith can impact, bless and enrich others. They are givers, and see every relationship as an opportunity to help someone draw nearer to God or meet God for the first time.
In one sense, Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians could be one of the most powerful marital teachings in all of Scripture. When the two of you are joined around a mission for God, your marriage becomes a fortress because there is something permanent holding you together. If you make parenting your fortress, what will happen when your kids move out of the house or reject the faith? If you make your business your fortress, what will you do if the economy collapses and your business disappears? If you make traveling and fun your fortress, what will you do if health or financial concerns topple your ability to travel?
But there is no instance where mission on behalf of God’s reconciling work isn’t relevant and urgent and important to a believing couple. And joint mission draws this couple together in admiration as each other gushes about their spouse’s zeal.
The wife talks about living with her eyes and ears open to “divine appointments.” She purchased a lake house for extended family gatherings and a young man came out to fix their dock. While getting to know him, she sensed a deep spiritual hunger in him. “I really needed that dock fixed for an upcoming family get together, but I also knew I couldn’t be too focused on getting the dock fixed to the point that I would miss what his soul needs most—a relationship with Jesus.”
Faithful in the Little Things
It comes down to what you want out of life. The husband once met a billionaire who hadn’t been on a vacation with his wife without the kids in twenty-two years. “He had plenty of money but not much of a marriage.” He could afford a vacation, but he didn’t value a vacation because his money became more important than his marriage.
The wife I talked to doesn’t deny that “money does help,” but she’s quick to add that life brings common hurts to everyone. “If one of our kids broke a leg, we could pay for the doctor to treat it. But we’d still have an injured child. Money helps you face problems but it can’t always solve problems.”
They mentioned a private family issue that money can’t solve. I know they’d spend a billion dollars to fix it, but it’s the kind of problem money can’t fix. Being rich doesn’t erase the fact that all of us live in a fallen world.
After talking with this couple I came to realize that people tend to over-estimate what money can do for a couple and under-estimate the damage it can cause. Foolish couples pursue financial affluence with everything they’ve got, but don’t guard themselves from what might happen when it starts to come in. “It’s in prosperity that people get greedy,” the wife told me. “We see young people start earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but instead of being grateful they get competitive and lose their marriages by focusing on their business more than they do on their families.”
The “happy” couples, in the wife’s view, are the ones who love each other and invest in relationships, beginning with their own. Psalm 49:20 warns, “People who have wealth but lack understanding are like the beasts that perish.” If you have a good heart, money can help you live an even better life. If you have a corrupt heart, money will likely speed and even enable your corruption.
I asked the husband, “What does a guy earning seventy-five thousand a year not know about the pressures and difficulties of being a billionaire?”
“The responsibility of handling all that money and being a faithful steward before God. Giving money away can be difficult.”
The wife shows empathy for her husband: “Very few people could even begin to understand the weight my husband carries.”
She has seen other wealthy men become workaholics as their businesses grow. “Here’s what so many of the guys do: they buy things for their wives to placate them: rings, clothes, cars, and then ask, ‘Why aren’t you happy?’ She’d live in a shack out in the country with him if she really loves him. If my husband lost everything, I’d go anywhere with him. We started out renting an apartment and I’d go back to that, as long as I was with him. What we share most together is our relationship with Christ, and we can’t lose that.”
It’s not just wealthy men who become workaholics. She’s seen a woman almost lose her marriage chasing after a few hundred thousand dollars a year because she was convinced that’s how much her family needed her to earn “in our neighborhood.” The young wife didn’t question whether that neighborhood was good for her marriage; the way it took her away from her husband and children, it sounded more like a prison. When she and her husband discussed their schedules and how they had to divide everything up timewise just to keep the family going, they wanted advice for their marriage but the advice they received from this couple surprised them.
“I don’t think your marriage will survive if you keep living at this pace,” they were told. “Are you sure you have to earn that much money? Is it worth the risk to your relationship?” They were so focused on how much money they needed to bring in to pay the mortgage that they were all but blind to what they needed to invest in their marriage in order to thrive as a couple.
To those who seem to be prospering financially, the husband urges, “Don’t let yourself spiritually erode, and don’t let money increase while your spirituality decreases.” He recalls his dad telling him that handling success can often be even more difficult than handling poverty: “I’ve been poor and I’ve been prosperous. I’d rather be prosperous, but I learned a lot more when I was poor.”
It’s a Bullfight
In order for a matador to win a bullfight, he has to keep the bull focused on the red cape that hides his sword. He doesn’t want the bull to see the real danger—the sword that will actually kill him. The bull is so focused on the red cape (the color hides blood stains as well as the sword) that he doesn’t realize the matador is slowly bleeding the life out of him. When I work with affluent couples, I sometimes think of the pursuit of money as the matador. They are so focused on the “cape”—financial success and security, preserving all that they have with the same desperation that poorer couples often exert to get what they don’t yet have—that they don’t notice how the matador of affluence is slowly bleeding their relationship to death.
Focus on your faith. Be zealous about your mission. Money doesn’t have to kill your marriage—it can actually serve it. But that happens only when faith and mission are at the center of your pursuit.
This really is the message of A Lifelong Love: Discovering How Intimacy With God Breathes Passion Into Your Marriage. If you’d like to learn how spiritual purpose and worship can build your marriage, I urge you to check out this newly revised edition.
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