My Lover Owes Me Money

You fell in love and your lover started asking for money. You’ve given money to him or her and he or she never pays you back.

He or she keeps asking for more money. It feels like it has become a condition of your relationship. You start to worry, but you don’t say anything about it.

It’s hard for you to say no, to set a limit. Now you’re frustrated and at times angry and resentful. What’s going on?

First and foremost, people who financially ‘abuse’ others psychologically substitute money for love. This is the root of their problem. Money and love are from different worlds and should never be substituted.

True love is not a quantifiable thing. It’s not something that can be easily represented by something else. In other words, you can’t talk about love with numbers. Even language represents love is a very limited way. Love transcends substitution. Love is the pure original.

Money is a quantifiable representation of something valued. Like the gold in Fort Knox. Most people accept the value of gold and value the money that represents the gold. Money doesn’t really have a value, it’s just paper. Money represents the thing that has the value.

Your lover is substituting money for love. The unspoken (usually) implication is, “if you ‘love’ me you’ll give me money.” As if the money you give him or her can represent your love for him or her. He or she is trying to convince you that money can represent ‘love’ like it represents ‘gold.’

There are plenty of people out there who have lost their faith in love. They no longer feel love has any value, at least not for them. So they have taken this a step further and given up on love while substituting a full-time interest in money instead.

Now for these individuals, money not love is the prize. In fact, they may talk the language of love but their true motivation is to get the money. They used to be called “gold-diggers” which describes their true motivation when in a love relationship, to dig for the gold or money.

If you’re in a relationship with someone who is simply interested in your money. Beware. If your lover has lost complete faith in love and talks the language of love only to procure an opportunity to gain money, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do to change that. If you value your lover for other reasons besides love stay put. If love is what you’re after, sorry, wrong person.

If you’re in love with a person who still has a little faith in love, only he or she is struggling with ‘dependency needs,’ money is substituted for love but not completely. Instead of the cold substitution of money for love in the case of the person who has completely lost faith in love, you have a lover who wants you to ‘demonstrate’ your love by giving him or her money. His or her faith in love has not been completely lost, it has just been transformed by the belief that money is the best way to give love or prove love exists.

For some people, money is the way to control a lover. Because your lover has more money than you, you are supposed to defer to him or her. Other people like to ‘owe.’ It’s their method of ensuring that someone always ‘wants’ or ‘needs’ something from them.

Money matters in your love relationship will determine how dependent or independent you and your lover will be. Financial abuse usually occurs in a relationship where one person tries to solve love problems with money.

You’ll know financial abuse is occurring if you see one or more of the following signs: multiple loans are given without repayment, requests for repayment are reacted to with defensiveness, anger and/or attempts to create guilt, or your lover becomes progressively more dysfunctional (less work, less responsibility, etc.) as a consequence of the money lent.

The ‘cure’ for financial abuse is your willingness to say ‘no.’ This limit setting on the borrowing of money will ‘separate’ money from love long enough for you to figure out if the relationship is worth keeping.

If your lover responses with sincere remorse and is apologetic, accepts the fact that you won’t continue funding him or her, and remains ‘in love’ with you, you may have something to work with. If his or her response is negative and distant, learn from your mistakes and get out.

Comments? Welcome. Dr. Tom Jordan