Have you ever entered a conversation about money with your spouse, thinking you would talk about numbers and then end up in a fight about something completely different? Carl Richards explains that talking about money, particularly with your spouse, is like grabbing an electric fence you did not know was electric. In other words, shocking. And not very pleasant.

I think this is almost universal. My guess is that the only couples who never fight about money are those who never talk about it. Research suggests that money disagreements are one of the leading reasons for divorce. I spend a lot of time thinking about why this thing, this unit of currency, causes us so many problems.

For starters, we are never taught about money – what it is and what it is not, what it can and can not do for us – and we are certainly never taught how to discuss money. It is still one of society’s biggest taboo subjects. People would rather talk about politics and sex than money.

Many of us were raised to believe that discussing money – how much you earn or how much you have – is rude, uncouth, or vulgar. When would you ever turn to someone and ask them their salary, what they have saved in the bank, or how big their investment portfolio is? Many of us share our entire lives on social media, yet we are still uncomfortable when it comes to sharing anything about our financial lives. Perhaps it is because money is so wrapped up in success, and we have not done a good job of uncoupling our net worth from our self-worth.

With that as a backdrop, it is no wonder that the conversation with your spouse about the credit card bill becomes heated. If we are taught about money, we are taught about it like we are taught about physics: that it fits onto a spreadsheet. If you are good with maths or have a calculator, then you can master it, and if you are not good with maths, then you are doomed. But money is not about maths. If it were about maths, financial education would work. But it does not.

Money is about behaviour, and it is about our emotions and feelings. It is about ‘could haves’ and ‘should haves’ and ‘why did you?’ and ‘why didn’t you?’. There is shame and blame, envy and regret, and, most of all, there is greed and fear. And we throw all of that emotion into the credit card bill conversation.

Often, the way we feel about money is subconscious. Our beliefs about money are said to be formed by the age of seven based on the messages we hear, mostly at home, from our parents. These core beliefs are often only partially true – things like ‘you have to work hard for your money’ or ‘money is the root of all evil.’ These are big messages often passed down from generation to generation, and we carry them into adulthood. They dictate how we behave as adults, often without us even knowing. We enter that conversation about the credit card bill and bang: there is the electric fence.

Have you ever taken yourself back to your childhood and asked yourself, ‘what is my first memory of money?’ How are the lessons that you learned serving you today? Are the things you believe about money even true? What about your spouse? What was their childhood experience with money? Maybe one of you came from a family where money was scarce, and there were always conflicts around money. And maybe one of you came from a family where money was always easy – never discussed; there was just enough.

When we think about it, it is no wonder money is one of the biggest causes of stress in marriages. But it is never too late to talk about it, whether you have been married for a year or twenty years – open up the conversation. Find out about each other’s beliefs and where they come from. It could be different if we understood, not only our own financial beliefs but those of our spouse. If we took that knowledge into the conversation about the credit card bill, how would it be different? We might come into that conversation with compassion and ease. We might come into that conversation understanding that it has nothing to do with the numbers and everything to do with the story behind the numbers. We might just avoid that electric fence, and who would not want to do that?