Many Unhappy Returns : Couples: Tax season drives otherwise compatible partners to opposite ends of the personality spectrum. The result? Disputes that can be taxing indeed.
The window panes quiver. The door jambs shudder. The neighbors cover their ears and mutter, “Oh no, they’re at it again.”
No need to feel ashamed. You are merely in the midst of your annual tax fight--an imbroglio waged by countless couples who see the 1040 form as a declaration of domestic war.
Faced with the prospect of assessing the year’s financial adventures, “people revert to their oldest, most dysfunctional forms of behavior,” said Washington, D.C., psychotherapist Olivia Mellan, author of “Money Harmony.”
Meaning that they act like children?
“Exactly,” Mellan said.
Couples bicker about record-keeping, said Richard Cassidy, a Brentwood accountant. They argue over who wants to stretch a particular deduction. They shout about profligacy, such as his Argentine fly-fishing expeditions or her passion for expensive shoes. They fume over financial priorities, and liabilities.
It’s moment-of-truth time for some couples, when they find out how much--or how little--their partner earned in the past year. If taxes are owed, they may spar over where to get the funds. If a refund is due, they may tangle over what to do with the windfall.
Sometimes, Cassidy has observed, one spouse uses tax time as an opportunity to demonstrate his or her superior financial sophistication--an occasion, in short, to make the other spouse feel stupid. Or, there is the hidden bank account explosion: the bomb that detonates when one partner finds out that the other has squirreled away a secret slush fund.
But experts agree that what all this fighting is really about is power. Tax time activates some primal struggle for many otherwise normal adults. Couples who appear perfectly peaceable the rest of the year turn into full-assault combatants. All it takes is one little document from Uncle Sam, and the monetary machine-guns come out in the open.
“It’s not just the taxes,” said Cassidy, who thinks of himself at this time of the year as a full-time accountant and part-time marriage counselor. “There’s no way anyone could get that heated up over taxes.”
But don’t tell that to Jane, a Riverside office manager who said she recently stopped speaking to her husband because of a tax battle. Feverish doesn’t even come close to describing the mood between Jane and Frank, who threatened bodily harm if their actual names were used.
“We’re at war right now,” said Jane, who went ballistic when she learned that Frank, an independent contractor, had somehow “forgotten” to pay his quarterly tax installments for the last half of 1993.
“My life has been sheer misery,” Jane raged. “Frank is a very good person, but he is not good when it comes to taxes.”
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Or there is Shelley, who would allow herself to be described only as working “in the nonprofit world” in New York City. Shelley has a doctorate from the University of Chicago, an attainment her husband, Bob, loves to taunt her with every year when he blasts her for her sloppy accounting habits.
“He’s a fastidious record-keeper,” Shelley said of Bob, a dentist. “I hardly balance my checkbook.” She paused. “In fact, I don’t balance my checkbook.”
Crossing swords over capital assets (or, for that matter, debits) is something of a national pastime, said Howard Markman, director of the University of Denver’s Center for Marital and Family Studies.
“It does turn out in our research that money is the No. 1 issue that couples fight about,” said Markman, who addresses tax tiffs in his book, “We Can Work It Out.”
Money acts as a magnet, Markman said, drawing out all kinds of other issues that couples may have been avoiding. In particular, he said, “there’s often a lot of anger buried under money.”
At tax time, said Dr. Bonnie Maslin, a New York City psychologist who is the author of “The Angry Marriage,” such enmity becomes even more pronounced. Clashes in personal management styles are often exaggerated where money and taxes are concerned, she said, citing the “NBD”--for No Big Deal--conflict as a prime example.
“That’s where you have one spouse who says taxes are not important--’it’s no big deal to me,’ ” Maslin said. “Just today I talked to a woman whose husband was flipping out because if she had had certain papers, they could have saved $300 on their taxes. Meanwhile, she’s shrugging and saying, ‘Oh come on, it’s only $300, it’s no big deal.’ ”
Maslin said she has also encountered marriages where one spouse is a chronic risk-taker and the other is a confirmed risk-avoider. “I know someone who says ‘I’m not happy unless the IRS audits me,’ ” Maslin said. While this man is relishing the challenge of beating the government at its own penny-ante game, “the wife is terrified of an audit.”
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Tax time also brings out the worst in what Maslin calls the “Odd Couple” marriage, “where you have a procrastinator married to someone who is always on top of things.” By postponing his or her portion of the tax preparation, “one spouse just passively drives the other one crazy,” Maslin said.
Focusing almost exclusively on money problems among couples, psychotherapist Mellan has come up with her own set of oppositional tax forces. Most common are hoarder versus spender marriages, she said, followed closely by worrier versus avoider, planner versus dreamer and money merger versus money separator. Any of those combinations makes for domestic pyrotechnics when tax time rolls around, Mellan said.
“What happens is that any polarized behaviors you have already developed are exaggerated,” she said.
As in any trusted battle strategy, habit sets in, and when April 15 looms close, “A lot of the time, people just have the same fight again and again and again,” Mellan said.
So common are these disagreements that Van Nuys accountant Michael Bernstein sometimes considers attaching a therapy fee to his standard charge for tax preparation. Fortunately, Bernstein said: “They usually have a fight after their appointment, when they find out what they owe--not so often in my office.”
Still, Brentwood accountant Cassidy said he has witnessed a few near knock-down, drag-out tax fights.
“Especially when one spouse completely disagrees with the other,” he said. “Or when one of them doesn’t keep the records and just expects the other one to solve all the problems.”
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Maybe so, but some spouses advocate tax abdication as the best tactic of all. Tracy Thomas, a graphic artist in Culver City, said that in the tax preparation department, he has “willingly acquiesced” to his wife and business partner, Pam.
“Pam’s the warrior on our personal taxes,” Thomas said. “She’s the one who organizes all that garbage. I lose patience, and my accounting system is basically to throw all the stuff into a drawer.”
Recently transplanted from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., writers Heidi Yorkshire and Joe Anthony have managed to avoid tax conflagrations in their two years of marriage. Maybe that’s because both are galled by one particular feature of Uncle Sam’s idea of family values.
“The marriage penalty just drives us crazy,” Yorkshire said. “We do consider getting divorced and not telling anybody, except the government.”
