I have been mulling over what could jokingly be called the “division of spending” in relationships. Simply put, you can generally observe that men are held to a high standard when it comes to providing for their partner or even the entire family. In contrast, despite all this talk about supposed equality between the sexes, the view that any money the woman earns should be fully hers is still entrenched. Consequently, even with a working spouse, men typically are the ones held accountable for making ends meet.

While it seems difficult to justify blaming only women for reckless spending, it is nonetheless the case that women are more prone to spending their money impulsively. Sure, some men have gambling problems. Drug addictions can affect both sexes but women, at least when they are young, often just bang dudes in exchange for dope. Say of that what you will, but at least they are not going to (directly) run up any debts this way. Some men like to get themselves some big ticket items every once in a while, such as a beefed-up gaming PC or a gigantic TV but there is probably no equivalent to the casual shopping behavior many women exhibit, which leads them to spending hundreds of dollars month after months to “keep their wardrobe up-to-date”. Yes, this is a phrase I have heard repeatedly. It is obviously quite nonsensical.

It probably is the case that few parents instill in their daughters a proper sense of the value of money, and even the Chinese seem to be lapsing when I consider how recklessly a lot of those I have met here in Europe seem spend their parents’ money. Of course, any man deciding to wife up such a woman is going to have to foot a big chunk of her bills, if not all of them. This becomes a problem when her appetite for spending is bigger than his ability to pay. The obvious solution for her seems to be to run up debts, if needed secretly. Plenty of men can tell you stories about their wives telling them about their debts after marriage, but this is nothing compared to some hapless guy on Reddit who learned that his wife has accumulated over $75,000 in debts over the course of a few years. He writes that “they” make $190k/year together — probably he makes the biggest chunk of it. Yet, despite such a high income, they only have cash reserves of $30k. Bummer. He does not seem to have a problem with money just going out of the window. The only issue is that little bit of excess spending.

If you go through the aforementioned thread, you will notice that a lot of the commenters make excuses for the woman. The guy gets told to seek marriage counseling, not-so-subtly shifting some of the blame on him. In addition, there is the suggestion that if his wife has any personal loans, he should talk to those people and make it clear that they will not get paid back. One of the comments was bizarre, completely exculpating the wife from any wrongdoing. The context is that this woman may also have taken out loans in the name of her kids (spelling errors in the original):

It’s tough to think about a mother hurting her child by taking out a credit card in their name, but judging by this sbub, it happens fairly often. There was just a post the other day about a kid who’s mother took out a card in his name, and he loved and respected him mom, no narcissism, she was a good and supportive mother.

So OP, take the advice to freeze your children’s credit. YOu wife would abhor the idea of hurting her child in any way, but it’s not her that would be doing the hurting, it’s the illness she has that would do it.

Oh, it’s not her, it’s some mysterious “illness” that takes control of her. It seems that evil spirits have been making a comeback, ensuring that they can be blamed for all wrong-doings. Unsurprisingly, this position quickly finds support:

I just want to thank you for your specification that it’s not his wife, it’s the illness. This is not a popular mindset, but it really is true.

This is utter idiocy. However, this view seems very common in Generation Z. I have worked with people who held the position that there is no human error. This means that if someone fucks something up, it is never the fault of the person. Instead, it is due to “circumstances” that are to blame. Thus, you would need to build safeguards for absolutely everything in order to eliminate all human error. Presumably, not having those safeguards is due to some kind of divine action instead of oversight. In reality, people do slip up and make mistakes, sometimes very serious ones. I have seen nonsense at a level you would not believe, like people wasting thousands of dollars a month of the company’s money, for about two years, because they forget to shut down some expensive cloud setup that was supposed to be used for a time-limited experiment. The person who did this appeared to me to be borderline retarded but of course he could not be blamed as an all-seeing AI watching over him could have prevented this.

I think that no man should let his girlfriend or wife get away with trying to shift the blame onto someone or something else. You have probably come across plenty of such examples. Not only is she not guilty for running up personal debts (it’s due to an “illness”!), she should also be allowed to sleep around behind her back (alcohol and drugs are doing it to her!) and if she is in insufferable bitch, it is not due to personality defects you could blame her for either (it’s your fault because you should be able to deal such situations!). All of this is utterly ridiculous. Yet, this is the society we live in. Just call out her bullshit whenever you encounter it. Most importantly, you should be able to figure out if the woman you are banging is inclined to blame anything and everyone except herself.