Hey! I recently started dating someone, and it is both of our first relationships. We have only been dating for 5 months. We both go to the same college in NY, and we recently decided to make a 3-day road trip in Early September.
The financial discussions for our upcoming trip have been a bit awkward, and we sorta decided that I will be footing the bill for the hotel, while he would cover gas and food. I felt like this was a bit unfair, as the cost of the hotel is probably ~3x what gas/food would cost us. I had brought this up and I noticed it was a bit of a trigger for him, and it was clear he wasn't too keen on having the discussion. I don't think this comes from malice, but more so that money discussions are always awkward, and this is both of our first relationships.
I had offered to split it so that he pays a quarter of the hotel charge, and he sort of reluctantly said yes, but mentioned he doesn't have the money right now, so I didn't really push further.
Both of us have different perspectives on money - he is a lot more frivolous than me in spending, while I'm pretty frugal. Even though we're both in university, I have more disposable income than him (mostly because of my frugality).
I'm worried that I will resent him during and after the trip because of this, and I know I need to bring it up to him, but I don't know how I should approach it. I do really want to go on the trip, and I realize that I may be too "cheap" and should let things go. At the same time, I'm feeling more and more resentful whenever he mentions how he spent money buying (non-essential) new clothes or books. I've been bottling it up for a bit since he's going through a bit of a rough patch, but the date of the trip is approaching and I can't keep my mind off things.
To clarify, my questions are:
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How do I bring it up to him? I'm worried if it feels like too much like an ultimatum, we'd have to cancel the trip.
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Should I just "suck it up"? I know in relationships things aren't always equal. I would like to think if the roles were reversed he would do the same, but I'm not sure if he would.
I can not emphasize how much I like him. My post may have made this sound like a toxic relationship but it is anything but. It's just one small part of an otherwise amazing relationship.
Without getting into the whole relationship side of things. My partner and I use the splitwise app for almost all our joint spending and find it works well to keep things fair and it keeps a record of things. Most things are split 50/50, but you can can do any percentage split based on the situation - like if one person uses the car most of that week, we might split fuel 70/30 or if one of us wanted to splurge on a shared expense and the other didn't, we might agreed to split it 60/40 - that way the splurger gets what they want and it fits within the others budget.
I'm a huge fan of splitwise-like apps, but somebody (way before this relationship) convinced me that you shouldn't count pennies in a romantic relationship. I feel like that was terrible advice and I should not have listened, because (ironically) I now spend a lot of time penny-counting ("last time he paid $20 for food, this time I paid $35").
We had this discussion early on in our relationship and we opted to keep it more """natural""", but I think I may want to talk to him about splitting everything more evenly. I just feel like that's an asshole thing to do once we've already started the relationship, but I'm probably wrong.
Nah, you're alright. It took us a while before we committed to splitwise and yeah, it was mostly a convenience thing. Less stress over maths and keeping tabs. You could say that it's causing you stress and you'd like to at least give a splitwise-like app a go. It'll hopwfully free up your mind to focus on the romance and each other.