by Alyx Grayson

Created on: March 18, 2009   Last Updated: March 28, 2009

Secrets and lies can poison a marriage. Secrets or lies about money in a marriage add insult to the injury. In 2005, a financial discrepancy in the bank account revealed a money transfer of $200 dollars from our joint checking account to another checking account. My husband handled the day to day finances, but I handled the yearly taxes. This year, I was trying to separate business expenses from personal expenses. That $200 dollar transfer earned a highlight to be investigated for what category it fell into later.

Soon another transfer of $50 dollars joined it, then one for $150 and another for $15. A pattern of unidentified financial transfers continued for nearly ten months, beginning in February of 2004 to the present, totalling over $3,000 dollars. Looking back into the finances for 2005, another $600 dollars was transferred between January of 2005 and March of 2005 when I was doing the taxes. This brought the total to nearly $3,600 dollars.

I contacted the bank to see if I could learn the identity of the bank account we were transferring money to. Perhaps I should have spoken to my husband first, but I tried to assume the best of intentions. At first, I rather hoped it was just a little slush fund my husband used for purchase shopping. I had a small personal account that I transferred $200 per month into to handle day to day frivolous expenses. The bank would neither confirm nor deny the account and who owned it.

The amount troubled me. Not knowing who the amount went to troubled me even more. Not finding a pattern of money coming back into the account matching the amounts going out troubled me. I told myself I needed to know for tax purposes and I told myself that I wasn't suspicious of the money transfers. Both lies seemed to make swallowing this deception a little easier. When I put the numbers in front of my husband and asked him point blank who the transfers went to and what they were for, I watched the wheels turn in his head. He was going to lie. When you live with someone day in and day out, you know how they think and you can read their body language. I could see it in the stiffness of his posture, the way he canted his head to the left and dropped his eyes and the way he made these soothing noises that were a combination of laughter and sob.

They were loans to a friend. He mixed truth with the lie to make it more palatable. But when I pointed out those loans implied the money would be returned and we were still giving money without expectation

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