--- title: The Danger of Surrendering Your Financial Independence in a Relationship description: Power isn’t given. You either claim it, or learn to live without it, writes Jillian Sanders. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/04/17/the-danger-of-surrendering-your-financial-independence-in-a-relationship/ author: Jillian Sanders article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-04-22T10:00:00.483Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-12T07:05:44.078Z og:title: The Danger of Surrendering Your Financial Independence in a Relationship og:description: Power isn’t given. You either claim it, or learn to live without it, writes Jillian Sanders. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/04/17/the-danger-of-surrendering-your-financial-independence-in-a-relationship/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ded3657b4846a81/69e2a6ec23c6b45e8cbcdad9/financial-independence-women.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: financial-independence-women.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Danger of Surrendering Your Financial Independence in a Relationship twitter:description: Power isn’t given. You either claim it, or learn to live without it, writes Jillian Sanders. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ded3657b4846a81/69e2a6ec23c6b45e8cbcdad9/financial-independence-women.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  IDEASTime ideas # The Danger of Surrendering Your Financial Independence in a Relationship by [Jillian Sanders](https://time.com/author/jillian-sanders/) ## Jillian Sanders Jillian Sanders is a writer based in Denver. Apr 22, 2026 10:00 AM UTC  J Studios—Getty Images by [Jillian Sanders](https://time.com/author/jillian-sanders/) ## Jillian Sanders Jillian Sanders is a writer based in Denver. Apr 22, 2026 10:00 AM UTC Two divorce memoirs—_Awake_ by Jen Hatmaker and _Strangers_ by Belle Burden—are part of a broader cultural trend: women reckoning with what it really costs to hand over full financial control in their relationships, and what happens when they’re suddenly left to navigate finances alone. In a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Burden admitted she found it [“romantic”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctXbYb8OdEk) to let her husband handle the money, casting it as something complicated and better left to him. When her marriage ended, she was left completely unmoored. Hatmaker described a similar reckoning: sitting in her attorney’s office, out of her depth, asking him to explain her finances [“like a child.”](https://hermoney.com/connect/marriage/jen-hatmaker-on-reclaiming-her-financial-life-after-divorce-podcast-505/) Both women were not just uninformed, but unequipped to manage the structures their lives depended on when it mattered most. These were not women without resources. Hatmaker was a successful author. Burden, a former corporate attorney [with generational wealth.](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/books/review/belle-burden-strangers-memoir-of-marriage.html) And still, both deferred to their spouses on the one system that governs independence more than any other: money. This isn’t an oversight. It’s conditioning: a cultural script that teaches women to opt out of power. ## Families condition women to ignore finances I watched this script play out in my own home. My grandmother never touched finances. My mother deferred to my father. For 25 years, it worked, until the day he left. Like Burden and Hatmaker, my mother was suddenly without both a partner and the framework for her own financial life. Accounts, bills, taxes, high-stakes decisions—all of it became hers to navigate overnight. You would think that would have been my lesson. It wasn’t. I entered early adulthood with the same expectation: I would marry, and my husband would manage our money. At 21, I moved to New York City to pursue acting. I waited tables, auditioned, pieced together a life out of odd jobs and ambition. I lived in tiny apartments with rotating roommates, paying rent wildly disproportionate to what I made. I opened every credit card that showed up in my mailbox. I charged dinners on Macy’s accounts with 24% interest. In my late twenties, a boyfriend gave me a designer handbag for Christmas. I sold it the next month for $500 because I couldn’t make rent. By then, I had more than $10,000 in credit card debt. No savings. No retirement. No plan beyond the next month. In the back of my mind, an unspoken assumption remained: I would eventually meet a man who would take care of me. I watched it happen all the time. None of my friends were particularly responsible. Most of us were creatives—bartending, waitressing, floundering. Some had parents helping out, a safety net that made the chaos possible. One by one, they met men with steady careers and clear trajectories. Their lives shifted. Their instability absorbed into something stable. ## How I rescued myself By 29, my financial situation wasn’t just disorganized, it was untenable. I didn’t have enough money to cover a single unexpected expense, and my credit card balance wasn’t going down; the interest was outpacing me. What once felt normal became impossible to ignore. I was dating someone I liked, but not enough to marry. And I knew I couldn’t move toward marriage without taking control of my own life. I moved in with my grandparents in New Jersey and began taking myself and my finances seriously. At 30, I landed my first real foothold: an assistant job at a major publishing house. I was nearly a decade older than my colleagues and earning $35,000 a year, but I knew I could build a career if I stayed the course. I paid off my debt slowly. I started contributing to my first 401(k). I learned how to read a paycheck, how to budget, how to save, and how much I could realistically afford in rent while still setting something aside. It was a complete inversion of how I’d been living, and it wasn’t hard to learn. I could have started a decade earlier. One year later, I returned to the city with a clean financial slate. The next seven years were a steady climb up the corporate ladder, working with high-level clients and major publications. This version of me was grounded and deliberate, no longer moving through the world expecting someone to step in and make it easier. By January 2020, after establishing a hard-won career and a modest sense of security, I was ready to leave New York. At 38, I wanted something more sustainable, somewhere I could see myself long-term. I chose Colorado. Four months after arriving in Denver, I was laid off when the pandemic hit. I took on freelance work, whatever I could get, to cover my expenses and stay afloat. Approaching 40, the realization landed with clarity: I was the only person I could count on to support myself. There was a maturity in that, paired with a growing sense of capability. The fairytale of a prince coming to rescue me had fallen away. It was just me, and I could handle it. ## Self-reliance is power My freelance work began to take shape. What started as a way to cover my expenses became something I could turn into a full-time job. Within a year, I filed an LLC and made it official. Nearly six years later, I still run that business, and it fully supports me. I was once convinced I had no aptitude for numbers. I don’t have a college degree. I was never a standout student. And yet, I became financially literate—not just in my personal life, but in running a small company. I wasn’t uniquely irresponsible. I was following a social script that teaches women to build lives around money they don’t fully understand. Internet tropes like [“girl math”](https://time.com/6958080/women-personal-finance-planning/) (the trend of applying questionable logic to justify purchases) excuse financial disengagement as an innocuous, feminine quirk. Characters like Carrie Bradshaw in _Sex and the City_ are framed as charmingly inept while spending freely. We’re taught to manage the aesthetics of life—plan dinners, book trips, decorate, buy clothes—while the cost, and who’s paying for it, stays in the background. We disengage. We laugh at what we don’t understand. We keep our distance from the numbers. This creates dependency on men, by design. ## Women have long been shut out of finances We can’t ignore the roots of this knowledge gap: it isn’t just individual illiteracy, but the legacy of exclusion. For generations, women were [shut out of financial systems](https://time.com/collections/time100-voices/7097385/tory-burch-equal-credit-opportunity-act-essay/), denied access to bank accounts, credit, and the education to understand them. What remains isn’t just a lack of understanding, but a structural disadvantage: women were locked out first, then expected to figure it out later. When life shifts—when a relationship ends, a recession hits, or a major financial decision has to be made—the person who was never taught to understand the structure isn’t just at a disadvantage. She is exposed, forced to make high-stakes decisions without the information, context, or control required to make them well. And this exposure isn’t just the result of personal choice, it’s shaped by systemic pressure. We call it caretaking, but for many women it’s an ultimatum: when childcare costs rival a salary, stepping away isn’t a preference, it’s the only viable option. And because women are still expected to be the default caregiver, that choice becomes the family’s cheapest solution—one that cuts off years of earnings and makes financial independence harder to reclaim. And often, the person managing the money isn’t always managing it well. We’ve seen this play out publicly in fraud cases, in bankruptcies, in marriages that appear stable until the numbers are exposed. When those marriages collapse, the consequences don’t divide fairly. The person who didn’t manage the money is frequently left carrying the debt, the confusion, and the aftermath. She inherits risk without ever having held the power. ## How women can secure financial independence Of course, this pattern doesn’t only surface in divorce. It appears in widowhood, when women, who are more likely to outlive their partners, are left to manage financial systems late in life, often for the first time. It shows up when careers are interrupted or abandoned to care for children or aging parents, reducing lifetime earnings and limiting long-term security. And we see it in the [wage gap](https://time.com/6259175/gender-pay-gap-us-pew-report/), where women start at a disadvantage and are expected to compensate for it without ever being taught how. This pattern isn’t inevitable. A growing number of women are financially literate, active investors, and fully engaged in the systems that shape their lives: proof that the script can be rewritten. And this dynamic isn’t limited to heterosexual relationships. While the script may look different in same-sex partnerships, the underlying risk remains the same. When one person defers financial control to another, power concentrates in one place. The imbalance isn’t just about gender—it’s about who understands the system, and who doesn’t. I’m grateful I secured my independence. My ability to live with family, and access to a corporate career ladder gave me a privileged starting point. For women working low-wage jobs, without a safety net, or navigating systemic poverty, the path looks entirely different. For them, financial literacy, while critical, is not enough to overcome structural barriers. This means the next step can’t be abstract. Start by creating transparency in your relationship, ensuring you have full access to accounts, bills, and investments—not as suspicion, but as equity. Understand your baseline by pulling your credit report and seeing where you stand. Begin building something of your own by opening an IRA and automating even a small deposit. That’s where ownership begins. Reading [Strangers](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760850/strangers-by-belle-burden/) alongside [Awake](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Awake/Jen-Hatmaker/9781668083680), the core lesson is inescapable: the imbalance isn’t just in what we don’t know, it’s in how readily we’re taught to surrender that knowledge. These memoirs are cautionary tales—not because these women were careless, but because they followed the script exactly as it was written. Power isn’t given. You either claim it, or learn to live without it. [TIME Ideas](https://www.time.com/ideas) hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. 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