With your individual meeting prep done, it is time to lay the ground rules for the meeting itself, and what you and your partner hope to get out of your finances. At the money meeting:

• Plan for a 20 minute meeting. This doesn’t draw out the issue and no one gets bored, tired or frustrated.
• Remove distractions. Make sure the TV is turned off and the kids are in bed, leave the phones off the hook or on silent and give your full attention to the meeting.
• Be open and honest about finances and goals. Each person should begin by explaining their approach to finances and their financial goals. This will allow you to understand what is important to your partner and you can work together to find a way to integrate both ideals into your budget. Plus, if you are aware of what your partner wants out of life, it is easier to make other financial decisions in the future regarding homes, holidays and children.
• Decide which are joint expenses. While you are sharing lives, it is up to you to decide how you want to share what is in your life. At the same time you are both bringing things to the relationship – your own car, your own TV, your own credit cards – and these can be considered individual expenses and you can total up the joint expenses such as household bills, holidays, dinners out and so on.
• Decide who will manage the finances. Having one person responsible for making the bill payments reduces the risk of late payments because ‘I thought you paid it’ or paying the same bill twice.
• Decide how to deal with emergency joint expenses. If you buy a dog when you move in together he becomes a joint expense and if he needs an emergency visit to the vet, you need an emergency plan. Does the person with the most funds in their individual account pay? Do you put it on a joint credit card? Do you set up a joint savings plan for a joint emergency fund?
• Decide how to deal with individual emergency expenses. If your car needs and emergency repair and you can’t afford it, your partner may be able to cover the costs but you need to decide how to deal with the blurring of money lines. Will it come out of joint savings? Will you keep your own savings account?

Have you ever had a money meeting with your partner? (One that didn’t end in tears?)

Stay tuned for the third and final part of this series tomorrow, in which we will learn about how to deal with uneven salaries between partners and which part of your finances to keep separate.

Timothy Ng is a personal finance writer who has a real passion for encouraging people to compare credit cards to ensure they get the best deal. Check out his comprehensive guide to best credit cards where he provides an in-depth overview and analysis, to help you find a better deal.

But how many people arm themselves with instructions on how to be in a relationship?

Not many. And certainly not many proactively. It seems to me that most people won’t seek help or guidance on how to be in a relationship until problems arise. By which time it’s usually too late.

Here are four common relationship mistakes that people make. Anything sound familiar here? I know I’m guilty of a few.

Arguing to Win, Not to Resolve

It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of keeping tally of argument wins, particularly if you’re both the stubborn type.

When arguing, try and keep on point, and try to remember that the best end goal for you both is a resolution of the problem, not another point on your imaginary scoreboard. This should help keep you both calm and civil towards each other.

Also? In light of this tip, let the little things slide. Who cares who forgot to change the toilet roll in the bathroom or who drank the last of the milk? Chillax, it’s not worth the pain.

Expecting Too Much

Oh boy, am I guilty of this one! Having major expectations of a situation or a person is always going to leave you disappointed. Bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

For example, I had this notion in my head that once we were married, we would have a wonderful honeymoon period of no arguing at all, gazing at each other lovingly for hours, wanting to spend time only together, passionate sex every day… and then Den got sick on our honeymoon and I was left to fend for myself while he played his PSP and watched DVDs in our hotel room. Not exactly the picture perfect life I had planned! I thought we’d be blissed out for months. In reality, it lasted all of three days.

Same goes when it comes to birthdays, engagements, proposals, wedding rings, gifts and more… if you have certain expectations of your partner, let them know. It’s only fair!

Letting Romance Slide

Sure, you’ve been together for years. You’ve seen each other at your worst, held each other’s hair back while throwing up into the toilet when you’re sick (or after a big night out), on the couch in trackies with unwashed hair, perhaps through childbirth. Perhaps you leave the bathroom door open.

All of which are no excuse to let the romance slide! Make an effort. Do it regularly. They don’t have to be grand gestures. Bring home a bunch of flowers. Switch off the TV and eat by candlelight at the dining table. Call from work and arrange to meet your partner at a restaurant, surprise them with tickets to a show, book a hotel room.

In short, stop every now and then and do something spontaneous for your sweetie that will blow them away and show them that you care. They deserve it! And so does your relationship.

Not Understanding the Needs of Different Personality Styles

We all need different things. Some people need lots of affection. Others need to spend quality time with their sweetie. Some need to feel looked after and some like small gifts and gestures to show that they’re loved.

Do you actually know what your partner’s Love Language is?

Find out, and use it to your advantage. It will make them happier and therefore you will be happier, and your relationship will feel more fulfilled.

These are only four common mistakes out of gosh-knows how many. Are you guilty of any of the above? Any I’ve left off that you’d like addressed?

I knew it! I’ve been saying it all along.

Says the Daily Mail in London:

“Half of men will upgrade a common cold to flu and describe headaches as a migraine to gain maximum sympathy.

They will also moan more than women when suffering a bug or virus.

This is despite the fact they catch fewer colds and flu each year – five compared with women’s average of seven.”

Certainly rings true for me – we’ve spoken before about Den and his Man-Colds. The worst of it is, he refuses to go to a doctor, happier instead to self-diagnose and then sit on the couch with a little silver bell, ringing for my attention when he needs his nose wiped and whatnot.

But I have another thing to put forward to you – men use this same talent of gross exaggeration in the opposite way as well. Den doesn’t usually cook in this house. For three years now, cooking has been mostly my domain. Sometimes I relish it, but lately I’ve lost my cooking mojo and happily left the task to Denis for a couple of weeks now to see how he would cope. He’s stepped up, but my Lord is it at a cost.

You see, every meal he makes – whether it be throwing hunks of meat into the slow cooker or whipping up a spag bog – has to be fawned over for at least 48 hours after the fact. How good it was. How great it tasted.

And yet, if I do the same I’m lucky to get a “tastes great” without fishing for one.

Anyone else find the same thing? Men and their exaggerating? Do women have an equivalent affliction I can’t think of right this second?

New York Times Magazine recently published this long piece on whether marriage is good for your health or not. Very early studies into the matter, circa 1858, concluded that marriage is a healthy estate and that single people died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts.

New, updated research is being carried out on the subject of marriage and health at the moment, with researchers finding that it is not simply the act of being married that ensures you better health, but whether the marriage is a happy one or not.

Says the article:

“While it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage.

Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all.

One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.”

So happy married people are better off, health-wise, than single people. But if you’re going to be in a bad marriage, you may as well be single for the sake of your health. And if you’ve gotten divorced once, the research suggests that we find that experience so stressful that it’s hard to recover from.

Sounds intense.

This research is all borne from the emerging area of science known as psychoneuroimmunology, which concerns the interplay between behavior, the immune and endocrine systems and the brain and nervous system. Spiritual types have been onto this “you are what you think” field for years, seems like science is catching up now.

A bad marriage can be as bad for your heart as a smoking habit. Quite literally, if you have your heart broken you won’t ever fully recover?

What do you think?

Instead of throwing him out, setting her lawyers on him or sobbing hysterically, Laura called bullshit.

What ensued was her husband going through a mid-life crisis and Laura giving him the space to do that in his own home. By letting him have his solitude, he worked through his issues in his own mind and came back to his family.

Laura’s initial article on the ordeal was published in the New York Times last year, causing great controversy along the way. Here is an excerpt:

“Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.”

Since then, the article has evolved into a book. Here is Laura talking about it on ABC News last week:

Is this method a revelation? Could more marriages have been saved with the same attitude? After all, in just about every argument there can come a point where you know you’ve gone too far, said too much, to ever reverse the situation. Could the same ring true with divorces?

Of course, every marriage and every break up is different, but what I love is that Laura believed in her husband enough to know that he was just freaking out. He got through it, but I wager that if she’d reacted – yelled, screamed, fought back – that we would be looking at just another divorce statistic rather than this book.

“My husband loves the middle of a quiche and I love the outside. He hates exercise, I love it. He knows everything there is about music, I know very little. Does that mean that we are incompatible or refreshingly different?

The fact that you may enjoy different ways of doing things to your partner really doesn’t matter, so long as you feel close. You will find that if you feel close to your partner, you will decide that you are compatible and in those moments that you feel less close, you will probably feel incompatible. How close you feel will depend on your mood.

No doubt, when my husband is in a good mood, he thinks I’m really loyal. In a bad mood, he probably thinks I’m stubborn. When I am in a good mood, my husband is an optimistic person. When I am in a bad mood, I can easily think he is unrealistic. In a bad mood, my husband probably thinks I am opinionated and in a good mood, he might think I’m expressive.”

Den and I are about as different as two people can be. And Sophie is absolutely right: Depending on my mood, the time of day and presumably whether Mercury is retrograde to Saturn or some such nonsense, I feel very differently about my husband.

He’s realistic, and then negative.
Loyal, and then stubborn.
Practical, but then nagging.

Sometimes, when I’m in a good mood I can’t possibly see how we could ever not get along, the two of us. It’s like a magic balance that we strike. Then when it’s all going bad I wonder how on earth I ever manage to put up with him.

Not that this is one-sided, it cuts both ways. I know he thinks my little quirks are cute – until they’re downright annoying. My naive optimism is no doubt refreshing, until then he suddenly thinks I’m a complete flake. I’m charmingly scatterbrained when he’s in a good mood, I’m downright messy and disorganised when he’s not.

The trick with being opposites is to constantly seek that balance between you. But it’s not always going to work out.

At least, when everything else goes to hell, we know that at our core we both want the same things from life, and morally speaking we are on exactly the same page. Everything else is just semantics and keeps us guessing, if nothing else.

Are you and your partner identical twins or so different it sometimes blows your mind?

Anyway, I was reminded of the days when he and I were first together. Being the vain creature that I am (well, if you’d seen my skin in those days you’d probably be on my side) I would wait until he was asleep to creep out and wash my make up off, then inevitably snap my eyes wide awake at some ridiculous hour of the morning and sneak again into the bathroom to touch up my face before slipping back into bed and reawaking a few hours later, supposedly “naturally gorgeous”. Ha.

How’s that for false advertising? The silly things we do. Anyone else guilty of the same? I’d wager money that there’s more than a handful of women out there who have done the same!

The divorce rate is insane, and divorces are easier and cheaper than ever to go through with.

Meanwhile, something like 40% of children are born out of wedlock, proving that we no longer need to be married to raise a family. In addition to that, the stigma of having children without marriage is long gone. Hell, you don’t even need a man to have a child anymore. You can do it on your own with enough money and courage.

What does this mean for the institute of marriage? Is it becoming unfashionable to be married?

I’m still collecting my thoughts on all this. The subject is huge, obviously. It’s a lot of sorting. I’m interested in everyone’s opinions on it. So please feel free to comment here.

Let’s start with this. If you’re married, why did you decide to get married? If you’re actively against marriage, why is that?

Plenty more posts to come in future weeks with musings about it… I’m fascinated with it at the moment.

I’m wearing a dress today that I adore. It’s just a cheap and cheerful that I picked up for practically nothing a few years ago, and every summer I traipse it out happily, loving the fun watermelon colour and the vintage-inspired lattice cut-outs.

I know for a fact that it was a good find because every time I wear it, at least one girl comes up to me on the street to tell me that they love it.

It’s one of those little numbers that I feel great in every time I slip it on. Great, until – I see the look on Den’s face.

Guys. They hate this dress. It’s a baby-doll style, which just doesn’t seem to translate when you have a Y-chromosome. We think: “feminine and floaty”, they think: “pregnant”.

Other lost in translation trends include any outfit from Carrie Bradshaw’s collection, harem pants, boyfriend jeans, maxi dresses and of course, high-waisted pants.

I own a pair of those too. And almost every guy I know (do they conference on this?) calls me “Harry High Pants” to my face when I wear them. I insist they’re “classic”, they insist they’re “80s”.

It’s a decision ladies need to make on a daily basis: to dress for the guys or to dress for the girls?

The debate is not a new one. Who are we looking to impress when it comes to our wardrobes? Rationality would tell me that I would most want to appeal to my husband. If I was single and looking for a relationship, I would probably want to be dressing for men too.

My outfit choices often say different.

Biology plays into it too. A recent study found that – consciously or not – women dress more provocatively when they are ovulating. Advertising your fertility is a biological phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom, only we use fashion instead of having our butts light up neon like baboon primates.

So why do so many women insist on following fashion trends, when the only reaction we seem to be getting from your average man is ridicule?

Then again, if we did leave our fashion choices to the whims of red-blooded, hetero Australian males, would we be condemning ourselves to a lifetime of tight dresses and high heels?

The good news is, the men may adapt before we have to. Daniel Dykes of Fashionising.com is one of Australia’s most fashionable straight men and a self-confessed harem-pant-lover. He credits the internet with bringing more highbrow fashion to Australia and thinks men will just have to get used to a new fashion aesthetic.

“As Australian men see more and more gorgeous women trying fashion-forward trends, their idea of what is sexy will eventually shift.”

Perhaps fashion is just an acquired taste?

I am fast learning that my husband is a creature of habit. He gets very comfortable with the things that he knows well. For example: All day every day, we hear the same four music tracks over and over and over and over…. and over… and over. Every few months he finds a new set of music tracks to play over and over and… well, you get the idea. He’s lucky the world has gone digital, if he were playing a cassette tape it would’ve broken by now from sheer use. If he were playing a CD, he’d blow up the player.

It’s not that I hate his taste in music – for the most part, I can tolerate it. The first hundred times or so, I barely notice it. Sometimes I even sing along. But (he’s playing it as I write this) by now, it just makes me want to stab myself in the ear with a pen to stop the noise.

He asked this morning if I’d prefer he wear headphones, which was very thoughtful and sweet of him. I think I now need to take him up on it.

Denis. Honey. I changed my mind. Please put your headphones on. (Speaking of headphones, how hot are the pictured ones from Swarovski Fashion?!)

What about you? Hate your partner’s music taste? Do they obsessively play the same stuff over and over? Is it a showdown for control of the sound system every day or do you plug in your own iPods and live in separate music worlds?