When one of you comes from a wealthy family and the other does not

The first Sunday lunch at his parents’. A white tablecloth, three glasses in front of every plate, a wine his father says a few sentences about before pouring it. She sits up straight and watches which fork she picks up. Halfway through the soup, his mother asks kindly: “And what do your parents do?” She answers that her father worked in a factory and her mother stayed at home. A short pause falls over the table — perhaps only a second, but she will carry it with her for years. In the car on the way home, she cries. He does not understand: “But they were perfectly nice.”

They are both right. His parents were nice. And she went through something he could not see, because at that table he was sitting at home. A moment like this is often the first sign of a difference they will one day have to name: differences in background within a couple. It is not only about how much money each family had. It is about two different worlds in which each of them learned what is normal, what is polite, what is safe and what it means to be enough.

In this post I write about couples in which one partner comes from a wealthy family and the other does not. About how the difference shows itself, why it can almost never be settled in a single conversation, what shame has to do with it, and how a couple can draw a third, shared map out of two.

Differences you do not see until you live together

When two people fall in love, a difference in background often seems attractive or irrelevant. She admires his ease; he admires her resourcefulness. Only when they start living, planning, buying, celebrating and raising children together does it turn out that they have different answers to questions they did not even know existed.

For her book The Power of the Past, the sociologist Jessi Streib conducted in-depth interviews with 32 couples in which one partner had grown up in a middle- or upper-class family and the other in a working-class one. You might expect them to argue mainly about money. She found something else: the partners differed in how they approached almost everything — money, work, leisure, emotions and parenting. Those from wealthier families more often managed things: they planned, organised and thought ahead. Those from less wealthy families more often let things flow: they lived more in the moment, spontaneously, with more trust that things would somehow work out.

Streib stresses that neither style is better. Both are adaptations to the environment a person grew up in. If you had enough, you could learn to plan far ahead. If you grew up with uncertainty, you learned that plans are often in vain and that you need to be able to live with what there is. The problem arises when partners read the other’s style as a flaw of character — “you’re irresponsible”, “you’re obsessed with control” — rather than as a language learned at home.

It is not only about money

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the word habitus for what we carry from the environment we grew up in: a set of habits, tastes, ways of holding the body and things taken for granted that we do not choose but absorb. Habitus shows in how you sit down at a table, how you speak to a waiter, what feels like a “normal” present, whether you find it awkward to ask for help, and whether you take it for granted that someone will help you.

Psychologists who study social class have described another difference. Michael Kraus and his colleagues find that people from less affluent backgrounds more often explain events through circumstances and relationships, while people from wealthier backgrounds more often explain them through the inner qualities of the individual. Nicole Stephens, Hazel Markus and L. Taylor Phillips describe how the environment we grow up in shapes a more independent or a more interdependent view of the self: whether the goal is to stand out and express yourself, or to be reliable and adjust to others.

In a couple, this means the partners can see the same situation quite differently. When his father pays for a holiday, he sees a kind gesture. She may see a debt that will one day have to be repaid, or a humiliation, because she could not have afforded it herself. When she sends some money to her parents every month, she sees ordinary solidarity. He may see a family that expects too much of her. Neither is seeing it wrongly. Each is looking through their own lenses.

Shame on both sides of the table

In couples from different backgrounds, shame almost always appears — and often in both partners, only with a different face in each.

The partner from the less wealthy family may carry shame that does not look like shame, but like oversensitivity, pride or tiredness. A feeling of having to prove all the time that they are good enough. Of having to know which fork is the right one. Of not being allowed to show that something surprised or embarrassed them. When their partner’s parents give them something, they may feel indebted; when they turn something down, they fear looking ungrateful. Sometimes they are ashamed of their own family — and then ashamed of being ashamed of it.

The partner from the wealthy family often has a different burden. They may feel guilt about a privilege they did not choose, and awkwardness at having had it easier. They may fear that their partner sees not who they are but what they have. They may feel torn between loyalty to their family and the wish to shield their partner from its expectations. And sometimes they do not even realise how much they take for granted — until their partner points it out, which can hurt.

The difference between guilt and shame matters here. Guilt relates to an action and can be repaired. Shame relates to who you are, and it wants to hide. You can read more in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters. When a couple begins to recognise shame in each other as shame — and not as an attack or as condescension — the tone of their conversations often softens noticeably.

In-laws and unwritten expectations

A difference in background rarely stays between the two partners. Both families of origin enter the relationship too — with all their rules that nobody has ever said out loud.

In a wealthier family these may be expectations about where the couple will live, which school the children will go to, how holidays are celebrated, who comes to lunch and how one should dress. Help is often generous — a flat, childcare, a holiday — but it sometimes comes with invisible strings: whoever pays also has a say. In a less wealthy family the expectations may be different: that the child who has “made it” will not change, will help out, will not forget where they come from. Sometimes a quiet reproach comes with it: “So now you think you’re better than us.”

The partner who has “crossed over” into another world is thus often torn between two loyalties. The partner who has stayed in their own does not always understand why the other tries so hard to please both sides. I have written in more detail about how a couple can set boundaries with both families without losing anyone in In-laws and boundaries: families of origin in a relationship.

The key is that the partner from the wealthy family speaks to their own parents themselves. When a mother-in-law says something hurtful to the partner from a humbler background and her son or daughter stays silent, that partner feels alone twice over: once in front of the mother-in-law, and again in front of the person who should be standing beside them.

What relational family therapy says about it

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we start from the idea that partners unconsciously bring the emotional atmospheres of their families into the relationship. Christian Gostečnik writes about how we often choose exactly the partner with whom something that remained unfinished in us can be played out. I have written more about this in Why we choose partners who remind us of our parents.

In couples from different backgrounds, this is sometimes very visible. Someone who grew up with constant uncertainty may unconsciously look to a wealthier partner for the security that was missing at home. Someone who grew up in a cool, orderly but emotionally empty home may look to a partner from a humbler background for the warmth and directness they missed. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is good to know, because the very quality that was attractive at the start can, over the years, begin to feel like a threat: his security becomes “control”, her warmth becomes “chaos”.

Bowen’s concept of differentiation helps here. A differentiated person stays connected to their family without being trapped in its rules. They can value what they brought from home and still choose differently. In a couple from different backgrounds, this means neither asks the other to give up their world, and neither insists that their own world is the only right one. What we carry from our family of origin is also the subject of Emotional baggage from your family of origin: what we carry into our relationships.

How the difference shows up in arguments

Arguments in such couples rarely revolve around background itself. They revolve around concrete things beneath which the difference hides:

• Presents. How much is “appropriate” to spend on a child’s birthday, what to buy the parents for Christmas, whether an expensive present is an expression of love or of showing off.
• Help from parents. Whether accepting help with buying a flat is natural or humiliating, and what else is bought along with the flat.
• Rest and work. Whether a holiday is something planned months ahead or something you allow yourself when you can. Whether rest is earned or simply taken.
• Parenting. How many activities, how much freedom, which school, what a child “needs”.
• Money in the relationship. Who has more say in decisions when one partner brings much more into the relationship. There will be more on this in Money and power in a couple: when one partner earns most.

In each of these arguments it is easy for the partners not to be talking about what they think they are talking about. An argument about a child’s present can really be an argument about whether the child will grow up in his world or hers. And because that question is painful for both, it is easier to shout about the price of a bicycle.

What the conversation might sound like

Take a couple who have just argued because his parents want to pay for a private nursery. Later that evening they come back to it (a composite, not a real person):

“I don’t understand why you were so angry. Mum only wanted to help.”
“I know she wanted to help. But once again everything was already arranged before I’d said a word.”
“You could have said no.”
“How am I supposed to say no? Then I’m the one who won’t give our child something better. And the one who can’t pay for it herself.”
“Nobody said that.”
“No. But that’s how I feel. Every time.”
A pause. “I didn’t know it was like that for you.”

This conversation does not decide whether the child will go to the private nursery. But it does something more important: it moves them from the question of who is right to the question of what is happening inside each of them. He learns that there is shame behind her anger. She learns that he had not seen it. A new decision can grow out of this — perhaps the same one, perhaps a different one, but a shared one.

It is worth noticing that in a conversation like this, neither gives up their world. He does not condemn his mother, and she does not demand that they refuse the help. But for the first time, both see that they have been reading the same situation in two different languages all along.

Exercise: a map of two homes

This exercise helps make the difference visible before it turns into another argument. Set aside a quiet hour for it.

1. Each of you writes down five unwritten rules of your home. About money, presents, help, work, rest, feelings. For example: “We don’t talk about money at the table”, “You never turn down help”, “Whoever rests is lazy”.
2. Read your rules to each other. The listener does not comment, but only asks: “What was it like growing up with that rule?”
3. Each of you marks which rules you want to keep and which you would like to leave behind. You do not decide about the other’s rules.
4. Find one rule that is similar in both homes. You often find it exactly where you expected the biggest difference — for example, that both families value reliability, only they express it differently.
5. Write down one new, shared rule for your home. Small and concrete: “We discuss larger gifts from our parents between ourselves first, and only then reply.”

The exercise does not erase the differences. But it helps you start seeing them as two maps that can be laid side by side, rather than as two truths between which you must choose.

Where this view falls short

A difference in background is a powerful lens, but it is not the only one. I want to be honest about its limits.

Not every argument is about class. Two people from exactly the same environment can argue about the same things. If you put everything down to background, you can overlook personal differences, old wounds or simple tiredness. Background explains a lot, but not everything.

A difference is no excuse for control. If one partner uses money or family power to restrict the other, controls their spending, takes away their independence or humiliates them because of where they come from, this is no longer a difference in style; it can become economic abuse. In that case the first step is safety — in Slovenia, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence is 080 11 55, and in an emergency you can call 113 or 112 (in Slovenia).

Some questions belong with other professionals. How to arrange assets, what to put in a contract or how to divide an inheritance are legal and financial questions for which you need the right experts. Therapy can help with how you talk about these things, but not with what is legally or financially wise.

Sometimes a difference is just a difference. Not every disagreement needs to be “worked through”. Some couples simply accept that one of them will always want to plan and the other to improvise — and laugh about it.

How therapy can help

In couples therapy we explore together what each partner brings from their family, how these two legacies meet, and where they get stuck. The goal is not for anyone to be proved right, or for one partner to adapt to the other’s world, but for the couple to build something third — a home that is a copy of neither family of origin.

A longer session can also help here: A Look into the Past, which lasts 90 minutes and in which we draw a genogram together — a map of the family across several generations. When a couple sees on paper how money, work, pride and shame were handled in his family and in hers, it often becomes clear for the first time that they are not the only ones speaking in their arguments.

For many couples from different backgrounds, becoming independent from their parents is also an important theme — especially when one partner’s family still supports them strongly. I have written about this in Between 20 and 35: why this is the key time for becoming independent from your parents. I also work with English-speaking clients, so you are welcome to get in touch in English.

What to remember

• Differences in background within a couple show not only in money but in time, work, feelings, presents and parenting.
• Jessi Streib’s research points to two styles — managing and letting things flow — both of which are adaptations to an environment, not flaws of character.
• Shame often appears in both partners, only in a different form.
• The partner from the wealthy family should speak to their own parents themselves and stand beside their partner.
• The goal is not for one to take over the other’s world, but to build a third home of your own together.