Wife Wants To Leave Her Husband After Finding Out What He Planned To Do With $8500 Cash He Found On The Ground
Respectfully, ma'am, this is absolutely not about the money.
fizkes | Shutterstock There's no denying that money can pull people apart, but you would hope that when it comes to a long-standing relationship, like a marriage, something like coming into an unexpected amount of cash wouldn't drive a wedge between a husband and wife.
Life is full of little moments that reveal big things, and often that process is extremely uncomfortable, especially when it comes to the people in our lives. Even when there are years of red flags, it's often some seemingly petty thing that pulls the wool off our eyes. Such was the case for one woman after seeing how her husband handled an unexpected wad of cash.
A woman wants to leave her husband over the way he handled $8500 he found on the ground.
The woman is so distraught over this incident that she wrote into Slate's "Dear Prudence" column for advice on the matter. It all began when her husband came home from the grocery store with an envelope filled with a huge stack of bills — $8,500 worth, to be exact.
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"He said he found it underneath the car next to him while he loaded the bags into the trunk of our car," she wrote, "and began eagerly going over all the possible things we could spend it on." But of course, there's only one problem: It wasn't his.
For her, this situation was shockingly black-and-white. That is so much money that its loss could be life-or-death for the rightful owner. So she immediately "stopped him and asked why he hadn’t turned it in," but he said there was "no way" he was parting with it because losing it was "their problem, not ours."
The money turned out to be an apartment deposit for someone desperate for a place to live.
It turns out the woman was right about the money. "I decided not to waste my time arguing with him," she wrote, and took the money to the local police station while he was at work. Sure enough, someone had already reported the money missing.
It was for three months' rent in advance plus deposit, which she said is a common demand from landlords in their area, and a tough one for many people to meet. When the person who lost it later contacted the woman, they explained that they would have ended up living in their car had she not turned the money over to the police.
She also learned that local law states that it is illegal to keep found money over $100. Had the owner not already reported it missing, the police would have run ads for 90 days searching for the envelope. After that period, it would have gone to whoever had found it. It turns out "that's their problem, not ours" isn't actually legally true where they live, not that it would have made any difference to her husband.
This couple's disconnect over this issue hints at deeper problems.
Just like the fight about the dishes is never really about the dishes, this conflict doesn't seem to have much at all to do with the actual money, but rather a fundamental disconnect in values. And that's before we even get into the fact that her husband is now sleeping on the couch over this, of his own volition.
As "Dear Prudence's" Jenée Desmond-Harris put it, "things don’t seem to be going too well between the two of you" because "at every turn in this story… you were completely misaligned." And what most stuck out to me while reading her story was what most stuck out to Desmond-Harris, too. This woman wrote about this conflict with a bizarrely blasé tone given the apparent seriousness of the conflict itself. She's considering divorcing this guy, after all!
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We can debate the "finders keepers, losers weepers" aspect all day long, but that won't even come close to what's actually going on here. These two people are operating on such wildly different wavelengths that it really makes you wonder if they even share any common ground anymore.
Or, to put an even finer point on it: It makes you wonder if, as so often happens, this marriage has already been over for quite some time in all ways besides the official, but the two people in it just aren't willing to confront this reality.
This woman is unambiguously lucid about what her morals and ethics are, so the real question here is not who's right or wrong, but rather, as Desmond-Harris put it, "can you apply that same clear-eyed analysis to your marriage?" It sure sounds like it could use the consideration.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
