Ask Eric: Secret expenses strain marriage

Dear Eric: I have been married to a wonderful woman for more than 50 years. About five years ago, I discovered that she spends more than $4,000 a year on vitamins and supplements. She hid these purchases from me by putting a small amount of the bill on a credit card and paying the rest in cash.

She buys them from her chiropractor. I knew she went to the chiropractor about once a month, but I had no idea about the amount she was spending.

I feel it is unethical for a doctor to recommend supplements and then sell them to clients. I have tried to get her to reduce her intake, or shop around for better prices or get a second opinion about her needs. She refuses and tells me the guy only sells natural products that are the best.

I would like your thoughts. I am ready to go my separate way over this.

Eric says: I agree that this chiropractor’s methods seem more than suspect. If your wife was able to buy these supplements someplace else, it would be a different story.

However, with regard to your marriage, I’m going to play chiropractor’s advocate for a second. It’s telling that she hid these purchases — it indicates she knows they were suspicious and that should be cause for concern. But I’m not sure it’s cause for the dissolution of your marriage. It doesn’t seem to have made a major dent in your budget. So, perhaps the issue is the deception and not the expense.

The bottom line: you and your wife should be honest with each other. At the same time, you should ask yourself whether this admittedly strange habit is worth throwing away 50 years of marriage.

My husband wasn’t allowed to meet her until she was nine, and I met her when she was 12. She is in her mid-40s now and has two young adult children whom I adore; they call me Grandma.

They live three hours away, but we can’t visit them because I no longer drive and my husband is terminally ill. When they visit us (very occasionally). she continuously makes very nasty comments to me. I don’t enjoy the visits anymore, and I have to lock rooms off because she thinks it’s OK to take things from our home.

They are planning to come in a couple of weeks, and she has told my husband that she wants me to leave when she comes to visit. This is not acceptable. This is my home, and I’m my husband’s caregiver. I want to see the grandkids, but I can’t do that and avoid her.

Should I meet with them briefly, then excuse myself and go into another room? Or do I keep enduring her rude and nasty comments?

Eric says: While it’s not appropriate for her to ask that you leave the house when she visits, it’s going to be hard for you to have a relationship with her children without some repair in the relationship that you have with her.

Even though she’s an adult now, the roots of this relationship began when she was young. She needs to be responsible for her actions as an adult, but you can help reframe them in your mind by remembering that some of this is rooted in childhood pain.