Hi all,
My (26f) bf (27m) and I have been together two years. We live together. We split all bills.
Two days ago, he came home with a gaming monitor he never mentioned purchasing, much less preordering like he said he did. Not only do we not have space for it currently, but he recently paid rent a week late because his dad had a vehicle breakdown and needed a tow.
I found out that this monitor is around $1k and was something gamers anticipated for months.
Is it “controlling” to expect us to discuss major purchases? It’s “his” money and “his” item, but this happened not long after I suffered from him paying rent late. The purchase also requires that we figure out arranging the house in a way that accommodates the monitor (some reconfiguring required.) So this decision affects me too.
Anyway—am I’m being overbearing to wish this was discussed first? Or is that totally reasonable? How do you discuss your financial decisions?
TLDR— He preordered something for $1k and just showed up with it (and nowhere to put it) one day instead of discussing it first. Should this kind of decision be made jointly?
5 comments
Personally if I was living with a significant other I’d let them know I was planning to make a purchase like that. More so just to be communicative about it. And especially since it would impact your space with rearranging things. It doesn’t so much come down to asking permission to buy something as it is just to be polite and have a discussion about it.
So he was unable to pay his portion of the bills on time because of this purchase?
Then yes, you have a reason to be upset.
Why not have a discussion about how your personal spending should not prevent joint bills from being paid and what kind of agreement you can come up with together?
NTA. Talk with him. Explain you this has made you feel. Key words here are “I” and “feel” when you’re talking to him. If you call him irresponsible or anything else, your point will be lost.
I would say that until you share finances/financial goals, you can’t really say anything about the purchase itself, except in the ways it directly impacts you. If you haven’t been impacted by his financial issues before, then this pre-order arriving on the heels of his dad’s issue was just an accident of timing, not a pattern. Now, sharing space with a behemoth of a monitor, that’s something that impacts your day-to-day, and I’d be annoyed that he hadn’t brought that up before/didn’t have a plan for where it would go. But if he’s excited about it, and, again, if this is not part of a larger pattern of him being inconsiderate, I wouldn’t harp on it too much.