When times are tough and wages are frozen, relationships often bear the brunt.The Mail&Guardian spoke to three couples to find out how they were affected by the economic recession, and how they got through it.
Brand researcher Kyle Findlay and mobile phone content manager Katie Edge, based in Cape Town, have been dating for six years. They moved in together in 2007, while both in their mid-twenties, just as the recession was beginning to heat up.
With Findlay’s company’s clients mostly international, his business suffered. In the meantime, Edge was still receiving her raises and bonuses, and was bored at work.
“I’d come home and be very stressed everyday,” says Findlay. “I had gone through two years with decent bonuses. Then suddenly my salary was frozen and there were no bonuses. There was no travel and the job was less exciting.” He says that with a buildup of flotsam of angry people in the company, everyone’s mood took a turn for the worse. “Everything felt harder, even if our expenses had not changed dramatically,” he says.
And it didn’t just stay at the office. Findlay would come out irritable and anxious, while Edge would seek conversation and company.
“You can’t just shrug off the days stresses,” says Findlay. “It definitely overlaps into your relationship and your home life.”
Finances
To save money, Findlay and Edge created a system where they have a joint bank account for household goods.
“It removed the stress from our lives and our relationship,” says Edge. “When we went out for dinner or did shopping, we put it on that account. That way no one feels hard done by. Keeping score is painful.”
Moving in together under a cloud of recession meant the couple had to deal with financial issues head on.
“It was harrowing, but it was trial by fire,” says Findlay. “So it galvanised that aspect of our relationship. How we deal with money is set in stone now and we don’t have to worry about that — If we’d been in a scenario where we had vastly diverging values, it would have been difficult. But we are similar in our approach to money.”
“For example, I’m not a big shopper,” says Edge. “That’s less stress on Kyle.”
Findlay adds that he feels that the recession strengthened their relationship. “We had to give each other support to get through it,” he says.
Frozen salary
Another couple who came out of the recession with heads held high, are copywriter Amanda Whitehouse and digital platforms manager Alistair Fearweather of Johannesburg.
“My salary was frozen for two years,” says Whitehouse. “Before then I’d had a Christmas bonus and a 14% increase every year. Then suddenly nothing, and people in the company were being retrenched.”
She says this affected her sense of self worth, because she was used to being rewarded for her hard work. “It made us very bitter at work. I was very depressed and miserable all the time.”
“The stress definitely affected us both,” says Fairweather. “I just tried to be supportive.” He became the one to pay for dinners out and the household budget was readjusted so that he contributed more.
But sensibilities meant the couple didn’t struggle. They had been saving for a long time and had not been splashing out on luxuries, like expensive cars or a pool.
“We were lucky because we didn’t have any debt,” says Fairweather. “Because we were more sensible before, that’s what helped us through.”
Type of job
They say they were also fortunate to have jobs in media, where “having a nice car and house is not as important as if you were working in banking”.
Fairweather says that it’s important to be able to talk about money in a relationship. “If I land myself in a hole, I don’t like to tell Amanda about it,” he says. “We should be able to talk about money, we shouldn’t be scared of it. Talking about money is like talking about safe sex.”
But the recession didn’t turn out well for everybody. Forty-nine year old salon assistant Zodwa Mosoeu and her husband Joe, of Soweto, took it really hard. Joe, formerly a building contractor, lost his job.
“I lost my clientele,” says Joe. “Most of the people that gave me jobs, lost their own jobs.”
That was two years ago. When Joe lost his job, he fell into a deep depression, and had to be hospitalised for months at a time. He has not been working since. The couple have two children, one of which is still in school. Zodwa is the only income earner in the house.
“It’s difficult, but the most important thing is to have faith in each other,” says Zodwa. “We’re not the fighting type. We survived and we’re still quite a close family.” She added their son’s good sense of humour was what kept them “on [their] toes”.
There were also those who barely felt the recession at all.
From those took a bad fall, to those who hardly saw it go by, the recession certainly happened. It went beyond office walls and into bedrooms. But couples got through it, each in their own way. And at the end of the day, love beat the hard times, hands down.