What money has to do with love

Valentine’s Day has been and gone - a relief for some, perhaps. But February’s real gift - the one that lasts longer than the bunch of roses - might be a conversation you’re yet to have.

You may have come across the concept of love languages. Author Gary Chapman identified five distinct ways that people express and receive love: words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, physical touch, and gifts. The core insight - backed up by relationship therapists and reviewed in detail by sites such as Mindbodygreen - is that we tend to express care in the way we most want to receive it. Which means two people can genuinely love each other and still leave the other feeling ‘unseen’, because they’re communicating in entirely different ways.

It’s not a magic formula - the theory has its critics - and no framework can do the work that honest conversation requires. But as a way of thinking about how we connect (and where we miss each other) it can be useful. It also points to something that doesn’t make Chapman’s official list, probably because it’s the most awkward one: honest, open conversations about money.

Not the transactional kind, as in who’s paying the electricity bill, but the deeper kind. The kind that covers what you’ve built, what you want to do with it, what matters to you, and what you want to happen when you’re no longer here.

That conversation, in most families, never happens. This is completely understandable, but the cost of that silence can be higher than most people realise.

When silence speaks

This recent piece in Fortune says that in families the hardest conversations are rarely about what’s being said - they’re about everything that exists underneath that: the unspoken expectation; the old disappointments; the assumptions that have quietly hardened into beliefs.

This is especially true when it comes to inheritance. People assume things – if there’s no direct information, they fill in the gaps. But the problem with this is that people don’t fill gaps with logic; they fill them with fear. So someone who doesn’t know how the estate is divided and feels they’ve received less might assume they’ve been treated unfairly, or that their sibling is the favourite.

There’s now a practical urgency to having these types of conversations, as well as an emotional one because the inheritance tax (IHT) landscape is changing. From April 2027, pensions will no longer sit outside your estate - a significant shift that could change the planning picture for many families who want to mitigate their IHT bill and pass on as much of their wealth as they can to their loved ones. Not everyone wants to plan this way - some clients are entirely at peace with leaving a generous tax bill – but what matters is that you’ve made a conscious decision rather than drifted into one. And that once you’ve made a decision, that you’ve spoken to the people involved - partners, children, sometimes wider family.

The love language of legacy

Money has its own love languages, even if we don't call them that. Some people show love through financial gifts - paying for university, helping with a house deposit. Others show it through security - creating a will, putting protection in place. Others through time: sitting down, explaining, involving the next generation in what's been built and why.

None of these is wrong. But they can create confusion when people don't know which language they're speaking. A parent who has quietly restructured their estate to minimise tax may feel they've done something deeply loving. Their adult children, never having been told, may feel excluded - or entitled to something they don't fully understand.

So how do you actually have the conversation?

The Fortune piece offers three useful rules: take a beat before reacting; stress-test what you're about to say (do I need to say it, now, in this way?); and keep to your values rather than being blown about by the emotion of the moment.

I'd add one more: don't wait until you have all the answers. The goal isn't a boardroom presentation - it's an opening. Some families find it easier to start with values rather than numbers. What did we want to build? What do we hope our children learn from it? Numbers follow values, and that conversation tends to be less charged than one about who gets what.

So when? Well now is as good a time as any. If you've been meaning to schedule a 'money date' - a deliberate, unhurried conversation about where things stand – better sooner than later.

I like to think that imperfect communication is better than none, and that any conversation is better than no conversation. Every month that passes without one is another month of assumptions filling in where clarity could be.

It's funny to think that the most loving thing you can do with your money might not be how you spend it. It might actually be how clearly you talk about it.

If you'd like to start that conversation - or continue one that's already underway – please get in touch.