I CAME home one morning from a tennis game to find a crying relative because she felt betrayed by her husband whom she caught trying to hide a few hundred pesos inside one of his law books. Where’s the money now, I asked her. With me, she replied. There you go, I told her. Stop crying because you still won.
The husband would later tell me that the money was extra income and he wanted to keep it for himself as additional allowance since the amount that his wife gave him out of his pay envelope wasn’t enough to buy a round of drinks with his friends.
That was many years ago. The couple lived perhaps not too happily as fairy tales go but they lived together as man and wife and raised children who were a credit to them. He died not too long ago.
Arguments over money are a common occurrence among couples but they manage to get over them most of the time without anyone having to invoke or seek guidance from the law. So it comes as a surprise that some genius in the House would propose a law that, if it had been in effect many years ago, would have sent my relative to jail.
How far should we allow the law to intrude into our private lives? The honorable Fidel Nograles does not seem to care about any limit; the State has to intervene so that there will be no doubt as to how much a wife can retain out of her husband’s earnings.
Maybe, the Church should stop the practice of giving arrhae in weddings. The giving of the coins is supposed to symbolize the promise of the husband to provide for his family and at the same time recognize the status of the wife as the keeper of the purse.
Nograles’s bill has the effect of demoting the wife to the status of a deposit box. She no longer has control over the family’s finances. She cannot even ask to keep her husband’s ATM card because that would constitute economic abuse which is presumably a crime under the bill.
The bill seeks to expand the Violence Against Women and their Children Act (VAWC) Act of 2004 to “promote mainstream gender equality,” according to its author. This is an obvious reference to the perceived bias against abused husbands in the VAWC law.
The intention may be good but Nograles is dead wrong in focusing on ATM cards and pay envelopes instead of real instances of psychological and physical abuse committed against men.
The worse part is that in prying into the couple’s financial relations, he is taking excitement out from marriage.