Rima Grace

When I was like in fifth grade, I used to carpool with a neighbor.

And I remember once her mom pulled into a gas station and then sprinted into the convenience store.

And she came back with a bunch of snacks, bag of chips, maybe some juice.

And she handed some of it to us in the back seat.

And then she looked at her daughter and whispered, we don't need to tell dad about this.

It was a small thing, but I think when you're a kid, you can register when something feels off, even if you don't really know why.

Kind of like hearing a note that's out of tune.

Your ear catches it, even if you know nothing about music.

Who knows what was behind that comment, but the story I tell myself about it is that my friend's mom probably didn't want to get into an argument about it with her husband.

Maybe he's a little stricter when it comes to spending money.

Maybe it was just easier to keep it a secret.

I'm Rima Grace and welcome to This is Uncomfortable, a show from Marketplace about life and how money messes with it.

We are now a weekly podcast, which gives us a chance this February to spend some real time on a topic that comes up over and over in my conversations with people, money and love.

It can be hard sometimes figuring out what's yours, what's shared, what we owe each other.

So this week we're asking, is it ever okay to keep financial secrets when you're in a relationship?

Because sometimes little privacy starts to look a lot like a secret.

And secrets, especially the money kind, have a way of becoming problems.

There's this park that I often go to by my house, and one afternoon I walked up there with my recorder and just asked people what they thought.

Many of them were hanging out on this large patch of green grass, reading or chatting with friends.

Felt a little bad bombarding strangers with intimate financial questions at 2 p.m.