It’s the dream of escape that makes couples keep their finances secret from each other

Remember that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when Andy, the jailed banker, hears Hadley, the vicious chief screw, complaining about the tax he’s likely to incur on a legacy from his dead brother?

Knowing a thing or two about fiscal strategy, Andy asks him (unwisely), “Do you trust your wife?” before suggesting he makes a tax-avoiding, one-off, marital gift that would mean the truncheon-wielding sadist paid not a nickel to the taxman.

For a scene consisting mostly of one man explaining to another man the benefits of monetary transfer, it’s full of tension and violence – and therefore fits nicely with the findings of a new survey by the Prudential insurance company into the financial lives of middle-aged couples.

The survey revealed that, in one in seven couples, one partner conceals details of their cash arrangements from the other. Those interviewed cheerfully admitted lying to their spouses about what they earned, how much they had stashed away in a savings account, and how big their pension pot was. Somebody computed that the average secret stash of money in these households is £20,800.

The point of the survey was clearly to enable the Prudential to pontificate about how couples, were they to pool their resources, would be liable to all manner of tax advantages. To the idle reader, however, the real fascination of this survey is the world of duplicity it managed to uncover.

Some people admitted they needed the money to pay for the upkeep of another spouse or family. Some said they couldn’t trust their partner not to spend the family’s cash like a drunken sailor on shore leave. An amazing number assured the Pru that they were concealing the truth about their bank accounts because they were planning a lovely event for their other half: a “dream holiday,” a “new car,” a “family surprise.”

Yeah right. The most likely family surprise on which the money would be spent seems to be the one involving the words, “Darling I’m leaving you.” A hefty percentage of respondents said they were squirreling the cash away as a contingency, “in case we split up.”

Nostalgists will despair of the modern world, in which British couples’ dreams of their marital future now factor in the likelihood that it will end sooner or later. They may look back to a time when middle-class married couples routinely opened a joint bank account and could see every surge and blip of income and expenditure in their monthly bank statements. Do couples do that any more? Has online banking, with its passwords and security codes, made couples paranoid that nobody – not even their beloved spouse – should know their financial business? Adding to the uncertainty of how they’ll fare when their children leave home, now that one spouse in four joins the ranks of the “silver splitters”?

I’m not sure we should despair just yet about the condition of British marriage. More than a quarter of the cash-concealers claimed they simply wanted to maintain their “independence.” I think this is an existential position. It doesn’t mean they are, or want to be, less attached to their spouses and families or even jobs; they just suffer from a free-floating, 21-century angst that everything seems to be going wrong – terrorist attack, climate meltdown, banking collapse, global disease, migrant invasion, species extinction, family disintegration – and want to keep a sense that they can somehow exist away from it all.

The money they’ve squirrelled away is what in vulgar circles is called a Fuck-You Fund, that will, if necessary, provide some magical spaceship/jetpack/teleporter to whizz them away from the collapsing edifice they’ve built around them for 20 or 30 years, and let them start afresh in whatever virgin territory they land in.

We all have dreams of leaving. We all have a little Bluebeard’s cupboard in our imaginations, where we keep secret desires and fantasies that aren’t available for the scrutiny of others, no matter how close. I think the hidden stash of capital, to which so many people have confessed, is an emblem of our dark, subconscious impulse to vamoose, to kick over the traces, to transgress. And no amount of blather about advantageous tax arrangements will ever wrest it from our grasp.