Yeah, I gotta say, as someone who's been both the higher and now lower earner in an LTR, this is the kind of thing that pretty clearly illustrated their lack of communication. Like, they clearly got married very young, and it'd be interesting to know, in the fic, why exactly it is they got married so young. I also have zero idea about how divorce would work for a German and a Canadian who got married in Germany and are living in Canada, in terms of distribution of assets, but it seems like, for as sensitive as Chance was about money ... they should have had a pre-nup or something.

I also think that a lot of Chance's angsting was basically over the fact that he didn't want to be the 'woman' in a income-lopsided relationship. Like, he didn't want to sit in the box with WAGs (which, whatever, I imagine a lot of family members get cycled through that, since it'd be different from a family room), etc. I feel like that part didn't get examined at all, and that there wasn't much difference between the characters being young and naive and the narrative being young and naive.

That said, being married absolutely doesn't mean pooling assets or having a joint bank account or even owning property or filing taxes together. It can mean all those things, but doesn't necessarily have to - what it probably needs is the communication about those things, which this fic didn't do a good job of showing.