Money, Honey : It’s a Touchier Subject Than Sex. It’s the Root of All Marital Conflict. It’s Modern Finance.

“WE NEED TO TALK about money,” says my husband. I clench my fists and begin to hyperventilate. Duke and I have a modern attitude about finances: We don’t trust each other. Does anyone?

“Are you free Monday night?” he asks.

“I can’t fight Monday night,” I reply. “I’m on deadline.” The last thing I need to think about is how much we spent on Christmas and how much we’re going to have to spend on taxes.

“We’re just going to balance our checkbook and pay some bills,” he assures me. “We’re not going to fight.”

I want to believe him. But when I think back on the arguments that we’ve had since we got married, it seems as if every one began as some petty monetary crisis. There was the brawl over whether our food budget was expected to cover Milk Bones for my pugs. There was the skirmish over how I could pay 75 cents for a can of Diet Coke when Vons was selling six-packs for $1.29.

There was the battle over why two people who had already made the commitment to share their lives could not commit to sharing a checking account.

“Show me a couple who’s been together for longer than three months who doesn’t have a conflict about money and I’ll show you a his-and-hers crypt at Forest Lawn,” says Duke.

Experts agree. “People are going to argue about money,” says Constance Ahrons, associate director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at USC. “It doesn’t make much difference whether money is tight or not. People are going to fight about money anyway, especially if their values are different.”

How different are our values? Let me put it like this. My mother’s motto was: “The best is none too good.” Duke’s father taught him that he would go to hell if he paid retail.

“We’ve gotten much better about money in the last year,” Duke reminds me.

This is true. We no longer go to war over sums under $25. We opened a joint checking account for household expenses. We saved for vacations. We even filed a joint tax return. Still, none of these improvements were made without raising our voices.

“Money is probably the major marital problem,” says Ahrons. “It’s harder to talk about than sex.”

Actually, money, like sex, is only difficult to discuss with one’s partner. It’s quite a popular topic of conversation among friends. My friend Claire, for example, is annoyed because her husband has a strange concept of what is and is not economical. “Fred has no problem going to a restaurant and spending $35 apiece,” she complains. “But let one head of 79-cent lettuce go bad in the refrigerator, and it’s a whole different thing. He goes insane.

“We split most general amounts of money. But I have to go through the phone bill and highlight every call that I’ve made. It’s easier than hearing about it. I don’t want him to say, ‘Don’t call information,’ so I write him a check.”

Monica would like to be able to write her husband a check. Jack just announced that he doesn’t know how she’s going to afford to go on their nine-day ski trip to Sun Valley.

“I stood there dumbstruck,” Monica reported when we met for lunch the other day. “And then Jack said in a very smug voice that he can afford to go.”

“But you’re married,” I argued, even though I realize that “for richer and for poorer” is a purely academic part of the marriage vow for many double-income couples. “Why doesn’t he just pay for you? Or lend you the money?”

“He feels that if he makes things easy for me he’s setting a precedent that he really doesn’t want to set,” Monica said with a sigh. “And I agree that it’s very important for me to be contributing half, so I’m my own worst enemy.”

“In theory, keeping money separate keeps you from fighting about how you spend it,” says Ahrons. “But what started out as a system to preserve equality and independence has sort of run away with itself. It’s gotten to a point where couples have arguments like, ‘You owe me 17 cents for postage stamps.’ ”

And their accountants find themselves acting as referees. “More and more couples are telling me their woes,” says Joel Lewinson, our long-suffering CPA. “They spill their guts out. Wine, women, whatever. I’m like their financial shrink.”

But he doesn’t object. “Any accountant can put numbers together,” says Joel. “To plan ahead, you want to know what everyone’s doing.”

Often he is the first to know. “I’ll be sitting down with a couple doing the sale of stocks,” he says. “And the husband will turn to the wife and say, ‘I didn’t know you bought that.’ Or there’s interest from a savings account that the wife doesn’t know exists. It’s a very trying time when couples come in and get their taxes done.”

What’s especially trying? “When I have to go through mental gyrations and do the return as if they were single and as if they were joint so they each contribute their own fair share,” he says. I shuffle my feet guiltily.

Sometimes I think that life is easier for one-income couples. But recently my brother and sister-in-law came to visit from the East Coast. Bobby believes that it is his duty as a husband and father to be the breadwinner, and Robbie is happy to have bread won for her. As part of their official tour of Los Angeles, I took my sister-in-law to visit my favorite soothsayer. “How much does your fortuneteller charge?” my brother asked nervously while she was having her reading.

“Fifteen dollars,” I said.

“Would she take a bribe?” he asked. “I’d give her a grand if she’d look into her crystal ball and tell Robbie: ‘I see that you spend too much money. You don’t appreciate how hard your husband works. You really don’t need to move to a bigger house.’ ”

Curiously, it turned out that Robbie had already received divine financial guidance. She returned from the reading clutching a malachite egg. “It’s a prosperity crystal,” she explained. “The psychic promises that it will make us rich.”

“Maybe we should buy a prosperity crystal,” I tell Duke while we’re blaming each other for the three unrecorded checks in our checkbook. “A really big prosperity crystal.”

“That’s a good idea,” he says. “Maybe I can find one on sale.”