Over half the married households in this country now keep multiple checking accounts. That includes couples with completely separate finances, those with his, hers, and our accounts, those with his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and what’s its – and those with one for the family dog.

Is this a bad thing? Retail banks don’t think so. But the breakup of family finances has generated a lot of ink and ire in recent weeks. A Wall Street Journal piece on the separation of marriage and money pushed the hot button of one columnist and a slew of readers. A few days after reading the article in late February, the New York Times’ David Brooks quoted Tolstoy to make his argument that sharing property in the home was the check to balance the individualism of our society at large.

One month later a columnist in the Sunday Times business section argued that joint accounts led to deception. If couples were forced to share everything, she wrote, sooner or later, one or the other would start accumulating a secret stash for spending that he or she did not want scrutinized. Both columns led to a flurry of letters to the editor and, in Mr. Brooks’s case, outraged blogs attacking his archaic defense of one account indivisible.

Do separate accounts undermine the institution of marriage or cement it?

Most often it is the man who wants to merge and the woman who wants to keep her money distant. A certified financial planner based in Greenwich, Conn., Lili Vasileff, argues that indeed, women should keep at least some money to themselves. A separate account, among other benefits, establishes a credit history, encourages each partner to develop financial management skills and control, and allows the saver to take pride in achieving specific financial goals.

Remember, it is only in the last 150 years that married women have had a legal right to own property. As for earning money, for most women, that didn’t happen till after World War II. Many women, Ms. Vasileff contends, still feel financially vulnerable, without a multigenerational history of earning, if not owning. Today’s working women retain a vestigial fear of being left destitute due to death, another Great Depression, or divorce.

This fear is the trigger for the so-called Bag Lady syndrome, which causes women to worry that they will end up pushing a shopping cart on the street in their old age. The syndrome afflicts even the highest female achievers. Just ask one.

But today, marriage is a partnership – at least in most of the 50% of the marriages that survive, that is the case. This partnership should strengthen and deepen as milestones are encountered or circumnavigated. Even if a couple enters marriage with individual accountability, as the partners make and reach financial goals – an apartment, a car, the extra expense of a child, or even a move from margarine to butter, Key Food chicken to organic – a merger of money makes sense. It is a matter of trust.

Separate accounts paper over insidious differences in spending and savings styles.

One couple fought bitterly over money in their first year of marriage. He spent, she didn’t. They resolved to keep two separate accounts and one joint account for housing and bills to cut down on the argy bargy.

Each spouse took cover behind the fortification of his or her own account with all the self-righteousness of the misunderstood. Since they couldn’t hash things out in the open, the anger went underground. Money, as is its custom, became a lightning rod for all their disappointment in each other and in the marriage.

Every time her husband failed to put what he was supposed to in their joint account, she ruminated, “What a spendthrift! He doesn’t care about me, or the kids. We’re going to lose the house because he can’t keep a credit card in his pocket.”

As for him, every time he passed a bookstore he had to go in. “Books,” he said to himself, “That’s all I buy. I can’t stand her spying. She should go work as a financial detective – get a job with Kroll.”

It’s not so much that separate accounts allow individuality to run rampant. It’s that a partnership requires agreements – at the very least an agreement to disagree. The separation of his from hers encourages those disagreements to calcify until they are too hard to remove.

Ms. Bailey is a writer and therapist in New York. She can be reached at ebailey@nysun.com.