My name is Aaron Gouveia, and my wife makes more money than I do.
Wait. This isn’t a support group for losers? Are you sure? Because after reading Hanna Rosin’s Slate column about “breadwinner wives,” I just assumed it was my lot in life to huddle with the growing number of financially castrated husbands whose pitiful paychecks are causing marital strife.
Rosin started off with an interesting topic, which she approached evenhandedly, citing census data and Pew Research Center surveys. And as a member of the 22 percent of American marriages in which husbands make less than their wives, I was intrigued to learn more.
Until Rosin’s article took a very wrong turn and inexplicably careened off a cliff.
Some couples seem to ease into the dynamic naturally—the woman is a born workaholic and the man lives at a slower pace, picking up contract work, savoring his afternoon coffee. One mother at our preschool can’t stop bragging about her stay-at-home husband—although I am still startled by the sight of him hanging around the school, helping the teachers make handprint T-shirts.
It’s the word “startled” that really threw me. I re-read it several times to see if I was just being oversensitive, but each time I went back it leaped out even more. Quite frankly, its use here is baffling: I can’t fathom any scenario in which a father taking a positive and active role in his kids’ lives could be construed as a bad thing, not to mention alarming or frightening.
Rosin goes on to talk about the women she knows in her life who are currently dealing with this issue.
One woman I know never seems to run out of ways to call her husband, who works as a part-time airline mechanic, a loser. Another complains about the small things: Why does he spend all her money on dress socks if he hasn’t had a job interview in over a year and why does he have to subscribe to every damned sports channel and why will he never clean up after himself? In a couple of cases I know of, the disparity never felt natural and the couple got divorced.
Let’s keep the recession in mind. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, seven out of 10 workers who lost their jobs are men. So wouldn’t it stand to reason this guy should consider himself damn lucky to have any job at all? Not to mention the man is an airline mechanic, which is a highly trained and specialized field. It hardly sounds “lazy.”
But even more confounding is why Rosin even bothered to include the husband who allegedly doesn’t know how to clean up after himself. Isn’t this a story about income disparity? What does his level of cleanliness have to do with this? Rosin’s last comment that these people are getting divorced really strikes me as no surprise—I wouldn’t want to be married to someone constantly calling me a loser either. But that has more to do with civility and respect, and less about the marital wage gap.
Truthfully I was disappointed to see this coming from the intelligent and forward-thinking folks at Slate’s DoubleX blog. Suppose I had written, “One father at our preschool can’t stop bragging about his working wife—although I am still startled by the sight of her hanging around the office, helping to broker multi-million-dollar business deals.” I have to believe I would’ve been taken to task. And rightfully so.
I’ll admit, I had issues with the fact that my wife out-earned me at one point by approximately $40,000 a year. But she works in finance and my heart and soul is in print journalism, a notoriously low-paying field. And after a while, she showed me that what I lack in the paycheck department I make up for in other areas. I’m the communicator, the social director, and the primary caretaker of our son. I still work full-time, but I cook most of the meals and perform the majority of chores—because those things are just as important as a padded wallet, if not more so.
In the end I realized it doesn’t matter if I make less money than she does. And while the issue caused some arguments, it was never something that was going to threaten our marriage. If two people break up because of something so arbitrary, I’d argue that their relationship had far more problems than an income disparity.
But I guess the important thing is that I don’t show up at my son’s school. I wouldn’t want to startle anyone.
—Photo via SoFeminine.co.uk
About Aaron Gouveia
You’re in my opinion, teaching your kids to do exactly what your ex did. Choose a career over a family. Am I misinterpreting this?”
Yes you are. The fact is after we separated the “good” doctor with whom she cheated on me with while we were married moved in with her. She has since left full time employment and is only working part time. The “good” (and rich) doctor pays her mortgage and property taxes. When she faced career setbacks, like a lot of men have, instead of soldiering on, like most men do, she sought a more lucrative ship to anchor her boat to and she bailed on me after I had acquiesced to her career aspirations at the expense of my own career. While she was a “career” woman early on in our marriage, she now would prefer to be a “kept” woman, a role that the vast majority of men neither want nor have the opportunity to avail themselves of. It is a matter of control. If you cede the primary breadwinner role to your wife you cede control and the fact is most women would prefer to be provided for and are willing to give up that control. Something like 30% of all households have the woman as the primary breadwinner, but there is a lot of media hand wringing and analysis of that dynamic, but what of the 70% of households with men as the primary breadwinners? You don’t see articles or studies on that. Why? Because that is the natural order of things. That is the way most women would like it to be. Women would much rather be home with their babies than carrying that Feminist clap trap. We men in the interest of peace and fairness have allowed it to happen. We need to throw down the gauntlet and give no quarter to a conflict between you own career aspirations and those of your wife. Make her choose early on in the marriage, because if you don’t you are headed for trouble. You are not serving your family well by acquiescing to accommodate your wife’s career aspirations. You duty is to your family and you can best fulfill that duty by aggressively pursuing your career aspirations unencumbered by whatever your wife’s career aspirations might be.
Had I followed the advice a I have put forth here, I would be living with my kids on an acre of land, in a 5 bedroom house, with a swimming pool in the back yard, on a cul-de-sac, 13 miles from the beach earning a helluva lot more money than I am now and we may not be married, but neither I nor my kids would have suffered the way we have. I have one life. I gave up a part of that life out of trust and love to afford my ex an opportunity of a life time and she paid me back by cheating on me. She now lives in a million dollar home, while I live far from a place I loved in a rented apartment.
I should have read the rest of your comments before I responded. Then I would have known to avoid engaging you because your outlook makes me sick.
You are saying that 1) the primary breadwinner of a family is the one with power and control and 2) the “natural order of things” is for men to have that power and control over their wives, which is totally okay because 3) women want to be controlled by their husbands.
Making career sacrifices for your family and your spouses more lucrative career, finding out your spouse is a cheating asshole, and getting a divorce and being way behind the curve with your career because of the sacrifices you’ve made is not a fun experience for anyone, man or woman. The fact that you went through that yourself and are now advocating for a more traditional paradigm which places women at great risk of the exact same thing is just fucked up. I mean, how bitter and hypocritical does one need to be to think like that?
Steve, I don’t know how old you are, but in your lifetime how many articles have you seen, how much media has been dedicted to the voicing of complaints of men who are primary breadwinners. You have seen none and I challenge you to google the topic because you will not find any. You will find a plethora of articles about Breadwinning wives. The gist of most of these articles are complaints, put downs of the husbands and the marginalization of men. I don’t like it. My ex sought out a better earning man at the expense of my life, my kids lives, the lives of her paramours’ children and wife. It is wrong. In order to keep this from happening again we need to take control and we should avoid women who aren’t willing to give. In light of the dissatisfaction that you are seeing in these articles about breadwinning wives I expect you will see a lot more women willing to give up that control .
just by way of correction–
We should avoid women that aren’t willing to give up that control.
Did you read Hanna Rosin’s article? It was a put down of men, in general. I heard a lot of that during 15 years of marriage and apparently it is not uncommon. You may willing to endure that kind of abuse, but I am not. Any man that wrote about women the way Hanna Rosin did would be vilified, raked over the coals and if he had a journalistic career, it would be over.
You sound too young and idealistic to really understand, so I won’t be offended by your insults.
Steve: Infidelity is never right regardless of the gender of who commits it. Had I refused to move with my wife to accommodate her career opportunity, no one would have faulted me for it and no one would have so much blinked an eye. I believe that had I protected my own career and refused to move she either would have turned the offer down or come crawling back after it failed so miserably especially since I would have had custody of the kids. And had I done that I would have been the PB and my career would have flourished. But I didn’t do that. Out of love I threw my own career under the bus. As result when she saw my diminished paycheck she saw a diminished man and went out and sought a man who could allow her the opportunity to be a stay home mom. The man she found would not have done for her what I did and he in fact did not do any such thing for his own because she was a stay at home mom for virtually their entire marriage. Unfortunately, in the process my ex destroyed our marriage, damaged our kids, destroyed the family of her paramour including his wife and his kids. Early on in the marriage she was a “career” woman, but when she realized the responsibilities of that she wanted no part of it. Men don’t do that. Men don’t bail when things get tough. If you are a PB you can’t do that. If you do people’s lives get damaged, if not destroyed. These women who are bitching about having to be PB’s are really annoying. If they want to be treated equally then they need to not bitch about the responsibilities that come with equal treatment.
The fact that you went through that yourself and are now advocating for a more traditional paradigm which places women at great risk of the exact same thing is just fucked up.
Have you read these articles by women complaining about being the primary breadwinner? If you don’t like that role don’t do things that are likely to place yourself in that role especially if the things you do are likely to impair or impede your husband from having that role. I am simply saying that men have to basically establish boundaries that will steer women in the direction that they really want and it is best for the family. If they were completely comfortable with the primary breadwinning role you would not seek articles like this written by women. Google “breadwinning wives” and you will find a lot of articles on the topic and they all sound the same general theme. They articulate discomfort with the role of being a primary breadwinner. It is a little hard to take when you have sacrificed your own career to achieve a goal that your wife ostensibly aspired to only to discover that is not what she wanted at all. Can you understand that?
I find it “startling” that anyone would bitch about being the primary breadwinner. As primary breadwinner you are endowed with control and power that the secondary breadwinner/caregiver does not have.
I, too, was shocked and dismayed by Hanna Rosin’s choice of couples to highlight. I see a lot more nuance in the world than that; and a lot more fathers helping out, be it preschool, elementary, or high school. I know so many couples in which the woman earns more than the man that it’s not even worth enumerating them — there’s the CFO whose husband works part-time and volunteers at school, there’s the bike shop owners where the wife worked for years in technology to save up money to start their business while the husband stayed home with their little boy and tinkered with his bikey inventions, there’s the couple around the corner where both the wife and husband work very part-time, but the wife’s the one who pays the rent and the dad’s the one who plans the birthday parties, there are the two freelancers who wrote a book together so the wife could demand a higher hourly wage writing grants while the husband followed his heart and art working on a variety of highly technical and not-very-lucrative projects.
yes, there are situations where the high-earning wife resents the low-earning husband, but I can find a lot of reasons for that (one or both of them are insufferable for reasons entirely not connected to their annual wage), including, maybe, that one of them places an unusual value on money, while the other, doesn’t.
for most of our relationship (in fact, most of our lives), I have made more money than my husband. whatever our problems, this has never (for me) been even a facet of our relationship. we have always considered together who would do what work, for what money; now, he is working for the Army in Kuwait, making four times what I’m making, and while I sometimes resent time to myself I never resent the money. I happily spend it, rarely for dress socks, always for the mortgage and groceries; I’ve never heard him once complain about my spending habits in the way the women in Rosin’s piece do. while there are many things he has spent money on, of which I disapprove, in our time during which I was the primary breadwinner — I surely never attributed it to his laziness or relative stature in the columns of our tax return.
it seems that individual relationship problems, as well as our culture’s obsession with earning power and its link to inherent personal value, are being attributed to the relative paychecks of men and women collectively. I hardly think this is fair or scientific. surely, the work that each of us does, does not need a dollars-per-hour value to be assessed in a relationship. (and, if one is being true to one’s heart, I believe one would not be measuring chores and hours chauffeured and words of bedtime books read out loud in comparison, either.)
we may be living in an unusual time with regards to the relative earning power of men and women. this should not mean (even if it does, to many people) that men and women change in relation to one another — unless, truly, all that matters to any of us is that line #37 on our individual tax return.
So I googled the term “Breadwinner husbands” and much to my chagrin and surprise I came up with no articles decrying the fact for the better part of 2000 years or more men have borne the burden of being the primary breadwinner. No articles complaining about how lazy and burdensome the wives of Breadwinner husbands were, no articles sounding the alarm as to the signficance to society that such a long lasting trend has had, no articles at all . . . in fact what I did come up with were articles relating to breadwinner wives and the complaints they have about their secondary earning/caregiving husbands.
Now how do you explain that!!!!!!
You said above that
“I find it “startling” that anyone would bitch about being the primary breadwinner. As primary breadwinner you are endowed with control and power that the secondary breadwinner/caregiver does not have.”
Now you call breadwinning a “burden”….When for quite a lot of the time you mentioned, women were not allowed to work because it was assumed they weren’t smart enough, or talented enough–
Which is just as stupid as thinking a man isn’t caring enough to be a good parent. Stereotypes are stupid no matter who does them…Let’s not rewrite history.
It is a burden, but it is a burden with certain benefits. Nothing in life comes without a price. As the primary breadwinner you carry the burden of financial responsibiity for others and in return you are entitled to certain control over how money is spent. Women have historically opted to cede financial control (to a certain extent) to their husbands in return for being relieved of the burden of breadwinning. Through the manipulative use of love and affection women have been able to obtain from men the resources to get the things they want without having to carry the burden of earning the means for obtaining those things.
I am not rewriting history and if you had any sense of history, you would understand that.