According to a number of recent studies, in relationships where the woman earns more than the man, things tend to go awfully wrong. (If that’s the case, then my chances of a successful marriage are even slimmer than I thought.)
At The Week they’ve got a roundup of a few studies showing how men are having a hard time coping with earning less.
W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project:
[T]here’s still a sense—on the part of both men and women—that men should be the providers. We’re facing a whole new social moment in which women are doing better than men are. We need to encourage men to find other outlets for masculinity.
Men are having trouble dealing with these changing dynamics, and it’s hurting their marriages in the process. According to the National Marriage Project, husbands with children at home are 61 percent less likely to admit they’re “very happy” if they work shorter hours than their spouses.
According to a study from the American Sociological Association, men are more likely to cheat if their wives make more than they do. Stanford University is about to release research that shows that male unemployment increases chances for divorce. And a Rutgers study shows that high-earning men in their 50s are more likely to experience health problems if they make less money than their wives.
We know that the standard marriage as changing. And none of this is the fault of women. As men, we should probably warm up to the possibility that we might not be the major breadwinners. It doesn’t make you any less of a man, and it’s no reason to see your marriage fail. Right?
For a family to be successful and functional, I think it’s important for everyone to feel they contribute, to feel they are somehow necessary, to experience that what they do is values and benefiting the family as a whole. I think that’s in many ways a fundamental human need, on both the micro and the macro scale. In the traditional family, the man brought home the paycheck, and went to sit in his armchair with the newspaper, safe in the knowledge that he had contributed to the family. That’s no longer how it works – and certainly not when the… Read more »
BOTH parties in a marriage or relationship need to feel that their work (regardless of whether it is paid or not) has equal value and clout. Women have had to deal with feeling not only powerless in the “outside world” but powerless in the inside world of their marriages and relationships. Now it seems that men are feeling this pinch that women are already painfully familiar with, and the answer really is to use this pain as a starting point to begin talking about the fundamental changes that need to be made in our cultural psyche about valuing and honoring… Read more »
This is seems like another case of everyone jumping around one of they key pieces to the puzzle and wondering why the picture isn’t clear.
Men aren’t ‘macho’ anymore because most of the jobs that require physical strength, with the exception of pro-athletes, don’t pay enough for men to provide anything. Only smart people should be rich, women are smart too, suddenly there’s not enough smart rich jobs to go around. Suddenly women will consider hiring a dumb immigrant to pave her driveway the same way a men will consider hiring a dump prostitute to clean their gutters.
I should have proofread that last comment for typos and suggestions (I hate complaining without offering a solution). First of all, the first thing that every article that reports on a scientific finding should spell out the fact that correlation is not cause. Secondly, marriages breaking up should inspire us to ask as often, if not more often, if the marriage was broken to begin with, not broken by some outside societal force. If the economical change comes, ask yourself if, on the wedding day, you considered the change and considered yourself ready should it arise.
I’m a writer, and therefore I make peanuts. I tried to not be a writer for a few years and I made good money at a sales job. Except I hated it because it ate away at my soul. So back to writing (and poverty) I went. Luckily that was about the time I married my wife. She manages a bank and makes double my salary. This was good because we could buy luxury items like groceries, gas and a place to live. But I had (Ok, ok…still have) issues with the arrangement. Sometimes I feel very small for not… Read more »
Women are always encouraged when they stay home to raise a family? You must not know too many women 🙂 I’m here to tell you that due to the fact that we’re one of the few Western nations to not have some kind of governmental child care support, women face a war within and without when choosing whether to stay home or work after they have children. Within: Women might feel unfulfilled staying home if they previously worked. They might feel like the world is passing them by, like their career is over, etc. Without: Professional women still often judge… Read more »
Good point. Women have the added pressure of feeling like they’re supposed to stay home with the kids as opposed to going back to work, so there’s definitely guilt involved. I won’t argue that. The point I was trying to make is that while some professional women surely judge stay-at-home moms, both sides judge stay-at-home dads. Many men scoff at SAHDs and, surprisingly enough, I think many women are judgmental of SAHDs as well. I used to have Mondays off so I’d take my son to story hour, the park, etc. I was shunned by the moms there and made… Read more »
As a graduate of Sociology I am conditioned to always question things; so I guess the major question here is ‘couldn’t all of this just be a coincidence?’ For example, more likely to have ill health because you earn less? How is that a proven cause of ill health. One could cogently argue that you are more likely to earn less if you are susceptible to bouts of ill health, if you are unreliable for example. I’m not trying to say that any of the research is wrong – I haven’t even read it – but that maybe there are… Read more »