We’ve Turned Marriage Into a Transaction

There is something deeply embedded in modern heterosexual relationships that we need to talk about more: the belief that men are supposed to provide.

Even in relationships where couples proudly describe themselves as “50/50,” the old way still shoot its ugly head. A man may split bills with his partner, cook dinner, change nappies and encourage her career, yet the belief that he should ideally be earning more, contributing more financially or at least possessing the ability to take over completely if necessary may still exist. In many societies, the connection is even more explicit. A man’s ability to provide is tied directly to his masculinity, his value and, sometimes, his entire sense of identity.

Take that ability away from him and society does not simply say that he is struggling financially. It often says something much harsher: that he is less of a man.

Meanwhile, women continue to be taught, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly, that choosing a romantic partner is one of the most important financial decisions they will ever make. Love is encouraged, passion is celebrated and emotional connection is romanticised, but “Can he provide?” is a question still asked in-between with extreme emphasis.

Perhaps it is time we asked where this thought process came from and whether it still deserves to survive.

How Did Men Become Providers?

The popular explanation is usually that men became providers because they were physically stronger and therefore hunted while women stayed behind waiting for food. Unfortunately, history and anthropology are considerably more complicated than that.

Women in many hunter-gatherer societies have always contributed significantly to food production and survival through gathering, fishing, processing food and, in some societies, hunting as well. The old image of prehistoric men marching out with spears while women remained permanently inside caves is more cultural mythology than an accurate description of every human society that has ever existed.

However, physical differences did matter in certain forms of labour, particularly in societies where warfare, large-animal hunting and physically demanding forms of agriculture became increasingly important. Men often had advantages in upper-body strength, and as societies became more settled, agricultural wealth, land ownership and inheritance became increasingly central to power.

As humans moved from smaller and often more flexible communities into societies organized around land, property, inheritance and accumulated wealth, control over resources became power. Those who controlled land could control food. Those who controlled food could control survival. Those who controlled wealth could influence marriage, inheritance and the future of entire families.

Across many patriarchal societies, men gradually came to dominate the ownership and transmission of major forms of wealth. Women were frequently excluded from property ownership, inheritance, political participation and independent economic activity. Their access to resources was often mediated through fathers, husbands or other male relatives.

War made this vulnerability even worse. Throughout history, women and children were frequently captured, enslaved, displaced and treated as part of the spoils of conquest. A woman could lose her home, her family, her social protection and her access to resources through circumstances entirely outside her control.

In such a world, attaching oneself to a man who could provide food, shelter, protection and inheritance for children was not necessarily a shallow or materialistic decision but could be a survival strategy.

And once a survival strategy survives long enough, society eventually begins to call it tradition.

Centuries passed and laws changed, women fought for education, employment, property rights, inheritance rights and financial independence. In many parts of the world, women can now earn money, own businesses, purchase property and build wealth independently, yet the psychological trauma remained.

Men are still expected to provide, women are still expected to choose providers, and both genders are still suffering under a role that was built for a world that, in many ways, no longer exists.

The Transactionality of Marriage We Pretend Not To See

One of the strangest things about modern conversations about relationships is how passionately people insist that marriage should be about love while simultaneously defending a structure built around exchange.

Historically, and in many places still today, heterosexual marriage has operated through a gendered transaction. The man provides resources, while the woman provides labour, reproduction, sexual access and domestic care.

He provides with his income, she provides with her body and her labour.

He is expected to bring financial security into the home, she is expected to transform that home into a functioning domestic world.

She cooks, cleans, carries pregnancies, gives birth, raises children, manages emotional relationships and often performs an extraordinary amount of unpaid labour that would cost enormous amounts of money if outsourced — then we call the entire arrangement love.

Of course, love can genuinely exist inside these relationships. That is not the argument. The problem is that love often exists alongside a system of expectations that becomes visible the moment one person can no longer perform their assigned role.

A man loses his job, suffers financial hardship or becomes unable to provide, and suddenly the relationship is tested.

A woman becomes ill, can no longer have sex, stops doing housework or becomes unable to perform the enormous amount of domestic labour expected of her, and suddenly the relationship is tested too.

This is why the saying that “love cannot keep a marriage” has survived for so long because behind the romance, many marriages are still structured around expectations. When those expectations disappear, people sometimes discover that the love they thought was unconditional had conditions attached to it after all.

Character Should Matter More Than Provision

Today, more women are earning their own money than ever before. Women are building businesses, entering professions that were once closed to them, purchasing homes, investing and, increasingly, becoming the highest earners in their households.

Yet many financially successful women remain attached to an old romantic rule that says the man must still earn more.

A woman earning millions may still insist that her partner must earn significantly more than she does. A highly successful woman can be financially independent in every practical sense while remaining romantically committed to finding a man whose income places him above her.

She wants love, but the love must come with a particular financial figure. This is not necessarily because women are naturally materialistic, but because the provider rule has been repeated for generations.

Women were taught that financial security in a man is protection. They were taught that marrying a financially unsuccessful man could place them and their future children in danger. They were taught that a man’s income determines whether a family survives comfortably or suffers.

And many of those fears are still very real, but there is another side to the problem.

Many men have also been deeply conditioned to believe that their financial position determines their worth as men. A man may genuinely love a woman who earns more than him, respect her success and initially feel comfortable with their arrangement. But then his friends make comments. His family asks questions. Social media tells him that no woman can truly respect a man who earns less than she does.

Eventually, he begins whispering into his ear.

Why would she choose me?

Why would a woman like her want someone like me?

Did she settle?

Is she secretly disappointed?

And that is where something painful can happen.

A woman may have chosen him precisely because she values his character. She may love his kindness, his emotional intelligence, his humour, his values, his companionship and the way she feels around him. She may genuinely see provision as something adults should be responsible for individually and collectively when they build a family, but the world has spent decades telling him that a woman cannot truly love a man who does not provide more than she does. So instead of trusting her love, he begins questioning it.

The Danger of Making Provision a Measure of Manhood

Provision is one of the fundamental responsibilities of adulthood and every adult human being should ideally have the opportunity and ability to provide for themselves — that should not be controversial.

A woman being able to provide for herself should not be treated as a threat to men. A man being unable to temporarily provide more than his partner should not be treated as a failure of masculinity. Financial circumstances change. People lose jobs, businesses collapse, economies crash, illness happens, pregnancy can interrupt careers, and children require care.

A healthy relationship should be capable of surviving changing financial seasons without either partner losing their dignity. Unfortunately, that is difficult in a world where men’s personhood is tied to provision.

When a man believes that his value as a human being depends primarily on how much money he brings home, financial struggle becomes more than financial struggle — it becomes an identity crisis, and identity crises do not always remain private.

Some men become resentful.

Some become controlling.

Some become suspicious of their partners.

Some begin interpreting generosity as pity.

A woman may simply be contributing to the household, but he experiences her contribution as evidence of his inadequacy because society has taught him that a man should always be above her financially.

The tragedy is that both people can genuinely love each other while an ancient gender role slowly poisons the relationship.

She is trying to build with him, he is wondering why she had to.

She sees partnership, he sees humiliation.

That is not because either of them entered the relationship with bad intentions. It is however because both were raised inside a culture that gave money a gender.

“Men Are in Love, Women Are in Business”

There is a popular saying that appears repeatedly in conversations about heterosexual relationships: “Men are in love, women are in business.”

It is often used to suggest that men choose women emotionally while women choose men financially, but the more important question is this: why would women become so concerned about financial security in the first place?

Women did not collectively wake up one morning and decide that romance should be financial.

History gave them reasons.

Women have died because they could not access adequate medical care during pregnancy and childbirth.

Women have watched their children go hungry because the household depended entirely on one income that disappeared.

Women have abandoned careers and dreams because the financial structure of their families made it impossible to outsource childcare, domestic labour or other responsibilities.

Women have chosen financially secure partners because marriage was not merely about romance. It could determine whether they and their children survived. Then society turned around and called them gold diggers. The irony is almost unbearable.

A society can restrict women’s access to education, wealth, employment and property for generations, make their survival dependent on men, then mock them for choosing the men with the greatest resources.

That is not proof that women are naturally transactional. It is evidence that people make decisions based on the conditions available to them.

If your survival depends on choosing a provider, you will probably spend considerable time evaluating who can provide.

The Provider Trope Is Also Hurting Men

The provider expectation is often discussed as something that benefits men because it gives them authority and power, but power that comes with a permanent obligation can eventually become a prison.

A man who is told from childhood that he must always provide may grow up terrified of failure. He may remain in jobs that are destroying his mental health because quitting feels impossible. He may feel unable to pursue a career he genuinely loves because it does not pay enough. He may work himself into exhaustion because the financial survival of everyone around him has been placed on his shoulders.

Then society congratulates him for being a provider, but nobody asks whether he is happy.

Nobody asks whether he is frightened.

Nobody asks what happens when he becomes sick.

Nobody asks what happens when the economy collapses.

Nobody asks what happens when he simply cannot carry the entire weight anymore.

A family should not be a pyramid with one exhausted person standing at the bottom while everyone else balances above him.

But What About Women Who Still Cannot Provide for Themselves?

This is where the conversation becomes particularly important.

We cannot simply tell women around the world to stop caring about whether men can provide while millions of women still do not have equal access to education, employment, property and financial resources. That would be cruel.

A woman living in a society where she cannot independently earn enough money to survive will naturally consider a man’s financial capacity when choosing a partner. A woman whose access to healthcare, housing and social protection depends on her husband cannot be expected to approach marriage in exactly the same way as a financially independent woman living in a country with stronger social systems.

The answer is not to shame women for wanting financial security. The answer is to expand women’s access to it.

Give women genuine economic opportunities.

Give girls education.

Protect women’s rights to own and inherit property.

Create workplaces where motherhood does not automatically destroy a woman’s financial future.

Build social systems that prevent women and children from becoming homeless when relationships collapse.

Teach everyone, regardless of gender, how to earn, save, invest and manage money.

And perhaps most importantly, teach everyone how to participate in domestic life.

This is because financial independence alone is not enough if a woman earns her own money and still returns home to perform all the cooking, cleaning, childcare and emotional labour. That is simply employment plus a second unpaid shift.

Everyone Should Learn to Provide. Everyone Should Learn to Care.

Perhaps the future of relationships requires something much simpler than the complicated gender roles we have inherited.

Every adult should learn how to provide.

Every adult should learn how to care.

Men should know how to earn money, but they should also know how to cook, clean, raise children and manage a home.

Women should know how to nurture relationships and families if they choose to, but they should also have access to education, employment, wealth and financial independence.

Neither provision nor care should belong to one gender. Both are human skills.

A person who cannot provide for themselves is vulnerable.

A person who cannot care for themselves or others is also vulnerable.

The healthiest relationships may not be those where one person permanently provides while the other permanently serves. They may be the ones where two adults possess enough independence to survive individually but enough love and commitment to build something together.

That is a fundamentally different model.

You are not with me because you need me to survive.

I am not with you because I need your income to exist.

We are both capable of standing.

We simply choose to build.

The “Provider Man” Trope Needs To Be Discarded

This does not mean that men should stop being generous. It does not mean that women should never want financially successful partners. It does not mean that couples should split every expense down to the last penny.

Relationships will always involve different financial arrangements depending on income, health, children, careers and personal preferences. Sometimes one person will earn more. Sometimes one person will temporarily support the other. Sometimes a family will decide that one partner should focus more heavily on childcare.

The problem is not provision itself. The problem is turning provision into masculinity.

The problem is teaching men that they become less human when they earn less.

The problem is teaching women that financial dependence is feminine.

The problem is raising generations of people who believe love is free while also demanding that one gender pays more for the relationship with money and the other pays more with labour.

Until we dismantle those expectations, heterosexual relationships will continue struggling under transactions that many people refuse to acknowledge.

Perhaps one day, we can create a world where women do not need to search desperately for providers because they can provide for themselves. Perhaps men can stop measuring their manhood by their bank accounts. Perhaps domestic labour can become a shared responsibility rather than a woman’s destiny.

And perhaps then, for the first time, people will be able to approach relationships with a little more honesty.

Not asking, “What can this person provide for me?”

But asking something much more difficult and much more important:

“Who is this person when there is nothing to gain from loving them?”

This is because when two people are both capable of providing for themselves, when both people know how to care for a home, when neither person’s humanity depends on performing an assigned gender role, something extraordinary becomes possible.

Marriage can finally begin to move away from being a transaction for his income and her labour. And perhaps, finally, become what we have spent centuries pretending it already was.