This makes sense. For me, I am the opposite. I am very driven and particular about a lot of things. Most of my friends are the same. My wife is the opposite. She is enormously talented and creative, but not at all ambitious. This actually suits us really well. I focus on doing, she focuses on being, and we both take care of each other.
She is also disabled, and this has seriously impeded her from pursuing her dream to be, of all things, a teacher of disabled children.
Our income may come from my labor, but it is definitely common property.
Female, straight, early 40s, married for 20 years.
My ideal would be for my partner and I to have similar incomes (which we do–he makes about 20% more than I do because he’s a software engineer and I’m a tech writer–I’m fine with this, because I’m not terribly ambitious these days and prefer not to have to work overtime/extra hours–he doesn’t like it either, but he’s more willing to do it than I am).
I’d be okay with a guy who earned a lot less than I did if he worked full-time doing something he loved, but I wouldn’t be comfortable supporting a starving artist or a deadbeat. I wouldn’t expect him to do it for me either. Despite the fact that I fantasize about winning the lottery (tough job, since I don’t play the lottery) and retiring to a life of gaming and writing novels, it isn’t going to happen. We could probably afford for one of us to quit working and stay home, but since both of us would like to do it, it wouldn’t be fair to either of us for the other one to do so.
I’m quite sure the spouse wouldn’t have any masculinity issues if I made more money than he did. We trust each other completely, have a shared checking account (though each of us has our own personal account that we get a monthly “allowance” for) and there’s no issue about who puts in how much money. The checks just go in the account and we buy goodies when we want them and have the extra cash.
My time as a retail banking CSR convinced me that even the happiest couple should have three checking accounts: a joint one for shared bills and a separate one for each person. If I were really paranoid–which I am–I’d go so far as to say that the joint account should be at a separate bank from the other two.
It shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does. Right now, I make more than my partner. I’m also much more assertive than he is and I tend to be pushy. The fact that I’m paying for things for both of us feeds into this - I can get my way simply by paying for it. This creates power imbalances that we have to be very careful about, and I have to make sure that his voice is heard.
For most of the past decade, he’s been making more than I do (3 times as much), and he did have a tendency to make excuses about not doing as much around the house as I do because he’s paying more toward the house - i.e. I was making up the difference with sweat equity. Now that he’s making less than I am, and he still hates household chores, he’s starting to realize what an asshole excuse that was.
I personally think income disparities are harder to deal with in dating than in marriage/long term partnership. You share with your partner more than with your dates, and you bring a lot of non-monetary value to the table.
Once upon a time, I was dating a man who was moderately rich. It was a minor but recurrent problem - he wanted to do expensive things, I couldn’t afford them, and I wasn’t comfortable being “kept”. What we eventually worked out was that we usually did cheap things and split the bill, but occasionally he could give me a gift of an expensive dinner or opera tickets or whatnot. It was quite clear that if I married him, the problem would go away - he would regard his money as joint money. But we weren’t that into each other, and we parted as friends.
It doesn’t matter as long as the difference isn’t too great. When you’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars it gets rough. Now if there is a reason for instance, a stay at home mom, that’s one thing. But if the guy is earning 100K and the woman is pulling in 30K there are going to be major issues. Even if it was reversed, simply because the lifestyles are too far apart.
Eventually one feels he isn’t pulling his weight but is working as hard. And this is probably correct as they work the same but get paid vastly different wages.
Mischevious, when we both worked expenses and chores were divided evenly but I just retired and now my partner makes twice what I bring in from my pension. I don’t feel guilty about the money since we talked it over for a long time and I know that this is what he wanted me to do and we still have plenty to cover the mortgage and bills and keep saving too. At first I felt guilty that he had to work all day and I get to do whatever I want to so I started picking up every single chore that didn’t require his skills to do. I do all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, gardening, taking care of the animals, chopping and hauling wood, taking out the trash and anything else that comes up that doesn’t need power tools or more strength than I have. I might have resented it if he suggesting handing me all of his house chores but it was my idea. There’s still plenty for him to do on weekends because this is an old rural property that takes a lot of upkeep.
Were you working when he felt that you should do more because he made more? That would piss me off. For me it’s about maximizing his free time since I have so much of it but if either of us ever suggested that the other should do more because of income disparities we’d probably have our 2nd real fight in a 15 year relationship.
When I was with my husband, there were various times when one of us earned more than the other. He supported me through a period of unemployment, I supported him once he lost his job. If we’d had children, clearly one of us would have become the main wage earner for a while.
But I think that’s a whole different set of circumstances to what I would be looking for in a partner now. I would expect someone to be able to keep up with my lifestyle - not worry about money when going out, take off for the weekend on a whim, go for two foreign holidays a year and so on. If I can do all that, and it would be a problem for the bloke, well… probably not the bloke for me.
Oh, yes, I was working longer hours than he was. I knew it was an asshole excuse, and told him so, and he only tried it a few times. Likewise, when I’m making more money and I start buying stuff for the house without consulting him, he tells me what I jerk I’m being. We’re both capable of bad behavior, but we’ve been extremely happy together for 16 years, so we mostly work it out.
My husband made considerably more than I did for a number of years. It made me feel kind of guilty, but we’ve always had separate finances, not out of lack of trust, but sheer laziness, so it was never an actual issue between us. Then, after owning my own business for a couple of years, I became far more marketable than I ever had been and, when I got pregnant and we decided that at least one of us should have a secure job with lower-cost benefits (we were both consulting at the time, him through a company, me on my own). So I was hired full-time at a large company and we found ourselves almost on equal footing.
Were I single again, I would have no problem dating and possibly marrying a man who made less or more than I did. However, I would want a pre-nup since I have some familial assets and will eventually be a steward of my family’s charitable foundation.
I’m an older fart too (turning 40 this year), but my wife isn’t, and I think it may be generational. It bothers Mrs. Rhymer that I bring in the bacon; she worries that I’ll get tired of pulling an undue amount of weight. But I’d rather she went to school full time as she is doing. I’ll likely die a long time before she does, and I don’t want her to have a resume consisting of a high school diploma and a succession of entry-level jobs when I’m gone.
I’m in the same position as Maeglin and Zeriel’s wives. I do all the housework, cooking and shopping and am working on a novel. My husband has earned six figures since his early 20s and comes from a much wealthier family. This arrangement is what works best for us - after a certain point money was just more money and time became more valuable.
I think it’s more about attitude than income. My cousin’s boyfriend earns 40k which is almost three times what she does. They contribute the same proportion of their incomes to household expenses, but when they argue he tells her that everything - their apartment, their furniture, their freaking cat - belongs more to him than it does to her. He could earn $50 more than my cousin and would still lord it over her. My husband could earn millions of dollars and still value my contribution.
I was 55 and Marcie was 45 when we married; our incomes were roughly equal. Neither of us married the other out of monetary concerns; we married because we saw eye to eye on most issues. We still do, for that matter. There have been ups and downs in our income level; for a while, she made twice what I was making----it made no difference to us or in how we treated each other. At the moment, we are experiencing financial difficulty for the reasons I mentioned earlier—it still makes no difference in how we treat each other. We’ve gotten through worse and we will get through this not because of money but because she and I are a team and money be damned. Even though we would like to have more of it.
You throw in quite a few variables and I’ve never given a good goddamn about those concerns; my opinion is my own and YMMV and obviously does. As to your education and six figure income, congratulations and throw you a dead fish.
To my mind it isn’t about the social class (income says little about that) and it has little to do with gender concerns; what would concern me about a big disparity (in my favour) would be, at the very beginning of a relationship, if I thought that she was into me because of the money. Though I would hope I’d be able to tell the difference.
Otherwise, I view a relationship as a partnership, and the income we make as “our” money.
In our case, when we started dating (and even when we were first married) there was no difference, so this wasn’t a concern.
QFT. DoctorJ and I discussed once what we would do with more money than we (he) already earn. The only thing we could really come up with is we might travel a slight bit more, and we’d feed our retirement fund a bit faster. His income alone is more than enough to take care of our needs and all our real wants, which is why he told me to just up and quit when my job got really miserable.
Right now I’m working part-time at a vet clinic, taking care of the house/yard/critters, and trying to start a small crafts business. It’s working out well for us–lower stress all the way around, the house tends to be cleaner, the yard looks nicer, we have a little veggie garden, I get alone time and crafting time without us feeling like we never see each other.
I suspect there probably is something of a generation gap in thinking about spouses with little to no income because they’re in school/pursuing artistic endeavors. The income disparity has never been an issue for us, but going to having pretty much no income took a fair bit of mental adjustment for me. I’m 33, and I grew up with the whole a woman should take care of herself, stand her own two feet, yadda yadda, which I generally did up until that point. Making that switch made me feel dependent in a way that I didn’t before, and it made me really uncomfortable at first. If I hadn’t still been working part-time and making at least a little bit of my own money, I don’t know that I could have coped. It would have just been too far from the ideals I grew up with.
It didn’t help that in our society was invest so much of our sense of self in our jobs/income. When you’re not putting any beans in the pot, it’s hard not to feel like you’re not contributing to the household, even when intellectually you know that you are contributing, and those contributions are valuable.
My wife lost her job (she was in the financial sector, the recession did it in) and, as far as our quality of life goes, it has been a good thing for both of us.
Fact is, we didn’t really need that income. It was nice alright to have extra money, but the non-monetary costs were heavy - two people working professional-type jobs with a kid is very difficult; and what were we doing it for?
It may not be a concern to you, however what I have noticed is that when there is a large disparity in education or income, there probably isn’t much mutual interest there anyway. Each person often views the other as either quaintly uncouth or pretentious and arrogant. Assuming you do have a pairing where there is significant differences in wealth, it can create a power imbalance. It confuses things. Gee, do I love him because he’s awesome or am I really in love with his Hamptons house and his private jet he takes me to Paris with?
It’s less of a big deal for the guy. He’s probably paying for most of the dates anyway. I know plenty of guys who make six figure salaries and their women make significantly less. Traditionally, men have earned significantly more anyway, although it’s not as pronounced as it once was. I mean why would a wealthy guy care about how much money his girlfriend made? And the difference between $100,000 and $30,000 is what? He has a nicer appartment and he can afford to go out to eat a bit more?
