Feeling resentful after sacrificing for my DH’s career—how to restore balance?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to derail this, but when are we going to stop teaching our daughters to take less lucrative careers? It feels like these situations are always the product of marriages where the man’s earning power, based on what they do for a living, is so much greater. If one person stays at home it’s not going to be the $1 million plus earner, if there’s just one of those. It’s not the values driving the decision, it’s just the economics.

All of this

- Mother of a future physician

I hate to break it to you ladies, but being a high earning woman comes with its own set of problems. You are still expected to be the primary parent by everyone, your promotions are often delayed due to pregnancy and maternity leave, and it’s a lot harder to climb the financial ladder. If you teach your daughters to pursue a lucrative career, you must simultaneously teach them to choose in an egalitarian partner who understands that family responsibilities are shared. Most men are not like this, even if they are good guys. She can have a great career but with the wrong partner she will end up remaining single, or paying alimony to an ex. Ask me how I know. Not saying it’s not possible to have a high earning career and a great home life, but it requires fairly laser-focused strategy.

- Female physician and mom

Yes. The problem isn’t how we’re raising our daughters, it’s how we’re raising our sons. We need to immediately and fully put the expectation of household work and caregiving on boys and men.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to derail this, but when are we going to stop teaching our daughters to take less lucrative careers? It feels like these situations are always the product of marriages where the man’s earning power, based on what they do for a living, is so much greater. If one person stays at home it’s not going to be the $1 million plus earner, if there’s just one of those. It’s not the values driving the decision, it’s just the economics.

Many of us just by nature had less lucrative careers and ended up with partners whose earning potential was 10x higher than ours. I had worked for 10 years in my career before meeting my husband who made next to nothing when we met. For our quality of life, I stepped back a bit and it worked for us for 7 years, until it didn’t. He makes 500k now, and can probably make 7 figures in the next 5 years. I was a writer at a nonprofit. So if I want to go back to work (which was always over 40 hours/week), he would have to majorly step back in his career in order to do 50%. So instead of HHI of 500k, it’d be HHI of 300k. I don’t know how to solve this. We can’t take that hit if we want to send our kids to college. We don’t even travel a lot, we have one old car, we live relatively modestly. It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer. Maybe the problem is we built our life around his earning potential. It was exciting, but now I’m lost.

It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer.

Just to be clear, the percentage of men who would feel comfortable making this decision is much smaller. The expectation from an early age is that you need to be able to provide. So doing this -- deliberately picking a career where financial struggles are pretty much guaranteed -- would seem pretty self-indulgent. Which is not to say, of course, that plenty of men don't do this. You can name lots of famous ones. It's just much more rare.

Yet more typical is the attraction of women to low-earning, stereotypically female career paths, like teaching or other helping professions. I assume that part of this attraction is social. But it perpetuates earnings disparity in marriages.

Earning lots of money is hard and requires a lot of deliberate decision making over a long period of time. In general it's pretty hard to slouch your way toward that outcome, in part because it's a competitive world and everyone is trying to do it. If it's not something you want, or are taught to want, then it's not going to happen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to derail this, but when are we going to stop teaching our daughters to take less lucrative careers? It feels like these situations are always the product of marriages where the man’s earning power, based on what they do for a living, is so much greater. If one person stays at home it’s not going to be the $1 million plus earner, if there’s just one of those. It’s not the values driving the decision, it’s just the economics.

Many of us just by nature had less lucrative careers and ended up with partners whose earning potential was 10x higher than ours. I had worked for 10 years in my career before meeting my husband who made next to nothing when we met. For our quality of life, I stepped back a bit and it worked for us for 7 years, until it didn’t. He makes 500k now, and can probably make 7 figures in the next 5 years. I was a writer at a nonprofit. So if I want to go back to work (which was always over 40 hours/week), he would have to majorly step back in his career in order to do 50%. So instead of HHI of 500k, it’d be HHI of 300k. I don’t know how to solve this. We can’t take that hit if we want to send our kids to college. We don’t even travel a lot, we have one old car, we live relatively modestly. It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer. Maybe the problem is we built our life around his earning potential. It was exciting, but now I’m lost.

It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer.

Just to be clear, the percentage of men who would feel comfortable making this decision is much smaller. The expectation from an early age is that you need to be able to provide. So doing this -- deliberately picking a career where financial struggles are pretty much guaranteed -- would seem pretty self-indulgent. Which is not to say, of course, that plenty of men don't do this. You can name lots of famous ones. It's just much more rare.

Yet more typical is the attraction of women to low-earning, stereotypically female career paths, like teaching or other helping professions. I assume that part of this attraction is social. But it perpetuates earnings disparity in marriages.

Earning lots of money is hard and requires a lot of deliberate decision making over a long period of time. In general it's pretty hard to slouch your way toward that outcome, in part because it's a competitive world and everyone is trying to do it. If it's not something you want, or are taught to want, then it's not going to happen.

Excellent point. Or never having to figure out how to monetize your career. I spent my 30s doing exactly that after building up a specialty and career in a lower paying industry. Part of it is that some industries have a later payoff. If you drop out before then, you’re forever the lower earner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to derail this, but when are we going to stop teaching our daughters to take less lucrative careers? It feels like these situations are always the product of marriages where the man’s earning power, based on what they do for a living, is so much greater. If one person stays at home it’s not going to be the $1 million plus earner, if there’s just one of those. It’s not the values driving the decision, it’s just the economics.

Many of us just by nature had less lucrative careers and ended up with partners whose earning potential was 10x higher than ours. I had worked for 10 years in my career before meeting my husband who made next to nothing when we met. For our quality of life, I stepped back a bit and it worked for us for 7 years, until it didn’t. He makes 500k now, and can probably make 7 figures in the next 5 years. I was a writer at a nonprofit. So if I want to go back to work (which was always over 40 hours/week), he would have to majorly step back in his career in order to do 50%. So instead of HHI of 500k, it’d be HHI of 300k. I don’t know how to solve this. We can’t take that hit if we want to send our kids to college. We don’t even travel a lot, we have one old car, we live relatively modestly. It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer. Maybe the problem is we built our life around his earning potential. It was exciting, but now I’m lost.

It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer.

Just to be clear, the percentage of men who would feel comfortable making this decision is much smaller. The expectation from an early age is that you need to be able to provide. So doing this -- deliberately picking a career where financial struggles are pretty much guaranteed -- would seem pretty self-indulgent. Which is not to say, of course, that plenty of men don't do this. You can name lots of famous ones. It's just much more rare.

Yet more typical is the attraction of women to low-earning, stereotypically female career paths, like teaching or other helping professions. I assume that part of this attraction is social. But it perpetuates earnings disparity in marriages.

Earning lots of money is hard and requires a lot of deliberate decision making over a long period of time. In general it's pretty hard to slouch your way toward that outcome, in part because it's a competitive world and everyone is trying to do it. If it's not something you want, or are taught to want, then it's not going to happen.

I was doing just fine on my own. Saving for retirement, financially stable, successful in my career. I also worked with many men who were the same and all of my boyfriends up until DH had a similar income potential. So, don’t give me this BS that because I wasn’t raised by tiger parents that I was engaging in some “luxury” by working 60 hours a week, making 150k. The mental gymnastics men participate in to justify this misogynistic crap is so effing tired.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to derail this, but when are we going to stop teaching our daughters to take less lucrative careers? It feels like these situations are always the product of marriages where the man’s earning power, based on what they do for a living, is so much greater. If one person stays at home it’s not going to be the $1 million plus earner, if there’s just one of those. It’s not the values driving the decision, it’s just the economics.

Many of us just by nature had less lucrative careers and ended up with partners whose earning potential was 10x higher than ours. I had worked for 10 years in my career before meeting my husband who made next to nothing when we met. For our quality of life, I stepped back a bit and it worked for us for 7 years, until it didn’t. He makes 500k now, and can probably make 7 figures in the next 5 years. I was a writer at a nonprofit. So if I want to go back to work (which was always over 40 hours/week), he would have to majorly step back in his career in order to do 50%. So instead of HHI of 500k, it’d be HHI of 300k. I don’t know how to solve this. We can’t take that hit if we want to send our kids to college. We don’t even travel a lot, we have one old car, we live relatively modestly. It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer. Maybe the problem is we built our life around his earning potential. It was exciting, but now I’m lost.

It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer.

Just to be clear, the percentage of men who would feel comfortable making this decision is much smaller. The expectation from an early age is that you need to be able to provide. So doing this -- deliberately picking a career where financial struggles are pretty much guaranteed -- would seem pretty self-indulgent. Which is not to say, of course, that plenty of men don't do this. You can name lots of famous ones. It's just much more rare.

Yet more typical is the attraction of women to low-earning, stereotypically female career paths, like teaching or other helping professions. I assume that part of this attraction is social. But it perpetuates earnings disparity in marriages.

Earning lots of money is hard and requires a lot of deliberate decision making over a long period of time. In general it's pretty hard to slouch your way toward that outcome, in part because it's a competitive world and everyone is trying to do it. If it's not something you want, or are taught to want, then it's not going to happen.

I was doing just fine on my own. Saving for retirement, financially stable, successful in my career. I also worked with many men who were the same and all of my boyfriends up until DH had a similar income potential. So, don’t give me this BS that because I wasn’t raised by tiger parents that I was engaging in some “luxury” by working 60 hours a week, making 150k. The mental gymnastics men participate in to justify this misogynistic crap is so effing tired.

I don't think you get it, but that's kind of the point.

[Anonymous]

Beyond the practical solution for your problem—It seems kind of unreasonable to make such a rigid condition in the first place. Who could forsee that Fridays would look the same for him in perpetuity? It’s a thing that can’t be promised in the first place. You basically premeditated a resentment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Beyond the practical solution for your problem—It seems kind of unreasonable to make such a rigid condition in the first place. Who could forsee that Fridays would look the same for him in perpetuity? It’s a thing that can’t be promised in the first place. You basically premeditated a resentment.

People can’t seem to grasp the concept that this is an OPTION for him. He made a deal. If he wants to work from home on Fridays, he can figure out a workaround for himself. I’m sure their local library is a shorter commute than his work. He can go there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP with an update.

But before that, actually, I do get paid for hosting this event. It’s nominal, but I do get paid for my time. So there’s that.

I hosted like usual on Friday. I told him I was standing my ground. Initially, he was fine with it, even supportive, but then yesterday evening started to pout a little bit about it. I think he was giving one last effort to wear me down but he is going to find out that I won’t budge on this. This morning, he actually brought it up in a pleasant manner. We’ll see.

Ugh

[Anonymous]

Do not state it as, "standing your ground", just mention it is happening as usual

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here.

I have to give more info because people assume it has to do with childcare or that I’m some other poster who posted above moving. That’s not me and this has nothing to do with childcare.

So, I host a weekly event on Friday mornings from my home. It’s been ongoing most every Friday for years. Now all of a sudden my husband has a WFH option on Fridays. His workaround for me is to host Saturday, or later on Fridays, or from somewhere else, but that doesn’t work for the others, and I’m not interested in moving this to the weekend or somewhere else. He needs quiet, so my hosting is a conflict.

Someone asked what I would advise as a workaround, and that would be for HIM to WFH somewhere else on Fridays, but I can’t, because he’s the “breadwinner” and so his preference trumps mine.

But I was assured the house would be mine on Friday mornings. I was very clear in this, and he knew how important this was to me.

You have a husband problem.
Since he's the breadwinner he views you as less..

Ugh.

Here’s the thing. If this disrupts his job or it has negative effects, they could end up unable to pay bills or the mortgage. There can be major consequences.

If she can’t host her event, what’s the worst thing that happens?

I can’t imagine not even working and then telling my DH who goes into an office four days a week that he can’t WFH on Friday. That just seems crappy.

If I were the husband I’d tell her that if I don’t work, she won’t be hosting her event since we won’t have a house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Beyond the practical solution for your problem—It seems kind of unreasonable to make such a rigid condition in the first place. Who could forsee that Fridays would look the same for him in perpetuity? It’s a thing that can’t be promised in the first place. You basically premeditated a resentment.

People can’t seem to grasp the concept that this is an OPTION for him. He made a deal. If he wants to work from home on Fridays, he can figure out a workaround for himself. I’m sure their local library is a shorter commute than his work. He can go there.

Imagine telling the sole breadwinner he can’t work from his own house. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to derail this, but when are we going to stop teaching our daughters to take less lucrative careers? It feels like these situations are always the product of marriages where the man’s earning power, based on what they do for a living, is so much greater. If one person stays at home it’s not going to be the $1 million plus earner, if there’s just one of those. It’s not the values driving the decision, it’s just the economics.

Many of us just by nature had less lucrative careers and ended up with partners whose earning potential was 10x higher than ours. I had worked for 10 years in my career before meeting my husband who made next to nothing when we met. For our quality of life, I stepped back a bit and it worked for us for 7 years, until it didn’t. He makes 500k now, and can probably make 7 figures in the next 5 years. I was a writer at a nonprofit. So if I want to go back to work (which was always over 40 hours/week), he would have to majorly step back in his career in order to do 50%. So instead of HHI of 500k, it’d be HHI of 300k. I don’t know how to solve this. We can’t take that hit if we want to send our kids to college. We don’t even travel a lot, we have one old car, we live relatively modestly. It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer. Maybe the problem is we built our life around his earning potential. It was exciting, but now I’m lost.

It wasn’t that I was taught to take a less lucrative career, it was that finance or lawyering sounded like hell on earth to me and I wanted to be a writer.

Just to be clear, the percentage of men who would feel comfortable making this decision is much smaller. The expectation from an early age is that you need to be able to provide. So doing this -- deliberately picking a career where financial struggles are pretty much guaranteed -- would seem pretty self-indulgent. Which is not to say, of course, that plenty of men don't do this. You can name lots of famous ones. It's just much more rare.

Yet more typical is the attraction of women to low-earning, stereotypically female career paths, like teaching or other helping professions. I assume that part of this attraction is social. But it perpetuates earnings disparity in marriages.

Earning lots of money is hard and requires a lot of deliberate decision making over a long period of time. In general it's pretty hard to slouch your way toward that outcome, in part because it's a competitive world and everyone is trying to do it. If it's not something you want, or are taught to want, then it's not going to happen.

I would trade the way women are treated in society generally to having this problem instead.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Beyond the practical solution for your problem—It seems kind of unreasonable to make such a rigid condition in the first place. Who could forsee that Fridays would look the same for him in perpetuity? It’s a thing that can’t be promised in the first place. You basically premeditated a resentment.

People can’t seem to grasp the concept that this is an OPTION for him. He made a deal. If he wants to work from home on Fridays, he can figure out a workaround for himself. I’m sure their local library is a shorter commute than his work. He can go there.

Imagine telling the sole breadwinner he can’t work from his own house. Good luck.

Earning more money does not get you more power in your household unless you are acknowledging that your spouse is your property that you keep to give you babies, status, and housekeeping. Men who feel that earning more means they get what they want are universally hated by their wives and they won’t be married long.