Reply to Feeling resentful after sacrificing for my DH’s career

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]
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.[/quote]

[quote] 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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]
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.

[/quote]

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

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