LOVE AND MONEY
January 6, 2002
By ELLYN SPRAGINS
[W] hen I told a married friend that I would be writing a column about wives who make more money than their husbands, he snorted out a laugh. Then he said, "I wish we had that problem," using his fingers to scratch quotation marks in the air as he uttered the word "problem."
As it turns out, the quotation marks weren't necessary. To many men, a wife rolling in dough sounds like a fantasy come true. But earning significantly more money than your husband is more than a potential relationship problem ? it's shrouded in more secrecy than any other money issue I've written about here.
One successful, outspoken woman after another told me that she could not really talk about it ? or at least not with her name attached. An entrepreneur in New York City chatted happily for a half-hour about financial conflicts and then called back the next day to say that after talking to her husband she wanted to retract what she said. Husbands were offered as interview subjects but never returned calls. I felt as if I were covering a drug-trafficking story.
Do husbands really need all this protection? Many of their wives think so. "The guy's ego is all caught up in being the breadwinner and if you take that away from him you take away a lot of his self-confidence," said a public relations executive in Boston who earns more than her husband.
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A business owner from New York City, who has been married for 20 years, added: "I would never want people we know socially to know. I think it would be a real blow to his ego."
Not all high-earning wives feel that they need to tiptoe around their husbands' fragile masculinity. Women in their 20's and 30's are much more comfortable than older women with the Chief Breadwinner designation, said Ellen Perry, founder of Family Office Solutions, a wealth management consulting firm in Washington. And women whose husbands are in low-paying professions ? the arts or social work, for example ? rarely feel the need to keep secret their income disparity.
No, concealment seems most necessary when a couple's W-2 forms don't follow the apparent script handed to each partner on the wedding day. Ah, you don't remember receiving it? Of course not. A couple's earnings premise, as I think of it, is rarely articulated. But it's there all the same, embedded in the couple's career choices. He is going into investment banking and she is going to teach? The pact is that he will make the serious money and she will have a family-friendly work schedule.
If either partner deviates from the script, trouble tends to come knocking. But when a wife ad-libs by hitting a career jackpot, the strain can be enormous. Barbara Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Group, a large Manhattan real estate firm that was acquired last fall by the Cendant Corporation (news/quote ) and Apollo Management, remembers the year after her brokerage company's growth far outpaced that of her husband's real estate business, in New Jersey. She and her husband, Bill Higgins, survived the strain, but not without some fears.
"I actually sat down and thought, `I better not do this,' " she said. "I valued my marriage and was fearful of losing my husband's love. I wasn't sure if he would love me as much if I was going to seem stronger than him."
Many relationships don't outlast the stress, psychologists and wealth management consultants say. And many couples that succeed often work hard to preserve the myth, even within the marriage, that the husband is the Chief Breadwinner.
"We don't talk about it," said the Boston public relations executive. "He'll tell me I'm beautiful but he'll never compliment me about the end- of-year tax return. He puts it in front of my face, asks me to sign it and not a word passes our lips."
Steven Axelrod, a clinical psychologist in Manhattan who specializes in work issues, says there is "a veil of silence around this kind of thing, even in many good marriages."
A sad collection of unanswered questions and lonely moments accompany that silence. Many wives feel chained to their earning power and angry that they have somehow engineered a life without an exit clause. "I worked since I was 13, but still somewhere in the back reaches of my mind I was dreaming about being rescued like Cinderella," Ms. Corcoran, 52, said. "I was resentful that I didn't have the option that all the other girls had."
Worse, though, are the nagging questions that eat away at mutual respect. Why isn't my husband more successful? "Unless there is some emotional contract, some way of feeling that the man is being productive, there can be a real loss of status in the woman's eyes," Mr. Axelrod said. "Then the man will internalize that."
You'd probably like to hear how husbands feel. So would I. If high- earning wives sometimes feel lonely and enslaved, imagine what their spouses are experiencing. Without their voices, this story is only Part One.
So how about it, guys? Speak up. You may have more company than you realize. The biggest secret about this secret society of fiscally unequal couples is that they are common at high-income levels. Among all married couples, about 22 percent of the wives earn more than their husbands, according to the government's Current Population Survey. But among couples in which the wife earned $100,000 or more, 68 percent of the wives outearned the husbands.
I'm listening. |
