It’s Sunday morning and my husband and I are in a heated conversation about tomato plants. We have two container beds in our backyard to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and zucchinis, but he has two tomato starters still to plant. He wants to experiment with an upside down tomato planter he has seen online. Instead of buying upside down tomato planter baskets, he is going to make a contraption for the tomato plants using two white, five-gallon buckets we have in the garage.
This means that somewhere in our backyard, there will be two five-gallon buckets hanging upside down that I would rate a one on a one-to-ten scale of aesthetically pleasing yard decorations.
We compromise: he gets to hang the buckets but they will be placed in an area of our yard where our neighbors can’t see them, and I don’t have to look at them while drinking coffee on our back deck. This debate is resolved quickly compared to our ongoing arguments over who folds more laundry, who is taking our daughter to her piano lesson or how recently the refrigerator was cleaned out.
Throughout our 22-year marriage, there have been many conflicts for us to overcome, but me being the consistent breadwinner has never been a problem. The fact that my salary hasn’t even registered as an issue between us leaves me genuinely confounded when I read a Refinery29 article from last year that recently recirculated, igniting a fresh round of debate on the subject, listing a number of reasons millennial women feel conflicted about out-earning their partners. After more than two decades together debating nearly every detail of our life – from upside down tomato planters to dishwasher-loading techniques — I wonder why my salary has never been a problem within our marriage. Could my indifference to being the breadwinner — and the conflicted feelings millennial women have around it — really be tied to the generations we have been folded into?
My husband and I are both Generation Xers (I was born in 1973, my husband in 1972), and we married young; I was 23 and he was 24. The night we met – exactly one year prior to our wedding date – neither of us had started our careers yet. I had graduated three months earlier with a Bachelor of Arts in English and he was only three weeks out of the Marine Corps. Both of us were still undecided about what to do with the rest of our lives. I was working as a waitress, not sure if I wanted to apply to graduate school. He was unemployed, still living off of his military wages.
The start of our careers aligns with the start of our relationship. By the time we moved in together, I had decided against going to graduate school and accepted an entry level job at an ad agency. He began working for an electrical services company, training to be an electrician. We both knew, because of my degree, I would most likely earn more. Even with our first jobs in 1995, I was a salaried employee making approximately $24,000 a year. He was paid hourly, earning a couple dollars over minimum wage.
Eventually, my husband earned a technical degree along with the necessary networking certifications to manage computer systems, but our earning power was already established. As I worked up the ranks into more senior marketing positions, my paycheck grew at a faster rate than his did. Not once did this cause a rift between us.
As Generation Xers, we are sandwiched between baby boomers and millennials. In an interview with Goldman Sachs, generation expert Neil Howe (the author who coined the term millennial) defined Generation X as latchkey kids who trust no one. “From early on, they understood that focusing on the bottom line was more important in life than ideals.”
Millennials, on the other hand, have been shaped by different forces. A 2015 report from Goldman Sachs claims lower employment levels and smaller incomes have left millennials with less money than previous generations. As a result, millennials are more likely to postpone commitments like marriage and home ownership.
The Millennial women interviewed in the Refinery29 article used words like “tired,” “exhausted” and “resentful” when asked how they would feel if they knew they would always be the breadwinner. I imagine, as a generation faced with fewer employment opportunities and less earning potential than previous generations, being charged at the beginning of a relationship with the bulk of your financial well-being for both you and your partner would feel tiring and exhausting and could make you resentful.
As a working mother of a fourteen-year-old and nine-year-old, there are definitely days I feel tired and exhausted, but not because I am the breadwinner. Being tired and exhausted is inevitable when you have a full-time career and kids. I am sure when I’m out of town, or unavailable to cook dinner, pick up the clutter of our lives and handle bedtime routines, my husband is just as tired and exhausted as I often am at the end of the day.
It has never occurred to me that I would feel resentful about earning more than my husband. Mostly, I am thankful I can contribute what I do to our income and grateful for the career I have (realizing that as I type this, I’m only reinforcing my Gen X nature of remaining focused on the bottom line).
There have been two times during our marriage when my husband earned more. The first time was in 2003. We were both working full-time when I was laid off from my marketing manager position with a local health care company. Instead of searching for a new full-time job, I began freelance writing. While he continued to work full-time and provide our health insurance, I began building a short list of client work that amounted to less than half of what I was earning as a full-time marketing executive.
Within a few months of being a freelance writer, I became pregnant with our first child. What we thought was going to be the perfect setup — him working work full-time, bringing home most of the money and providing our health insurance, while I had the baby and freelanced — ended abruptly when he lost his job six months into the pregnancy.
Already panicked about becoming first-time parents, we were now both unemployed and faced with an $800 per month Cobra payment to continue our health care coverage. The only logical solution was for both of us to begin a job search.
At six months pregnant, my interview attire consisted of a long black button down dress blazer that hit well below my waist to hide a rapidly growing baby bump — it looked like something Prince would have worn if he was a mid-level bank manager. On our tight budget, I bought the blazer to pair with the black dress slacks I already owned but couldn’t zip up over my now protruding stomach.
Less than a month into the interview process, my husband was offered a position that came complete with full benefits – and I was offered a contract position, that turned into a full-time role as a marketing director. Within a year of becoming a new mom, I was earning nearly double my husband’s salary. We were both thrilled — we had a new baby, new jobs, two paychecks and health insurance. Not once did it occur to either of us that there was a problem with me earning more.
Maybe our indifference to my role as the breadwinner isn’t connected to being Generation Xers but instead because we address our biggest challenges — like being pregnant and unemployed — as equal halves of the same unit. We’ve built our careers the same way we’ve built our relationship, each of us supporting the other in whatever way we can. I’ve never looked to him to save me, and his masculinity has never been threatened by my abilities. I know this because when I asked him if he has ever felt threatened that I earn more, his response wasn’t a "yes" or "no" answer. Instead he asked me, “Why would I ever feel threatened by how much you make?”
My husband knew what he was getting when he married me. Along with my English degree, I minored in women’s studies. I also chose to keep my maiden name. The first night we met, we spent most of the evening arguing over Shannon Faulkner’s treatment during her time as the first female cadet at The Citadel and whether or not she deserved to be there. (It took nearly 20 years, but I have since convinced him she did in fact belong there and was horribly mistreated by fellow cadet members as well as the state of South Carolina.)
While who we are within our stations in life may in part be attributed to our generation, my ideas around work and a woman’s earning potential were also shaped by my grandmothers. Both women worked outside the home during an era when working mothers were not part of the cultural norm. My maternal grandmother began her career as a switchboard operator for the local phone company when she was a teenager. She remained with the phone company until she retired in the mid-1980s, working her way up to the executive offices as administrative support to the C-level suite. While it was never confirmed, I am sure she earned more than my grandfather, a factor that no doubt played into their divorce.
My father’s mother was an entrepreneur by necessity. After her divorce in 1970, with four of her six children still living at home, she had only $6.38 in her bank account. My grandmother supported herself and her family running a local grocery store she opened in our small Indiana town. It remained in business until I was in grade school.
Both of my grandmothers took responsibility for their financial well-being at a time when many women didn’t even have checking accounts in their own names. I can’t begin to imagine the challenges my grandmother faced and the sexism she overcame during her 40-year career as an office worker during the second half of the 20th century. I am just as awed by my other grandmother’s strength and resiliency to rebuild her life and create financial stability for herself and her children.
The second time my husband out-earned me during our marriage was six years ago. I was desperate to make a career change and left my job as a marketing director — and my senior-level salary — to become a writer. I remember sitting alone in my home office one morning, just days after quitting my full-time job, in a near panic attack over what I had done. My husband had already left for work and the kids were at school when my phone rang.
“It’s me,” said my husband, “I just wanted you to know how proud I am of you. We’re going to be fine, no matter what happens.”
He was right. Within a year, I landed a full-time role as a reporter. By this stage in our marriage, his annual income was within $20,000 of mine, but I was once again the top earner in our relationship and have remained the breadwinner ever since. Without his encouragement, I never would have had the nerve to change careers — and without his unwavering faith that we would both be OK, neither of us would have come as far as we have in our work or our marriage.
We may not agree on how best to hang upside down tomato vines, but whatever it is we planted more than 20 years ago has kept us from suffering any conflicted feelings over who earns more. I don’t know if this is a generational thing or simply who we are. I do know that we consider our income in the same way we consider all other aspects of our married life — as something we’ve built together.
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