More Magazine Article: Some Men Are Threatened When Their Wives Earn More Money.

My wife makes more than me

By: Jay Teitel

“It’s an unpredictable situation, making less money than your wife,” says Trey Martin, a 43-year-old high school math teacher married to Mary, a 42-year-old tax lawyer, as he adjusts the sugar container on the table between us in a downtown Toronto restaurant. “I’ll give you an example. I would have figured you couldn’t find a couple more comfortable with the situation than us. So when I told Mary that you were doing a story about how husbands felt about earning less, I said that I of course didn’t really care. You know what she said? ‘Maybe you should.’

“I didn’t see that coming.”

Trey Martin, as it happens, is not Trey Martin’s name. Nor is his wife’s name Mary, nor does he teach high school math, nor does she practise tax law. What is true? We did meet at a restaurant to talk, he does make about $70,000 a year, and his wife does make three times that much. And he, like almost every other man interviewed for this article, declined to participate unless I kept his identity secret.

Husbands who make less

Not only was it difficult to get men to speak on the record about making less than their spouse, it was difficult to find men  — and women — who would admit it in the first place. Studies vary slightly, but it’s generally acknowledged that about 30 per cent of the women in the workforce today make more money than their husbands. This means that a third of the married women you see in the workplace are the bigger breadwinners in their families. The statistic is startling given that women still make, on average, only 78 per cent of what men make in the same job. If you could institute equal pay overnight, in other words, the percentage of women who make more than their husbands would probably jump to more than half.

So they are out there, the HWMLs (husbands who make less). And they’re generally an interesting group of guys — unaffected and honest, with a strong sense of themselves. But a unique mixture of wariness and candour characterizes almost all of them, too. It’s not that they don’t have the same ego as other men; they’re just usually better at controlling the impulse.

Trey Martin is a case in point. An apparently well-adjusted and secure man, he’s proud enough of his wife’s accomplishments that he’ll trumpet them enthusiastically to anyone who’s interested. But a “but” creeps into any discussion of his married financial life — one he’s ruefully aware of

“I think I can honestly say that it [his wife’s more lucrative income] doesn’t affect my sense of who I am in any significant way. And it hasn’t affected our allocation of duties in our house, either. I cook more because I like to cook, she cleans more because she, God love her, doesn’t mind it. But I should point out that there were a few years there where I was supporting her outright while she finished her studies. So it hasn’t always been tilted in her favour.” He smiles again over the condiments. “Nice rationalization, no?”

Nice — and common. Take commercial real estate broker Ron Gilmore, another pseudonymous Torontonian I spoke to, whose wife, a high-level executive in a government utility, had a more dependable income than he did. Gilmore is one of the most affable and laid-back people I’ve ever met. “My business is a crapshoot. Some years were extraordinary and some years she’d make more than me — sometimes dramatically more. It was never a big deal to me. I never knew whether we had 10 dollars in the bank, or 10 grand. Whatever we earned just went into the pot and she did all the finances. Mind you, she hated my business, because you can’t cash-flow it.”

Gilmore spoke in the past tense when I talked to him because he no longer has a wife; after 29 years of marriage, she’d called it quits. Even though he assures me that this didn’t happen because of the differences in earning power, or because of his lack of “drive,” it’s hard to resist conjecture as to what part these things played. Even Gilmore makes sure to add that he was, “for many years, the only breadwinner.”

“Not long ago,” began a recent article by Dan Kadlec, co-author of The Power Years, a guide for baby boomers, “my wife started making more money than me. There, I said it. Don’t think it was easy.”

When your wife’s career soars

Roughly speaking, HWMLs fall into one of three broad categories: men who have particularly homebound professions (this includes writers and telemarketers, and excludes men who are stay-at-home fathers and bring in no outside income); young (or at least young-ish) men who work out of the home at more conventional jobs; and previously high-powered middle-aged men who find themselves suddenly foundering professionally while their wives’ careers soar. According to Barbara Moses, author of Dish: Midlife Women Tell the Truth About Work, Relationships, and the Rest of Life, this last growing trend is a result of the tendency of middle-aged male executives to be increasingly unwilling to change or to exchange ideas as they age, and the inverse willingness of midlife women to do both. According to Moses, “Women become engaged, men withdraw—rather than wanting to be challenged or stretched, they [the men] want to be left alone to do their own thing.”

Meanwhile, the women who are becoming engaged while the men withdraw — i.e., women who make more than their husbands — have some reactions to the situation that are less predictable than you might expect. One reason for this is the fact that even when the woman is earning more, it seems to have little impact on the generally inequitable distribution of household duties that still exists in most modern marriages. Even when the women make more, they tend to end up doing most of the housework and child rearing. Resentment can result. But another reason is pure cognitive dissonance — internal warring impulses in the female high-earner psyche.

In the 2000 movie What Women Want, Mel Gibson, playing a Chicago ad executive who finds himself with the ability to read women’s minds, concocts a Nike ad for women’s running shoes by reading his female boss’s (Helen Hunt’s) mind. The voice-over uses “the road” as a foil for men, as in, the road doesn’t care if you make more money than it does. The implication is that women would like it if their husbands didn’t care if their wives made more money. But this is not always the case. Consider Victoria Secunda, a New York magazine editor whose husband, Shel, encouraged her in the mid-’90s to quit her job and “pursue her dream of becoming a full-time writer.” She took him up on his offer, struggled for 10 years, then wrote a book that earned a huge advance and a raft of publicity, in the process making her more money than her husband (and eventually landing her on Oprah). Her reaction?

“Shel had no problem with my out-earning him; I was the one with the problem. It felt, well, weird being the primary breadwinner. On the up side, I was able at last to buy new couches for the living room and assorted other longed-for, high-ticket items. The down side: I found myself alternately worrying (unnecessarily) about Shel’s ego, and being royally annoyed that I was in the money-making lead. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to be taken care of, if only theoretically. I wanted my income to be the bonus, not the necessity, with Shel hauling in the bigger bucks. This, despite my passionate feminism, my independent streak, my belief that women should pull their own weight. The real feminist, it turns out, was the man I was married to.”

Have your cake, eat it too, and pretend someone else is paying

Strictly from a man’s point of view, sentiments like Secunda’s, although honest, can seem pretty barbaric. While high-earning women reserve the right to earn, she’s saying, they also simultaneously reserve the right to the conventional impulse, which includes their husbands feeling that in a world unfolding as it should be, they, the husbands, should be making more than their wives. This is like wanting to have your cake, eat it too, and pretend that someone else is paying.

Meanwhile, in another reaction that turns political correctness on its head, women in Secunda’s position can also become disappointed when their husband’s level of ambition doesn’t match their own. This was certainly the case with the wife of Ron Gilmore, the laconic real estate agent. And it’s true in the case of another HWML I interviewed, a dentist from Ottawa I’ll call Peter Smith. Smith is a member of the sub-species of rich HWMLs: He makes a fortune, but his wife, an endodontist (a specialist in root canals), makes an even bigger fortune.

“I was actually a little ahead at the beginning of our marriage income-wise, because I was out of school a year earlier. And to be perfectly accurate, there was a time when there was a larger gap; now it’s smaller. To my mind it’s an immaterial gap. After tax it’s practically non-existent. All right, it’s still there after tax. Of course I keep score; I’m a guy. And she consumes a lot more than I do. I’m the one who’s always topping up. How pathetic does all this sound?”

According to Kate White, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, the trickiest situation for a marriage is when the wife has both more money and more fame than her spouse. When I tell Peter this, he makes a mournful sound. “I’m screwed both ways. We travel in the same social circles, and she’s much more high profile than I am; she’s on boards, she’s doing seminars. She’s a lot more of a hustler than I am.” His voice on the phone drops a level. “Just between you and me, I wouldn’t mind slowing down a bit now, going into the office less and taking it easy. But I have to keep going to keep up. I’d take a break from the race if she would, but she won’t, so I have no choice. If I can last at this rate for another 10 years it’ll be an f-ing miracle.”

What, I say, if his wife had inherited her superior money, as opposed to making it on the job? Would that make a difference?

“Are you kidding? That’d be gravy.”

And therein lies the rub. Historically it’s always been considered acceptable, even canny, for a man to marry a rich woman, at least a woman with a rich father. As long as a man had a respectable income of his own, the money descending from a father — another male —was a tolerable form of the masculine compact. But if the “sugar mama” has amassed her assets through her own labour, as is increasingly the case, the compact is far more likely to hide a minefield. Men are allowed to marry into money as substance, but not money as process.

The changing landscape of household income

The subject of fathers comes up, incidentally, with the last HWML I talked to, the pseudonymous Christopher Brown, a sportswriter and editor in his early thirties who’s spent the last seven years supporting his wife through med school and her residency as a surgeon, and who is just about to cross the threshold into HWMLdom. This year for the first time, his wife will earn more than he does — and from here on in, the contest is over. This might have been why his wife’s father, who refused to meet Brown in person till the wedding, was adamant that his daughter have a pre-nuptial agreement. Brown was amenable, lawyers were hired, but the process became so divisive that eventually they decided to forget the whole pre-nup idea, her father notwithstanding, and get married without one. They pooled their money, used one bank account (something that Dan Kadlec advises against when the income gap starts to grow), and had a baby. At dinner parties with his wife’s male colleagues, Brown turned out to be the centre of the other guys’ attention; they were all intrigued about, and often envious of, what he did for a living. But Brown acknowledges that the landscape is changing now.

“I’ve always known this day was coming. Am I disappointed? I don’t think so, but it’s still no fun; it’s like moving into old age…. But I can’t really see it affecting my pride, or turning me into a kept man.

“In fact, I can only think of one place where it might be tough. My wife wonders about this too: midlife crisis. The typical midlife crisis behaviour is, here I am, middle-aged, supporting my wife, supporting my kids, never spent any money on myself, stuck in a mid-level job, dammit, I’m buying myself a sports car. But it won’t be my money buying the sports car, it’ll be hers. She’ll be into it, I know — ‘Go ahead, buy a sports car.’ But having a midlife crisis on someone else’s money — that could be tough.”I know what he means. Not that I’m having a midlife crisis. But my wife makes more money than I do, too.

Just don’t tell anybody.