I Suddenly Found Myself The Breadwinner In Our Family. I Didn't Expect What It Would Do To My Marriage.
Not too long after I sold my book to a Big Five publisher for a six-figure advance, my husband lost his job.
Even though money wasn’t an issue on account of the book deal — and I was actually relieved that he could take over the lion’s share of invisible labor that I’d been managing for years on top of my low-paid, part-time freelance work — I felt my partner’s stress level rise.
The book I sold, “Shame on You: How To Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification,” is a deep dive into how our unconscious emotions, and unfelt shame in particular, can keep us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. So it’s ironic that I was reticent to explore what the situation kicked up.
In retrospect, I felt guilty.
Pursuing my career goals, I believed, had impacted my partner’s abilities to pursue his. Even though I’d become the “provider,” I still felt as if I needed his permission to work. I felt irritated when I came home to a sloppy playroom or a sink full of dishes. (The house was always clean on my watch.) I felt, at times, as if my husband resented me — which made me resent him. I worried for our future and, yes, I felt ashamed: Was my marriage not as equitable as I’d always imagined?
According to financial expert Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez, my husband and I are in no way unique. In a 2023 article for Glamour UK, O’Connell Rodriguez used the term “ambition penalty” to describe the social, professional and financial costs that women face when they go after what they want.
“Research finds that women enter the workforce with the same or higher levels of ambition as men. But while men are praised and rewarded for their ambitions, women are far more likely to be penalised for acting on theirs,” O’Connell Rodriguez writes.
In the workplace, women who actively pursue leadership positions are labeled aggressive, demanding and money-motivated, and they are perceived as less likable and hirable. But according to O’Connell Rodriguez, our most intimate relationships suffer, too.
For example, O’Connell Rodriguez tells me, breadwinning women are up to three times more likely to get cheated on by their husbands. Or there may be, as she puts it, “backlash in the form of their partners withdrawing from the domestic labor and refusing to help out and support their careers and their households in the same way that women who are breadwinners do. And you even see higher incidence of emotional and physical abuse when women have career success. You’ll also see divorce rates oftentimes go up.”
Particularly when a relationship starts off as equal, and the woman has some kind of professional success that eclipses her partner, the backlash can be sudden and surprising.
“It can be very disorienting, and painful,” O’Connell Rodriguez says.
Between two successful careers — one in tech and another as a freelance journalist — Brianna makes over six figures, whereas her husband, she says, “works in nonprofit and just makes no money, unfortunately.”
“My husband has never felt emasculated,” Brianna says. “He loves that I make money because it’s what keeps us financially afloat.”
Even so, she continues: “As a couple we have had to battle out gender norms because I did a lot of household stuff when I was home, and it wasn’t a seamless transition to equitable labor. I’d say it’s a work in progress still. My husband has had periods where he’s been a stay-at-home parent and doesn’t do nearly the household labor I did as a stay-at-home mom.”
Intentional or not, it’s the kind of penalty that O’Connell Rodriguez says will cause some women to retreat from their ambitions.
In researching my book, I spoke with countless women who left their professions so that they could better fulfill the role traditionally prescribed to them. Working moms felt ashamed for not being at the PTA meeting, apologetic every time they came home after the children were already put to bed. For same-sex couples, the roles each partner takes are often more fluid, but they may still feel certain gendered expectations for themselves and each other. In some cases, our partners explicitly or unconsciously reinforce our painful feelings.
Tess and her now ex-husband, Lou, worked as professors at the same university. “Even though he always earned more, I was more well regarded on campus,” she says.
When Tess started publishing her work in well-known outlets, she says, “it became too much.”
Lou was frustrated by his lack of success, or “wins,” Tess says, “and was — I know now — crippled by anxiety.”
Tess says Lou relied on her for emotional support and reassurance that he was a good teacher, that he made a difference in his students’ lives, and that his work mattered even if he wasn’t winning accolades. “When I was just raising our girls and teaching, but not yet publishing, I think it was manageable to him,” she says. “But when I was doing those things and publishing — and making money doing it — he fell into that classic position of worrying that I didn’t ‘need’ him anymore.”
To salvage their marriage, Tess says, “it would have taken him going to therapy to have his anxiety diagnosed and treated.”
Instead, it ended in divorce.
For my book, I spoke with an old high school friend on what happened to him when a sports career didn’t materialize. “I couldn’t be ‘Ricky the athlete,’ so I became ‘Ricky the coach,’” he says. “It was safe, but it wasn’t me. I was coaching, and my wife would look at me and say: ‘You tell me you like coaching, but you look miserable. You come home and look drained.’”
Ricky’s wife is a partner at a law firm and has always made more money. “My ego has never been loud about that,” he says. “But when she comes home and she says, ‘I’m so tired, I don’t know how much more I can do this,’ my mind jumps to ‘I have to fix that. My wife’s working all the time. What kind of husband am I to make my wife do that?’”
As a husband and father, Ricky says: “Society expects me to be Andrew Tate — alpha male, head of household, making the money, just those types of stereotypical male. My role in my family is to make sure they have what they need. My children need me. My wife needs me to be there for my children.”
After COVID-19, Ricky quit coaching and became a stay-at-home dad. Before, he says, “I was doing things for my family through the lens of what everyone else thought my family needed.” Now, he says: “I take my kids everywhere. I do the cooking. The gender roles are reversed.”
“Shame-breaking comes from communication,” Ricky says. “I told my wife: ‘I don’t fit the image of the high-value male. I don’t meet the six-figures part.’ We started talking about it and the one thing that took the burden off is that she said: ‘All I ever wanted you to do was love me. I don’t need you to take care of me.’ That was a relief. I thought she had expectations for me that she didn’t. I had expectations in my head.”
As a result of these honest conversations, Ricky says, “My wife and I have gotten to a good place and rediscovered each other.”
My husband and I are working to get to this place ourselves. Even though he’s still unemployed, we started couples counseling, which created a safe space to air complicated emotional reactions. With the help of a therapist, we’re sorting out what’s happening when my husband’s effort doesn’t meet my (exceedingly high) standards. I’ve had to admit and explore the ambivalence I feel about compelling him to do what I was conditioned to believe is my job. Together, we’re confronting the ways we underestimate the value of domestic labor, and the work it takes to manage a home. We’re redefining success and what it means to contribute.
Shame resilience, as I discuss in my book, starts with giving ourselves and each other permission to acknowledge shame when it arises. I have to give my husband permission to feel his feelings, just as I work toward admitting my own, and we both have to work on not judging ourselves and each other for whatever arises.
Shame resilience is also about de-individualizing the experience — that is, recognizing that an experience is not unique to us. Instead of shifting shame back and forth within a relationship, “This needs to be a bigger conversation,” O’Connell Rodriguez says. “It’s not just about me and my relationship, or you and your relationship. And it’s not ‘men are bad, and women are good.’”
The ambition penalty, O’Connell Rodriguez says, hurts men as much as it hurts women, and it is built upon these ideas of what a man or woman should be. “It’s about saying: ‘What is it that we value in the culture and in one another? Are those definitions still serving us?’” O’Connell Rodriguez says. “Overwhelmingly, I believe the answer is no.”
Melissa Petro is a journalist whose writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Good Housekeeping, the Guardian, InStyle and many other national publications. She was a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize, and she holds a bachelor’s in women’s studies from Antioch College and a master’s in creative nonfiction from The New School. She lives with her husband and two young children in upstate New York.
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