THE COMMITMENTS
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go out for lunch with your friends, he can’t go out to lunch with his coworkers.You’ve got to share the burden equally. Remember, the one who brings home the paycheck doesn’t have the power to decide how it’s spent. The two of you who share that money have equal decision-making power. Give the relationship power over the money—do not make money more powerful than the relationship.
Woman as Breadwinner The statistics show that increasingly women are outearning their husbands—a phenomenon unthinkable in our mothers’ generation and so newsworthy even now that it was a trend story on the cover of several national magazines.Yes, the woman as breadwinner is another example of how history is being rewritten in our lifetime.This radical shift in our society means that while the rules are changing for women, they are also necessarily changing for men, which creates new problems for men and women alike. Whether their paycheck covers the household expenses or not, men today still carry the emotional and financial burden of the traditional role of breadwinner.When both spouses work but the wife outearns her husband, I can assure you that no matter what is said, earning less than his wife affects a man’s sense of his own masculinity. He may say it doesn’t matter, he may say he’s fine with it, but trust me—it is hard for a man when his friends make more than he does, when his friends have fancier cars or bigger houses, so imagine how hard it is for him to be truly at peace with the notion that his wife brings home a paycheck bigger than his. It takes a mighty big and enlightened man to be comfortable with this role reversal. Now, what I’ve seen happen time and again in these relationships is that the wife tends to disown her power and downplay her role as breadwinner. She doesn’t talk about it, she backs away