After dropping off their children at their East Side private
school one morning, Betsy and another mother shared a secret. “It was one of
those things where you circle around each other,” Betsy remembers. “I assumed
they had a pretty conventional marriage.”
By that she means, as with most of the other families at the
school, the other woman’s husband was a chest-beating breadwinner who set off
for Wall Street each morning in his Town Car to bring home the six- or
seven-figure bacon. Or, alternatively, both husband and wife slaved away at
medium-to-high-powered jobs, neglecting their children, to pay for the August
rental in the Hamptons and their $25,000-per-kid tuition bills.
The embarrassing truth the other mother confided to Betsy
was that she was her family’s sole support. She worked in advertising while her
spouse, an “artist”—predominantly in his own imagination, since he had not a
single gallery show nor even a commission to show for his talent—puttered
around the house. “She kind of indicated they were living on her money, and I
was surprised,” Betsy says.
And perhaps a little relieved. Betsy thought she was the
only mother in their grade supporting a stay-at-home husband—especially one who
refused to polish the surfaces. “It’s like one of those things,” she says,
“where you realize you’re married to people who drink.”
Well into feminism’s second generation, there are finally a
significant number of women reaching parity with the men in their fields—not to
mention surpassing them—and winning the salary, bonuses, and perks that signify
their arrival. (The Town Cars idling in front of their children’s schools these
days at morning drop-off are almost as likely to be Mom’s as Dad’s.) In 2001,
for example, wives earned more than their spouses in almost a third of married
households where the wife worked. Yet this proud professional achievement often
seems to have unhappy consequences at home.
From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Alias to Kill Bill, the
culture has for some time been awash in fantasies of powerful women. Fetching
as these female superheroes may be—and however potent at the box office and in
the Nielsens—are these really the same chicks the average, or even
above-average, guy wants to curl up next to in bed in real life? Perhaps not.
As the wives grow more powerful and confident, their husbands often seem to
diminish in direct proportion to their success.
Indeed, there’s little evidence to show that as women
acquire financial muscle, relations between the sexes have evolved successfully
to accommodate the new balance of power. Neither the newly liberated alpha
women nor their shell-shocked beta spouses seem comfortable with the role
reversal.
For women, the shift in economic power gives them new
choices, not least among them the ability to reappraise their partner. And
husbands, for their part, may find to their chagrin that being financially
dependent isn’t exactly a turn-on. According to psychologists (and divorce
lawyers) who see couples struggling with such changes, many relationships follow
the same pattern. First, the wife starts to lose respect for her husband, then
he begins to feel emasculated, and then sex dwindles to a full stop.
Anna, a public-relations executive, saw her relationship
with her Web-designer husband collapse as she became more and more successful
and he floundered. In the last year of their marriage, she earned $270,000
while he brought in $16,000.
“He never spent money that wasn’t his in an extravagant
way,” she says while taking therapeutic sips of a Sea Breeze at Tribeca Grill
on a recent evening. “But by not helping, he was freeloading.”
She felt unable to confront him. “We were really
dysfunctional,” she admits. “We acted as if we were a two-income family. He was
in denial, and I was sort of protecting him. He’d pay for groceries. He was
running up credit-card debt to make it appear he had more money.”
While they may have been able to avoid the truth while she
was off at work during the day, it came back to haunt them at night. “Sexuality
is based on respect and admiration and desire,” says Anna. “If you’ve lost
respect for somebody, it’s very hard to have it work. And our relationship
initially had been very sexual, at the expense of other things.
“Sex was not a problem for him,” she goes on. “It was a
problem for me. When someone seems like a child, it’s not that attractive. In
the end, it felt like I had three children.”
“The minute it becomes parental, it becomes asexual,” agrees
Betsy. “A friend of mine who works and MAKES MONEY and whose husband doesn’t
told me one day that he was taking $100-an-hour tennis lessons,” she recalls.
“She said to him, ‘You are not in the $100-an-hour category.’ She had to spell
it out for him. It was totally parental.”
There are, of course, happy exceptions: couples evolved
enough to feel perfectly comfortable acknowledging that the wife is more driven
to be the breadwinner, so it makes sense for everyone if he’s giving junior his
first feeding while she’s off covering the presidential campaign.
“Kurt has never been someone who defines himself by his
job,” says Jami Floyd, a correspondent with ABC’s 20/20, of her stay-at-home
husband, Kurt Flehinger. “Nor does he care much what people think about him.
He’s not a Master of the Universe type. I am much more testosteronic. I’m much
more driven, much more traditionally male.”
But in many cases the role reversal is the work of market
forces as much as force of personality; the husband’s career is expected to
take precedence, and initially it does, but it’s overtaken by his wife’s.
Neither of them saw it coming—nor do they welcome it.
“Maybe the guy’s industry changed and he lost his job,” says
Ken Neumann, a psychologist and divorce mediator who has seen his share of
depressed dads lately. “Or the wife steps into the right place—something she
couldn’t fully have anticipated. The question is, how secure does the guy feel?
When the woman earns more, we can’t assume in our culture it’s a nonevent.
We’re a long way off from a world where it doesn’t affect the relationship.”
Written by Ralph Gardner Jr.
