Women who forget not everyone has access to money from men

[windygallows]

With 34.5% of the population aged over 16 in England ‘single and not cohabiting’ (2015 stats), it’s clear that a significant number of women in the UK, many parents, are single and having to fend for themselves/live on one income.

Yet I'm amazed at the number of women who forget that not every woman has access to a second income from a partner. In fact the privilege of having access to another’s (usually a man’s) income is often naturalized and many women are, or become, totally oblivious to this privilege.

For example just this last week I experienced:

• A woman at work going on and on about the importance of her life/work balance and suggesting I drop my hours to have similar. She works just 2 days/week and seems to forget that such a setup is an absolute privilege, thanks to a husband who works FT.

• Another woman I know who is on quite a low salary bragging about her 3 luxury holidays per year, again thanks to the income from an IT Director husband. She thought she'd give me travel tips in case I wanted to go to the same 5star holiday.

There are a million reasons why women might have to rely on men’s income but I don’t think I ABU in asking women to recognize that their lifestyle and having access to men’s money isn’t the NORM for up to 1/3 of women, who are having to get by on their own accord and lack the same privilege or financial flexibility.

I don't have DC but I'm single. I've worked since being 13 and everything I own is mine. My home will always be in my name as security. It's hard, I became unwell with a back problem which turned into an emergency and ended up off work March - August following emergency surgery
I then lost my job of 11 years. Spent a week wallowing and then brushed up CV and decided to take anything just to get a new reference
Ended up working FT as a carer/support worker and then got a better paid job, they eventually took me on FT and things were back to normal
It's exhausting, I have another severe medical condition and am immunocompromised and on medication that someone on here once said "I would rather give birth 10,000 times than take that again"
But if I don't work, nobody is going to pay the bills for me 🤷🏽‍♀️

@Tigger001 I've never met anyone, it is what it is. And the likelihood is I won't be able to afford children anyway, if I got pregnant now (I'm on two forms on contraception to avoid it!) I would have to terminate or adoption because I can't afford a child

Quite, YesQueen. I don’t know about you but I get a deep fulfilment and satisfaction from being self-sufficient that I just didn’t get when I was in a live-in relationship with someone else picking up the cost of stuff I couldn’t afford. I guess I never really stopped to consider the notion of splitting finances/planning life as one half of a couple, even from a young age my natural assumption/vision for the future was me making my life what I wanted on my own, on my own terms. It wasn’t a decision or a conscious choice, that’s just how my mind works. If someone else happens to join me they’ll have to do it on my terms. I’m healthier, happier and more fulfilled when I’m single. But even if I was actively looking for a relationship I would still put it 2nd on my list of priorities after being self-sufficient.

Wow, @Zaeem15. Just wow. You appear to be living on a completely different planet to me.

You know at least 100 SAHMs, only ONE is divorced? All the DHs earn between £200k and £1m. You must live in a very special and select place. I know maybe only one person I can think of earning so much who is in my own personal circle. Maybe the executive team at my company are too...?

All these SAHMs live an ideal life, studying for several MAs while not missing a second of their DCs’ childhoods. Nobody is bored with domestic duties alone. There is certainly plenty of cash sloshing around. None of the DHs feel trapped on a treadmill of work or driven into the arms of a wannabe wife No2.

I am just wondering where you found these men? I am reeling, really. How do you fit all those mansions into the same area? Where do I find Stepford?....

Have you ever been to Barnes in London SW13 NotBeingRobbed? I have heard it described as Stepford Or parts of Putney, Fulham, Parsons Green, Chelsea, Kendington, Notting Hill, etc? I’ve had 3 DC and Im just talking about typical couples we’ve met through the prep school over the last decade, as well as neighbours and people locally we’ve known from when the FC were babies. Also, wives of DH’s work colleagues etc. Of course I realise this kind of set-up may not be the national norm, but it really is fairly typical in some parts, for instance, in DDs current class at school, I think maybe one or two mums might work (out of 20).

Blimey Stepford indeed

Yes, I know all those places well but I can’t afford to live in them!! I’m guessing there are a lot of City workers. Even so, the divorce rate seems remarkably low. I do have a friend living in Kensington whose ex husband would have fitted the bill - and he is an ex!

Yes I don’t really know what most of the DHs do tbh, but there are a lot who seem to be in banking. In 17 years since we lived here, I can only think of one DH who had an affair and literally everyone knows everyone round here . She wasn’t a “younger model”, either, she was an “older model.” To be fair, she still lives in the house and he hasn’t messed her around financially at all or shirked his responsibility to the kids, whatever else he may have done. She has a new partner now. Maybe she works part-time or something, I don’t know, but I always see her around in the week. I know one lady whose DH was tragically killed and there are 2 other single mums I know, but they still have good relationships with the exs and the ex’s probably pay the school fees, etc, plus they have the kids a few nights a week.

In fact the mansions won’t be mansions at all in those areas but rather ordinary in spite of the very high price. The wives may not all be first wives but won’t be letting on if they are the “upgrade” after the first has been dumped for the woman from the office. And a large chunk of that income will be spent on schools that have (at least in the past) had a very lax and unconventional approach to safeguarding children. We all breathe the same fumes in the big city and knife gangs and drug dealers are a stone’s throw away. Not such a paradise after all.

Gatoadigrado - I was responding to the hyperbole of others, actually. Why other people have such an issue with whether someone works full or part time, or even whether someone takes time out of the job market for a while, I don't know. It's none of their bloody business if it works for the people concerned. I wouldn't personally choose to make myself completely unemployable by never gaining qualifications, never having a career, or staying completely out of the job market for so long that employers assume I have miraculously lost all skills and don't even know how to operate modern technology. But then that's all hyperbole, isn't it?... I have had a career, had time out of the job market (but volunteered in various roles and kept skills up to date) and have another career again. I have worked part time and full time. If my dh wanted a change of career, that's fine by me, provided it was all planned together and thought out as carefully as everything else we have done together so far.

@Zaeem5 I wasn’t meaning to be nasty about it....just trying to understand. Your life is not the national average picture! Looks like I should have gone into banking instead of working very hard in a not so well paying line of work.

Besides, Gato, the whole quote you made of my post quite clearly pointed out it is sensible to aspire to 50:50 in everything. I went on to outline why it is ridiculous to insist on it 100% of the time throughout an entire life. Which effectively means you agree with everything I said, anyway...

If in an ideal world everybody strives to be financially self supporting, who would be doing the minimum wage / low pay jobs, cleaning, care work, child care work, retail work whose salaries cannot support a couple or family? would they all have to now be paid fairly?
Not everyone is cut out for corporate careers, or a career full stop, I suffer with pretty crippling mental health issues, as a result I've always been in a minimum wage type job, my sister has mild learning difficulties but has always held down a low paid full time job, but could never earn enough to be independent, she lives with my parents. These jobs are all needed in society and there are people who want to do them, but maybe this is a whole other thread about fair wages.

As for misogyny, it's misogynistic to assume that a woman who has been out of the job market for a while is only competent to do a minimum wage job for the rest of their life.

In my case (not in the league of @zaeem15) I am just coming to the end of a divorce. It does infuriate me that people assume that as the mother left supporting the kids I will be getting a “good deal” or “taking him to the cleaners”. In fact I am having to pay my good-for-nothing ex a lot of money to go away. I am left with sole charge of two teenagers. He will pay basic CMS cash for the younger one and nothing for the older one who is at uni and costs me plenty.

I was the higher earner and I have slogged my guts out basically for years to support the family and provide an adequate standard of living - we had to move out of London though to a cheaper area. In fact I enjoy my work and I’ve done well at it but it was not at all easy with kids. My ex also worked but earned less than half my salary and never once pushed for promotion. He also didn’t do his fair share around the home. So anyway, I’m glad I’m rid of him.

There are times when I’ve thought instead of studying and working hard I should have just spent all my time at the gym or beauty parlour and mixed with the right circles to snare a rich husband. It’s only a fleeting thought. Firstly I’m just not that sort of person and also I am not a commodity to be sold into marriage!!

I couldn’t ever afford to give up work and be a SAHM so it has occasionally grated that people have suggested going to work is a bit of a self-indulgence. Such as a neighbour’s mother who stopped me outside my home to tell me I was “always going to work and should make more time for family”. Heck, if I don’t work we won’t survive - she has no idea. Luckily my teens now appreciate that.

I’m glad I never chucked in my career and I am able to support us and control my own destiny. The alternative would have been being locked in a marriage to a bad un. At least financial independence gives choices.

And as Hiddentext points out, minimum wage is not the same thing as minimum value to society - it merely provides minimal income to the person doing the work. Wanting to take advantage of an equal number of men and women is not a massive improvement on picking on women. It's still wrong to undervalue huge swathes of people.

notbeingrobbed
Your final paragraph is spot on

Even when I was a sahm I never considered that I was 'living off a man'. His money is my money and vice versa and I worked fecking hard for it looking after his kids. Now I work and he's unemployed. Does that mean he's my emasculated bitch. We dont care who brings in the money as long as someone does.

By the way, I don’t buy the argument that all money earned in a marriage is joint. Sadly it is the legal view but my ex did nothing to “earn” half my salary. The law is wrong and I will never enter into an unjust marriage contract again.

NotBeingRobbed - I’m sorry to hear about that. Of course, I realise I’m talking about a particular demographic, but this thread is about “women who live off men’s money”, after all, so that’s who I’m saying all this. I don’t particularly like that expression, but I understand how people may perceive it that way, so as someone who has lived that reality for 16 years, I was just giving a perspective of how it actually is in reality for myself and most people I know. It is what it is.

I used to work with knife crime etc, so I know the realities of that are always on everyone’s doorstep. Plus DH and I grew up in very very different circumstances (immigrant families) so we fully realise we are in a bubble! But the bubble certainly exists and within it are a lot of SAHMs.

I genuinely can’t think of one woman who set out to “nab a rich man.” They wouid have no idea how to even go about this! Most couples met in their early 20s or at uni. I met DH when I was 24 and he hadn’t “made his money” then, by any means. This is why myself, and I would imagine my friends, don’t see ourselves as “living off a man’s money” because these men wanted families but are also extremely career-focused, often workaholics, so they have been incredibly facilitated by the wives and well they know it. Trying to talk to my DH about cutting his hours to do childcare or housework would be a joke. He’d just tell me to up the cleaners hours or something. It’s a certain kind of mentality, I guess. It wouldn’t be for everyone, but when it works, it works, in my experience and from what I see around me every day.

I guess immigrant families would be key to the low divorce rate. It would also explain the commitment to do the right thing by the family. The only people I know who fit your demographic in terms of income and geographic location are divorced!

Zaeem5 fair enough if that’s your experience. But what jumped out at me from your post was ‘Most couples met in their early 20s or at uni’. I think that’s pretty common... many couples meet at university or perhaps in their first job - which indicates a pretty equal level of ability, education and even earning at an early point. Just seems bizarre to me to then fork into completely different aspirations... the man (and you make it clear it’s always the man) pursuing a stellar career and the woman happy to give up work and facilitate it.

I suspect I’m an older age bracket than you (50s) I too met my DH at university yet we wouldn’t have dreamt of taking on stereotyped roles like this. Seems a much better balance to both enjoy careers which provide satisfaction and decent earning without being so high flying that it needs a wife at home to facilitate it. And equally I’d rather our children had decent amounts of time with both parents than having one parent home all day at the expense of the other parent who’s jet setting off and far too busy to do bath and bedtime.

Horses for courses I guess but the situation you describe does indeed sound very Stepford wives

@NotBeingRobbed - there are many men like you as well, who don't want to share with their wives. When you don't want to share or you're with someone spectacularly lazy, it's best not to marry them. Just because you made a mistake in your choice doesn't make the principle of shared finances wrong. My DH likely won't ever make as much money as me, but he contributes in other ways and looks after DS when I work as well, we're a team and we love each other for the things we bring yo the relationship, accept what we watch cannot do and tolerate each other's faults (with the occasional squabble of course). That's the point of marriage. It would be harsh to judge him for his financial value alone, I wouldn't want to be with someone at all if I was only looking at their money.

@MRex Those if us who have been married to someone who only ever takes, who has a variety of addictions and who spends our (my) hard-earned cash on his own self-indulgences tend to see things rather differently! Over on the divorce board there are people - both women and men - being dragged down by the addictions and compulsions of their other halves.

Why did you marry him? Or why stay when he developed addictions / compulsions? I'm sure you'll say it's naive to ask that, but I had several useless boyfriends over the years, I just got rid of them when they showed they couldn't measure up. I don't understand hanging around in the situation you describe, you limit your losses by leaving.