To wonder how some women have it sooo easy...

[Elderflowerasusualthxs]

Aibu? Or just jealous? I don't know but how did they make it?
Such an easy life! Cleaners, gardeners. Huge countryside houses and sometimes second homes by the sea.
A caring and loving husband, good looking and wealthy. No need to work for the rest of their lives. Kids privately educated. Enjoying wonderful holidays in different places and cultures and so on...
They exist and just hit the jackpot or there is a secret that most of us don't know?! I met a pair of them last year by chance through my son's extra curricular activities.
So many of us don't have it like that and I know life can be challenging and unfair at times but they seem to have it all.
Can I have the recipe please? Thank you.

I have a nice life. Don't work, house isn't overly special, big garden but not acres and not in countryside. 4 bed, utility, three baths, etc. Drive a nice ish car. In the future if things carry on as they are then we will have a home in countryside with land.

I have a wonderful husband who also works from home so will take DC to school, take the baby to give me a break.
Life is good and from the outside I imagine people are jealous.
However I have always worked until giving up after dc3 born two yrs ago.. And, I'm in long term therapy because I'm a survivor of cse, think cases like Rotherham grooming gangs. My life was horrific. I live with the after affects and I'll never get over it.

So don't compare, you don't know what these women are going through or have been through. The old saying of, don't compare your outsides to someone insides.

The ultimate dream is not "having" to work?

it is for many people. Nothing to do with gender though.
Some of us would have plenty do to to have a fulfilling and happy life without turning up in the office, and I quite like my job. I just wouldn't have the time to work if I didn't have to!

just read that back and realised I didn't mention work - I do a job I like - part of my life choices, so does my dh, but we were able to get a good education to get those jobs.

We now both do them for charity, so we have no money, but that is also part of our life choices.

A friend of a friend seemingly has it all. Rich loving husband, beautiful house with gardeners and house keeper, holidays wherever, one lovely daughter who is privately educated, which car she likes etc.

Everytime I bump into her an mutual friends gatherings, perhaps twice a year, I think “god you’re boring”.

She literally doesn’t do anything.

I don't get bored. Mum drummed it into us as children that 'only babies get bored, so get off your bum and do something'.

I'd love to have the opportunity to attempt to get bored!

There's so much wrong with this thread.

You don't know what goes on behind closed doors. Everybody has their challenges in life to go through. Just because they aren't having the same challenges you are doesn't mean they have perfect lives.

I love how anyone who works for a living MUST have a fascinating (and well paid) job

no one could ever be in a boring unpleasant job where they are desperately waiting for Friday (and in tears on Sunday)

I’m surrounded by these women and there are plenty who are happy and some who are unhappy (none are particularly good looking or posh, just hard workers supporting even harder workers, not all the breadwinners are men either). One particular lady springs to mind who has just had to give up her career and become a SAHM as she has a terminal, untreatable illness. She is a lovely woman and told me the other day that she is, in one way, the happiest she has ever been as now she knows she is going to die, the pressure is off. She has primary aged kids. Ultimately hard work is the way to get all the ‘extras’ but money can’t buy you health and we all go out the way we came in, with nothing. Tomorrow isn’t promised OP, so “count your blessings”, as my gran used to say.

@drspouse I was on your side until you said

And no point in having a husband that you don't think is "good looking"?

Do people marry people they don't find attractive?
My DP would be everyone's bag (just like many husbands and partners of women here wouldn't be mine) but I fancy the pants off him.
I can't imagine spending my life with someone I don't feel that way about.

Mine too Queen she even wrote me a letter aged about 12 to say never compare yourself there will always be those better off and worse off than you.

The only time I have felt pure envy was at an nct meet up when everyone else’s babies slept through and mine still screamed all night at 6 months...

Blimey, you thinking staying at home and "not having to work" is having it all?

Are you under the misapprehension that womens' collective goal should be to marry well to live in a gilded cage? Fuck that!

I'm wealthy, I live a very nice live, have a happy marriage, great children, great work life balance and a career I enjoy. I "have it all" because my definition of having it all is very different to yours. The difference here is that if I didn't have money, or this life, I would still be happy with my everything, and I would still feel rich.

And yes you're being both unreasonable, and jealous. Try and find some contentment in the things you do have, rather than pressing your face up against the window of the lives of others and finding yourself lacking.

Those of you saying that the “what goes on beyond closed doors” argument is an irrelevance are missing the point.

Of course there’s no way to know whether someone is happy or not based on their wealth and the size of their home. A rich woman with a large house may be happy or unhappy.

No one is saying a rich woman with a large house is any more likely to be unhappy.

What we are saying - what I am saying anyway - is that if you constantly assess your own happiness on the basis of whether you measure up to other people you are doomed to fail because you are using the wrong set of criteria and choosing false consciousness.

The only way to be truly happy is to be comfortable with yourself and to measure your success against goals you set for yourself that increase yours and your family’s happiness. Looking at someone and assessing who is thinner or who has the bigger car is always going to leave you falling short against someone else.

Research shows that when people win the lottery, they get a big boost in happiness for about a year afterwards and then settle back down to being just about as happy as they were before the win. As much as I would like to have a second home and not need to work, I suspect that it would be much the same and not really make me all that happier in the long run.

£70,000 is the Magic number apparently, I remember the slices from uni. At that income level you have all your basic needs met.
Hands up if you’re earning £70,000
I’m working my ass off to get there. I’m assuming it means £70,000 per person not as a couple.

@thepeopleversuswork I think the idea that you measure yourself against yourself and not others is so crucial to know.

Your achievements are valuable in and of themselves, you cannot possibly compare your circumstances to anothers.

Not having to work must be wonderful. As is having a career that you love. What's not do wonderful is needing to work in order to pay the bills, in a job which isn't wonderfully fulfilling and takes all your time and energy. That's the reality for a lot of people. And you are more likely to get the wonderful career if you have financial freedom to follow your interests and don't need to work for the money
If I was rich I can't imagine being bored. I could study whatever I wanted, travel etc. More trivial, but still lovely, would be not having to cook every day and being able to get it all delivered in trays from M&S (like Princess Diana used to do apparently)

Maybe I should have had make it clearer in my first post.

When I refer to lucky women having it all, particularly those whose lives are supported by a wealthy partner, It Does Exclude abusing relationships, mistreat or unhappiness due to the lack of a career.

The ladies I met and still have contact with, look truly happy enjoying such a good life and their husbands/partners are nice kind reliable and generous men.

Well, it appears as though it was pure luck...

@GiveHerHellFromUs some people do marry people they are not attracted to. The woman I know who did this isn’t attracted to her husband- he’s 40 years her senior (I’m not saying men in their mid 60s can’t be attractive, but in your twenties there are plenty of more typically attractive men in your path). She admits she doesn’t find him attractive, but the lifestyle materially at least is attractive. He was/is the way to obtain it- secured by their baby. As I already said, the person close to me isn’t as happy now as she feels bored/trapped. But that involves Gulf/Khaleeji culture so is a different matter

@GiveHerHellFromUs a bit mixed up with the "you" in that sentence.
i.e. the OP thinks there's no point in ME having a husband that SHE doesn't think is good looking.

I think my DH is very good looking but every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother (and wife) and all that. I'm not sure the OP would give him a second glance.

I have friend who lives this life. She took the decision, coming out of a relationship at age 2, that she wanted a really rich man. So she joined a dating agency with a £10,000 joining fee to make sure she met one......

She is very happy but I personally think her husband is an arse.

The one woman i know like you have described is probably the most insecure, unhappy person I know. Investment banker husband, massive house, kids in private school, nanny, cleaner, fancy holidays etc but she is lonely, her husband is always away with work and she is obsessed with social status. Before she got married she found an email which strongly suggested he had cheated but turned a blind eye. She had a good career herself but gave it up when she had kids and is very much a kept woman now. Rather than envy her I feel sorry for her, she’s always miserable.

I work in an independent school and the mothers of a certain number of our pupils are women like the ones you describe. I can't vouch for the happiness of their lives or their marriages, but the houses, cleaners, gardeners, handbags, clothes and holidays are all as you describe OP.

I have this lifestyle. I met my husband at university and yes he is now a very high-earner but that is only party of the 'recipe'.

I was state school educated, worked bloody hard through school, went off to Oxford for university, worked bloody hard again. Borrowed money so I could get professional qualifications, landed a great job and then worked all the hours there were. DH had a similar job and similar workload. It was clear that if we had kids and carried on working like that we would hardly ever see them - we were both working into the small hours and often on weekends too.

So we sat down and came up with a plan. At that point our earning potential was the same - our jobs would make us wealthy but not for a while. DH loved his job and didn't want to stop, while I liked the idea of being at home with children. So I took a big gamble and set up my own business in my late 20s with a view to making more cash in the short term even though sticking with my job would have made more long term. Luckily it panned out and provided enough of a cash boost that we could buy our first flat. We bought the biggest place we could afford, rented out the spare rooms and paid off the mortgage quickly.

This meant that when our first DC was born we could manage on DH's salary while he worked his way up. When DC1 was a tiny baby I started looking at houses. Found somewhere bigger but dilapidated which we moved into while I supervised its renovation and also had DC2. When it was done we sold that and did the same again and again...

Then DH's salary went through the roof.

So while on the face of it now it would look like my lifestyle has been achieved by marrying well, it's really been a joint endeavour. The charmed life we have know was bought by sacrificing holidays and partying throughout our twenties and early thirties to hard graft and living in a series of building sites. But also huge amounts of luck - not least with house price rises.

I have my own pension, plenty of investments and will always be financially secure. I'm not bored. DH is lovely and we still laugh together all the time. The DCs are happy and able to have a whole range of opportunities and experiences that I couldn't at their age. DH will be able to give up work in 10 years or so too (if he wants to, he still loves what he does).

And I am definitely not 'very pretty' .

@Notmynon but it is luck that it worked out that way, instead of something going wrong along the way. Calculated luck, to a degree but you were fortunate in a way you haven’t acknowledged (although I am sure you realise).

So sorry @Notmynom. You have acknowledged it - my mistake for not reading it properly