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.

OP things are not always as they seem. There are a couple of women like that in my family. One had to abandon her city and career to run the ancestral home of her husband which drains money. Her husband, now dead, had a long term affair with another bloke. Her children now live far away she is stuck looking after the inheritance for her son.

The other married young when her career plans failed. She lives with her much older husband who she despises but can’t afford to leave. She is having an affair but the other man won’t leave his wife. She has no money of her own. Both her kids live overseas.

Having money doesn’t make you happy, some women have shit lives regardless.

I find it disturbing that finding a rich husband is considered 'making it'.

I think life is pretty random. You can make a few good decisions and things go really well, or a few wrong decisions and it can all go to shit. I think there’s an element of luck as well. That said some people look like they have it all and have had a really hard time of it. I would trade all I have, not to
Have gone through the heartache that I have done.

I don't ever look at anyone like that and think they are any happier! Some stuff can not be gained or brought with money.

Someone close to me has the kind of life you describe and her husband is a good man (although she doesn’t see him that much because of his working hours and business trips). Her house is huge and amazing, she has a gym at home but belongs to a luxurious health spa as well, she has a dressing room full of beautiful clothes. I could go on. I on the other hand am in an abusive relationship and live in a one bedroom flat with my DD and her father. And in all honesty, in general I think I am more happy than the other person I have described. When she drinks too much (which is quite often) she cries and tells me her life feels empty. I don’t know why because she has friends and events to go to all the time and two children. I just think she is unlucky in that she is more prone to feeling unhappy than I am. I know several aspects of my life are not great, but I am very much a focus on the positives and I love the small flat we live in (I would feel weird living in a huge house with cavernous rooms, I like a cosier home), I love my job, I love living in London etc. The only thing I wish I could swap for hers is my relationship but I will get out of mine at some point and forge something better for myself. It will be hard but not impossible. So I could compare my life to hers and feel hard done by but I genuinely don’t. And you shouldn’t either. Look at your own life and find things to be grateful for, and work out a plan to change the things you don’t like.

I think when you’re near the financial bottom in our society, working hours to make ends meet and doing everything but getting nowhere you do wonder where you took that wrong path and how others seem to have what, on the outside, looks perfect. Money, lovely home, lovely family, not having to work unless you want to so time to pursue actual interests and be able to go on holiday now and then.

Doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate what you do have, just that it would be nice to have what you don’t. I think that’s the same reason many people dream about winning the lottery!

I think it’s a combination of knowing the right people, luck, having wealthy parents, living in the right areas and being able to see beyond the mundane path everyone is encouraged to follow as young as possible. I didn’t have any of those things when I hit my late teens so my life choices weren’t well made. Hence I have very little except the nice family part!

The problem with these threads is that everyone jumps on and assumes that actually these women MUST REALLY be unhappy with abuse husbands and no freedom. Maybe they actually are happy? And maybe that's okay.

Some of it is luck, some of it is judgement.

I feel sad that just now mumsnet has far too many posts from women trapped in relationships with abusive men. They get pregnant young so stay with an unsuitable partner, stop working because they probably don't have a job that means they can afford childcare, then they go on to have more children.

The partner gets more abusive, stays out all night and turns it all back on these hapless young women - because all the recent posts I have read have all been young women who should be out there enjoying themselves and working their way up the career ladder, not shackled to abusive arseholes, with multiple children by their mid twenties.

We aren't wealthy, but are comfortable. In my case I was lucky enough to meet a wonderful man who loves me and is kind, considerate and respectful. I love him and am kind considerate and respectful towards him as well. We didn't have DD until late (due to infertility) so were financially stable by the time she came along.

I think life skills like being able to spot abusive arseholes and watertight contraception should be taught in schools. Although the former probably can't be taught, sadly.

OP you are describing me almost word for word. Sorry. I don’t think there is a magic formula for it and much of it is indeed just luck. Yes I am extremely average in the looks department and yet here I am. 🤷‍♀️

I’ll try to explain how I think I ended up here.

Much of it has been about being in the right place at the right time. I met my DH at work. Although I had a pretty average administrative support role and no degree I happened to work in a sector that is renowned for professionals with high salaries and good career advancement.

I got married and became a SAHM while DHs career went from strength to strength. He certainly wasn’t particularly senior or rich when I met him, but he was always ambitious and conscientious.

I was always attracted to intelligent and reasonably ambitious people - not because I was ruthlessly money obsessed but because I was stimulated by the company of intelligent, educated and ambitious people. That included (and still does) many of my friends as well as the men I dated. I have always had friends and partners who are at least as intelligent as me but usually more so, and certainly more highly educated and advanced career-wise than me. I have no idea why. 🤷‍♀️

But I think positioning myself among them in them in the first place has obviously had a bearing on where I have ended up. If I’d left school and gone to work on the tills in Asda I’d have mixed with different people entirely. Not inferior, not worse, just different.

Of course none of that explains how I ended up with a great husband - just a well paid one.

Some of it was down to luck, but not all of it. We never truly know how our marriages are going to work out or what kind of parent our partner will be. So much of it is just a leap of faith and a gut feeling.

But I find that if you set yourself high standards and expectations from the beginning of a relationship and if you have healthy boundaries and decent self esteem then you will not settle for less than you want and deserve in the first place.

If a man shows by his behaviour that he falls short of the sort of husband and father you’d dreamt of, then you need to have the courage and confidence to walk away, not spend your best years trying to mould him into something he’s not. As for having a baby with a man you already know treats you worse than you deserve, well that’s just stupidity and self sabotage.

Taking all of the advice above still guarantees nothing, of course. People can change, grow apart, fall out of love. However, if you choose wisely in the first place and apply the same criteria to choosing a father for your children as you’d apply to choosing a reliable car, you stand a far better chance of getting your desired outcome.

No-one takes a Ferrari on an off road drive through the mud. No-one wears a bikini to visit Norway in January. No-one emulsions their their house using a tiny watercolour brush.

Get the right kit for the job and you’re halfway there.

You’re describing many facts of my life op.
I’ve spent most of my married life deflecting bitchy bullying behaviour targeted at me from women like you.
I’m not going to list my very real and challenging life problems to persuade you to feel I deserve my life in some way or influence you about how wrong you are about me....and you are.
Maybe you should focus on your own life and consider why you’re so bitter towards others?

This.

Some women have that life and think themselves lucky because it's what they want.

Some women work part time and have similar earning husbands and think themselves lucky because that's what they want.

Some women work full time and their husbands are SAHD's and think themselves lucky because that's what they want.

Everyone wants different things in life and what works for some won't work for others.

If you want a different life, make it different. Don't rely on a man for a handout.

They're look plain looking like me tbh...still for some reason seems like they made it.

Well, it depends how you define having made it...

But I find that if you set yourself high standards and expectations from the beginning of a relationship and if you have healthy boundaries and decent self esteem then you will not settle for less than you want and deserve in the first place. If a man shows by his behaviour that he falls short of the sort of husband and father you’d dreamt of, then you need to have the courage and confidence to walk away, not spend your best years trying to mould him into something he’s not. As for having a baby with a man you already know treats you worse than you deserve, well that’s just stupidity and self sabotage.

Very well said WhereShallWeMoveTo. I think women who "settle" probably have low self esteem, and only feel defined if they are in a relationship, even if it is with someone who treats them badly. Some women have poor role models as well, so their "normal" is the kind of relationship that you or I would walk away from.

I know someone whose life would look like this through the prism of social media. But she is married to a man who could start a fight in an empty room and all those lovely holidays with girlfriends are to get away from him. Her children are horrible spoilt brats who treat her like dirt, just like their dad. But she won't ever leave because she has prioritised money.

Some is rich
And some is poor
And that's the way the world is
But I don't believe in lying back
And saying how bad your luck is

When I look back at my 20s I can see that some of my friends then were raised to focus their romantic inclinations on successful men. I wasn't and both me and my sister married financially unstable men and we women provide the economic stability. However we were raised to marry kind men and that has worked well. I remember one hippy-like friend was friendly with all the other bohemian types in the town but weirdly only had very straight boyfriends who never fitted in. She married one of these straights and now lives the life the OP described. As previous poster said, it's very transactional. He provides the money, she provides the subservience

All the woman I know who “landed” rich husbands were, at least for a time, successful themselves: university educated, well travelled, varied passions and interests. I

They, by and large, ended up with decent successful men because they never accepted anything less.

Also I imagine maintaining property is really quite tedious and lonely.

Is that a euphemism?

By God I hope you don't have daughters OP. What an utter paucity of ambition for them to learn from to think living off a man is "making it".

All the really wealthy women I know are highly educated and have in the past, or do, earn good money in their own right. At the very least many worked their arses off to get into a prestigious Uni where they then met clever husbands who went on to earn buckets. Or came from money themselves.

DD is at private school and we live in an affluent area, so I know lots of wealthy families - some seem miserable, others are wonderfully happy. I do believe the study that estimated that above ~£50k household income your happiness plateaus somewhat.

The one in eight globally who are undernourished probably think “what did they do in a past life to be born lucky enough to have such abundance of food”. It’s all relative!

Why is it lucky to be 'looked after' by a man? If I had to give up my financial independence and the career I've worked very hard for and I am very passionate about, I'd be deeply unhappy. We don't have a second home yet, but will one day and it's likely DS will be privately educated, although we have some excellent grammars locally. I'm the higher earner, I'm from a very working class background. If you looked at my life you might think I was lucky, I'm not, I'm tenacious and have a work ethic you can only dream of. So do fuck off dear.

Just remember that you may kill to have what someone else has but somewhere out there is somebody who would kill for what you have.

Stop

Those lucky women are the ones that landed financially secure, stable men.
They didn't have successful jobs or family money or anything else apart from their husbands. They are not catwalk models either. They're look plain looking like me tbh...still for some reason seems like they made it.

Comments like this aren't going to help you and frankly show that you have zero self worth. Why is it a prerequisite that women have to be stunning to 'land' a rich husband - perhaps they have genuinely lovely personalities? It's also not rocket science to work out how they are married to successful men - it amazes me on MN how many women are prepared to tolerate relationships with useless, lazy and sometimes abusive husbands. If the man isn't right, you just don't get involved.

Well OP if your pinnacle of life achievement is to marry a rich guy then it’s really no wonder you’re feeling low at the moment. Get a better and healthier goal in life. Geez.

relationships with useless, lazy and sometimes abusive husbands. If the man isn't right, you just don't get involved

Agree. I was just looking at a thread about a guy with more red flags than Korea and the OP was saying she’ll give him a chance. Most people said run away, but the odd person was like “go for it” - this is the kind of thread that will reappear in a year with OP saying “I don’t understand why he’s behaving like this.....”