2 men ( creative types) who are very talented but don't earn a lot of money saying ( heard through other people) I don't think she would be interested in me as I don't have this and that ect.
Well in my case this is bang on the money. Sorry to be blunt but I do think one of the benefits of a board like this is the ability to speak freely behind the cloak of semi anonymity.
My position was as follows:
- I earn a pretty decent amount.
- I did not want to have a DH or long term partner who saw me as a "cash cow" OR who I felt was living off me. I knew that long term I would have no respect for them and I would resent them.
- I know ALOT of women in these kind of relationships - woman is a high earner, man has some "artistic" type job that he loves, pays nothing and is never likely to (his fantasy of being the next Hockney/Olivier/Bowie/Lloyd-Webber/Simon Cowell etc is now realistically long dead; he is an aging failure but having fun and deluding himself that success is imminent) which the woman supports. The women (a) get resentful (b) secretly fear that he is only with her because of her money. In many cases, this is with justification because she has basically "bought a husband" and he stays because he has a settled financially comfortable lifestyle doing his layabout fun job, living in a house where he couldn't even afford to pay for the front door.
- If I have children, I wanted to be sure that IF I chose to give up work, that would be an option for me financially and maintain the fairly affluent lifestyle I had as a single woman. This would need a man who earned as least as much as me.
- I am very attracted to drive and ambition because I am like that too.
For all these reasons, before I got married, I would never have been interested in someone who earned nothing and had no prospects in their artsy-fartsy job. I wouldn't have found that personality type attractive. I can conceive maybe then of dating someone who was career early stages and looked like they were "going somewhere" and had drive and ambition.
But as it turns out, since I started dating, I have never dated or had a seriously long term relationship with a man who earned less than me . My DH earns more than I do and is very ambitious and successful.
My attitude was: I expect my partner to have to offer me the equivalent of what I can offer in everything - including earning capacity.
[The most irritating types are the "my job is fun and I will do it come what may because I am a self-entitled arse who thinks my personal job satisifaction even if my children and wife have to starve because I am pretty shit at it and will never have success" types - very often actors, artists, musicians, writers, playwrights and so on. I know quite a lot of these actually and they are all married to women who keep them.]