Money and (In)equality in Relationships
It shouldn’t matter, but it does
Who makes more, you or your partner? One of you does, almost certainly; the odds of you both earning exactly the same are vanishingly rare.
I’m earning about 85% of our household income at the moment; last year my contribution was around 65%. It’ll change. It already has, more than once. Just a few years ago, my husband brought in almost three-quarters of our income.
Before we even lived together, I supported him for a while. That was largely a selfish act on my part, though; he’d been living off his savings while he worked on a novel, always intending to go back to the computer gaming industry when he ran out of money. I knew what hours he’d be working if he did that, though, and I decided I would rather have a boyfriend I ever got to see than watch him go back into that grind. (Luckily, I could afford to be so generous; it wasn’t a hardship for me at the time.)
In all my relationships until this one, I have consistently been the lower earner. As a woman who has relationships with men, that is not unusual. Even so, I’ve always been the one who keeps track of the household finances, pays the bills, and manages the budget. Apparently, this is not unusual either. In my first, brief marriage, my husband and I were fresh out of college, and poor as…
