I have been on both sides of this issue. For a few years after college, I made more than my wife. She got her MBA and eventually settled into a really good company, moved up in the ranks, and is now earning much more than I did at my earning peak.
As long as the bills got paid and we were able to save for retirement and still have some fun, it didn’t matter whose money it was. I was smart enough to realize that her long-term financial prospects were better than mine given her choice of industry.
It gets better. We had a baby and after a year of daycare with both of us working full-time, we decided the best thing was for me to stay home while my wife continued to work. I never really enjoyed working anyway and she loves what she does and I’m more temperamentally suited for the job of watching a child all day. She loves our son but she freely admits that being around him every day, all day, would drive her a little bit crazy.
Whether it is because I am older and wiser (we had the child in our very late 30s) or extremely confident in my abilities and intelligence, it does not bother me at all that she works and makes a lot of money while I stay home changing diapers and raising our son. Since neither of us planned on having children, I look at this as the opportunity of a lifetime to spend the formative years of my son’s life with him.
My advice to those men threatened by a woman who makes more than they do would be to ask them to think long and hard about why they feel threatened. Is their sense of self-worth completely tied up in how much money they make? If you define yourself COMPLETELY by what type of work you do and how much money you make doing it, I suggest that your priorities in life may need some adjustment. I always thought of work as a means to an end and I never confused my sense of self with the work I did for other people.
The new reality is that as more women enter college and complete college degrees, women will represent an ever-increasing portion of the workforce to the point where they will be entitled to more money simply because they are the ones sitting there doing the work. Men who cannot adjust to this fact and respond appropriately will only shortchange themselves by settling for just those women who make less than they do. If you’re really that insecure, you can either (a) do something about it and accept the coming reality, or (b) look for women who don’t threaten you financially in any way. If you choose the latter course of action, don’t complain when you don’t have as much money to spend as men who can handle living with women who make more money than they do.
