My husband earns 10 times more than me. Here’s how it makes me feel.
Woman in Profile, Amedeo Modigliani (1909)
I’m a smart cookie, and so is my husband, Bryn. I left Cambridge with a languages degree and walked into a graduate headhunting job with a starting salary of £27,000. So far, so successful. When I met my husband he’d graduated from Bristol with a first class degree in Engineering and was busy being worked to the bone by a strategy consulting firm. His starting salary had been £38,000.
We both floated around London like the carefree bright young things we were told we were, with plenty of disposable income, no dependents and nothing to worry about. And one night, when we were all deep in the midst of our party years, we met at a dinner party in trendy Shoreditch, a semi-set-up by a mutual friend. We hit it off immediately and we’ve been together since that night.
By the time we were married, three years into our relationship, I’d had several promotions, and moved firms and he’d left consultancy for strategy and then marketing jobs in online businesses and the gap of £11k difference between our salaries had widened to £25k.
I grew to hate my career in executive search, although I’d been earmarked early as talented, and eventually I took redundancy from a big American firm to pursue more creative routes. I’d always been artistic (I went to art school before hitting the hallowed halls of Cambridge) and interiors were a passion, so I started my own upcycling and interior design label as well as running our spare bedroom as a style-led Airbnb from our flat in trendy London Bridge. It’s everywhere now, but in 2009 I was ahead of the curve in embracing peer-to-peer holiday rental.
Our salaries had been combined since we got married and started living together: we’ve always considered our income as one pot, particularly as Bryn contributed to the mortgage on my flat once he moved in. I bought my ex-local authority flat when I was 25 years old in 2009, with the help of a loaned deposit from my parents. The price was £205k and I covered the mortgage easily on my salary. But now I was starting my own venture, funded only by my redundancy pay and the spare room rental income, it was even more important that we banded together.
This solo sideshoot turned out to be the turning point in our earning power.
Over the intervening years, I’ve continued to slowly (and taking a very wiggly route) build a career for myself outside of the corporate sphere. Now I have a portfolio of roles: some women’s health advocacy and writing work, some property-based, some wellbeing- and hospitality-focused which make up my paid working life.
Twelve years after leaving headhunting, I have established a steady roster of work and projects that keeps me occupied and happy (and sometimes stressed!), that means I get to pay myself. In those same twelve years, my husband has climbed to c-suite and managing director roles in online retail businesses earning well over six-figure salaries.
“Each month over £10k comes into our joint account from his salary. And each month £1k comes in from mine. ”
And when you see it written down like that, the disparity really packs a punch.
I do also have semi-regular freelance work and location rental income from our current house (the London Bridge flat is long-since gone) that can top up that £1k from month to month, but that goes straight in my rainy day pot. I run our French property as a business, so I am solely responsible for paying its mortgage, which I guess you could count as earnings. But there is very little (if any) profit left after the large outgoings. So there’s still a vast gap between us in disposable income.
Whilst Bryn and I consider ourselves in an equal relationship, this is something we can’t get round. And it makes me feel horrible. This disparity is a topic we’ve argued about, discussed at length, instigated planning meetings on and talked over endlessly in couples therapy.
I’m a staunch feminist, but the disparity makes me feel like a kept woman, despite my intelligence. I rail against misogyny, but the reality is that our patriarchal system means that (in my own home!) two otherwise equal people find themselves separated by a huge gap. So therapy helps us understand each other and promotes patience, and yes, I’ve got better at understanding why it makes me feel so impotent.
As a millennial, I was told I could achieve anything a man can; but as the lower earner, my career takes a backseat. I’m the one to cancel a meeting if there’s a clash, I pick up the slack when school holidays roll around. We couldn’t afford not to, so it’s the obvious solution, but this casual dismisal is at the belittled core of the way I feel.
Ultimately, Bryn is a sensitive man and we’ve been able to talk openly about this in a way that perhaps other couples can’t. But, interestingly, he does feel the societal pressure to provide in the same way that his father did for his family, and this can cause stress for him, despite the huge salary and job title - and the status they come with.
We started as equals, but through two kids, and the bulk of the child-rearing, building my own businesses and taking the non-standard career route, we’ve diverged so greatly as to be highly unfair. But I also know that I’m lucky. We’re not, as a family, struggling. Why am I even worrying about what money I bring in, you might ask. I don’t need it.
I’m not sure, if I knew then what I know now about how this disparity makes me feel, that I would make the same career leap away from corporate life. Because the fact that I earn so much less than my husband, despite having done the huge job of raising a family alongside my work, sometimes makes me feel I am less than him too.
