The Big Flip

Izzy Chan, a business strategist and film director, has been working on a documentary project, "The Big Flip". Marriages are in the process of flipping from having a husband as the primary breadwinner to the wife taking that role. Already, women are the breadwinners in 40% of households with children. Within fifteen years the majority of working wives will outearn their husbands. And since women outnumber men in college, this trend is only likely to continue.

Most people find these statistics startling. Social conversations are simply not keeping pace with the facts. The trend toward dual income households and the high income and net worth of a small minority of ultra-successful men has obscured this transition. People just assume that women are catching up with men as they enter the workforce but, in fact, they are beginning to surpass them among average households.

Although these changes are occurring slowly, social convention is not keeping pace. An unfortunate consequence of flipped marriages is divorce. Divorce is 40% more likely when a women earns over 60% of the family’s income.

Why? There are three interrelated reasons.

First, husbands are generally uncomfortable with playing second fiddle. That's the male ego at work. Men are naturally competitive and often view themselves in competition even with their wives for social status within the family. When the wife outearns the husband, the husband can feel emasculated and jealous of his wife's success.

Second, wives, even those in high paying jobs, expect their husbands to be ambitious and to provide for the family at least at parity. When the wife outearns the husband, especially when the difference is significant, she tends to resent him for his lack of ambition blaming his relative failure on the career decisions he's made.

Third, especially in cases where there has been a sudden change in relative income, it is the wife who still shoulders the major responsibilities of keeping the home. Even when the couple can afford to hire help, the wife is still spending more time with the children and managing the household.

What to do? The common denominator is resentment.

It may be that your husband lacks ambition. Or it may be that you have made better decisions than him. It may even be that you are simply more competent than him. Regardless, you must avoid resentment. Resentment will poison your marriage.

But avoiding resentment is not easy when you not only earn more but still shoulder most of the household responsibilities.

You need to step back and reappraise the respective roles in your marriage. Redistributing household chores is one of the most obvious changes to make but, more generally, to head off resentment you will need to assume a greater role in household decisions. This is particularly the case if you are, in fact, the more competent spouse or if your husband is genuinely lazy.

The problem, as noted above, is that your husband may, himself, already resent the fact that he is earning less than you. And he will almost certainly resent being asked to do women's work around the house. It's not enough for you to overcome your own resentment, you must also disarm your husband's ego and resentment of the situation.

Essentially, your husband's ego will be in conflict with reality. He is not fulfilling the role that he would prefer and wishing won't make it so. He may well be avoiding that reality. You must gently and patiently lead him to accept the situation as it is. And accepting the situation includes, of course, accepting whatever you determine is necessary to avoid resentment of your own.

In situations such as these there is little merit in halfway measures. If you must lead your husband through this crisis you might as well take the lead in the marriage. Whether you decide simply to redistribute chores or to ask him to become a stay-at-home dad, you will be the one initiating the change and taking responsibility for the outcome.

The key to accomplishing this is to constructively harness your own resentment into a determination to make yours a wife led marriage.