Me being woman, I take dual income over single one in part due to consequences. The negotiation over household work is much better with dual income anyway. So is any other conflict situation, especially those about money.
The risk of divorce with woman earning real money is in part larger, because she has that option. See, the spouse that did not worked for six years have hard time in job market which compels her to stay in bad relationship. Does not even have to be abusive, just a bad one. And I am picking woman here as example, because it is woman who areore often in that situation - and you framed comparatively must smaller female problem as example for some reason. I do more household work is less of a sux then "I would leave if my confidence was not so low and if I had real job options" sux. Divorces do not happen magically. They happen because someone decided it is best solution for their present situation.
The "I am earning money and she does not understand and just do nothing whole day" resentment is real too.
A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's.
In general, I disagree. In many, many relationships, while the husband earns the money, the women gets final say in what's spent where. While this isn't the rule, it's certainly not uncommon (and popular culture, IE sitcoms, movies, etc pretty much purely reinforce this).
You could say that the scenario where the husband holds tight to the purse strings and the woman only goes along with it because of fear or anxiety that the woman is forced to be infantilized. But I would guess this is sub 10% of marriages in the US.
On a separate note, I think a useful framework for looking at this is to think of the couple as one entity with two parts, rather than as two separate entities. If the entity is split, it's definitely true that the one that can't provide for itself is at a disadvantage, so it takes a lot of trust. But that's also why there are divorce settlements that favor women that gave up working at some point.
If you think dual-income houshold are problematic then thats nothing compared to divorced/2nd marriage housholds. That actually makes you much less likely to move.
That's because financial problems are the main reason for divorce. Dual engineering incomes should not have those problems.
Happily married to another engineer for 15 years. Now engineers also like to argue, so put two of them in the same household and see what happens. We do argue about finances, but it's me not wanting to spend money.
Even single people should be thinking through high risk decisions, so I don't really see your point there. A dual income couple has inherently more ability to make higher-risk decisions that have larger expected returns.
As for time spent working, I'm a bit skeptical of that. It's not like single people don't have socialization needs that need to be met. My single friends spend a lot of time and effort on dating and trying to arrange opportunities to see friends.
Elizabeth Warren is the author of a book called The Two-Income Trap - which is mostly apolitical and talks about an interesting economic/statistical paradox.
If a man and woman make equal amounts in a marriage, they are twice as likely to undergo financially hardship as a marriage where the male is the sole breadwinner. This is because almost any couple is going to budget more than 50% of their total income regardless, so a single firing or loss of job can lead to financial hardship. It is paradoxical because a second income should provide an additional safety net, but because of the way people budget having two points of failure (even if the failure isn't as devastating) increases the odds.
I am unable to get into the original article, but I wonder if it is always the case that men's stress increases if wife earns more than 40% or if it is the case that men's stress increases when the wife earns more than 40% and less than 60%.
First of all, with two incomes, if one person loses a job, you still have cash coming in. On average, the drop is from 100% of normal cash flow to 50% of normal. With one income it is from from 100% to 0%. Yes, the other spouse can get a job, but that takes time, maybe days, maybe months.
This seems especially true during a bad economy when unemployment is high and people stay unemployed for long periods of time. With a dual-income family, the two often work in different fields. One might get laid off but the other's job is safe. You'll suffer, maybe even have to sell your house or something, but at least you can feed yourself.
Second, I've seen what happens when a spouse doesn't work outside the home for a long time. This happened to a relative of mine a long time ago. She had a short but perfectly fine career as a teacher for a while before getting married, having children, and being a housewife. Eventually she got divorced and found that, after being out of the job market for 20 years, the only job she could get was near minimum wage data entry. (She eventually got a better job, but it took many years as she was basically starting over.) Anyway, the point is I'm skeptical of Warren's reasoning that in a single-income family, the other spouse can just go out and get a job if needed. Over the long term, the single-income situation tends to damage the career path of the spouse who doesn't work outside the home.
>My contention would be: It's pretty rare for both person A and person B to be able to earn so much under the second configuration so as to break even with the first configuration (as measured by hosehold disposable income, i.e. after taxes and everything).
This depends on your timescale. If you look at the tax returns of years 0-5, your contention will look spot on. If you compare the tax returns of two couples -- with double income in all years vs single income for years 0-5, you may find that in the long run, given the sacrifice involved in taking a career break for 5 years, it is in the favor of the couple to shell out in big in those 5 years.
Marriage itself is not really more of a risk to a man than a woman. Shared property from the marriage will get divided up, but that affects women the same as men.
Having children is a slight risk because custody is a bit more likely to be given to women than men, so men are a bit more likely to have to pay child support.
Having a spouse who stops working to take care of children is a large risk for both partners. One risks having to pay alimony to support the non-working spouse; the other risks losing their earning potential from time spent out of the workforce.
I’d even argue it goes in the other direction to a degree. I’ve witnessed many relationships where the woman makes more money and it creates tension. Obviously, not in all cases but It does happen.
Traditional gender roles and expectation still exist. It also seems that if the wife makes more than the husband, you're more likely to suffer a divorce[1]
It's easy to say I wouldn't mind, but I haven't faced the situation. In fact, I hope I wouldn't have to.
I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious reasons.
> Many couples even find their way into that dynamic involuntarily when one spouse becomes disabled, often in an even more challenging way, but still find a way to make things work.
This is one of the big 'unseen' risks with dual income couples. Elizabeth warren talks about it a lot in her book 'The Two Income Trap'. While it seems having two incomes makes you more robust against any job loss.. The opposite is true, and the data bear it out. Essentially if you both earn 100k, then you will adjust your lifestyle to depend on 200k in income. Now if one spouse loses their job, the other spouse has to make up the 100k somehow. Most cannot and go bankrupt. It is actually very hard to increase your earnings when you start hitting the upper income levels. While easy to go from 120 k to 150k for example, it becomes harder when you're earning 200k to go to 250k.
On the other hand, if you have a working spouse and a non-working spouse (realistically, most non-working spouses have some work experience) and are earning 100k, then you create lifestyle expectations around 100k. If the 100k guy loses his job, then, in most cases both historically and today (and again, Warren gives substantial data to support this claim), the non-working spouse is often able to find a job that will pay almost as much. Either way, in the single income case, they new gap between expectations and earnings is much less than the gap in the dual income case. Historically, much fewer single income couples go bankrupt.
Now, obviously, if you both work and depend on only one income, that's fine, but most people (and again, the data bear it out unequivocally) cannot do this.
Why the focus on married women earning less than single women instead of focusing on household income?
Even if the single woman earns more than a married woman. For the most part, a married couple should have more disposable income after living expenses than her single counterpart. Married couples have a greater per capita net worth than their single counterpart.
In our case, because of choices we made together, my wife earns a little over 10K less than she did when she was single 5 years ago, but because I could depend on her to carry health insurance and she has more flexible schedule, that helps our family, I was able to switch jobs aggressively and I earn roughly $50,000 more than I did before we got married. We are both better off.
Once they are married, the couples also are able to take advantage of economies of scale – anything from buying just one dishwasher to relying on one another’s health insurance. That allows them to build wealth more quickly than their peers who are single, divorced or living together romantically.
For example, a married man may be able to work 12 hours a day to please his bosses and get promoted, because he and his wife can divide household duties so he can get ahead. That’s not as much of an option for a single parent.
Women report higher happiness after divorce on average while men lower happiness after divorce. The women initiating divorce more often then men might just be both groups doing correct guess about what follows.
A lot of peole of both genders (meaning dudes too) see male role as breadwinner supposed to work a lot of hours, but not really supposed to do logistic around children or even spend time enough with spouse to keep relationships alive - it is not even possible with over 60 hours a week schedule. You can see that attitude in tech community often. With such arrangement, her loss of job makes her a bit more depressive, but relationship kinda can continue almost the same. His loss of job is personal catastrophe for him, loss of identity, familly role and lot more stress overall.
It is not just money, it is identity and self respect going away for them. Such change is hard on marriage even absent financial stress - which makes everything double hard.
Yes, this is the main thesis of her book 'The Two Income Trap'. By and large, dual income couples are significantly more fragile in terms of resiliency to job loss.
I don't know if you're a rich guy planning to marry down in the social hierarchy, living in a culture where where women don't work or just a misogynist but this is generally false in the west. Dual incomes with a single household is very economical compared to life as a single.
See eg. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dinks.asp "A household in which there are two incomes and no children (either both partners are working or one has two incomes). DINKS are often the target of marketing efforts for luxury items such as expensive cars and vacations."
> There's some evidence that when women start to out-earn their husbands they divorce at higher rates. Whether biological or social (and probably a bit of both), there is an expectation that men contribute more financially than women do
Alternatively, women who aren't financially dependent on men don't put up with as much in terms of negative situations within marriage. If that's the reason, there's no pressure unless your intent is to keep a wife through material dependence.
The risk of divorce with woman earning real money is in part larger, because she has that option. See, the spouse that did not worked for six years have hard time in job market which compels her to stay in bad relationship. Does not even have to be abusive, just a bad one. And I am picking woman here as example, because it is woman who areore often in that situation - and you framed comparatively must smaller female problem as example for some reason. I do more household work is less of a sux then "I would leave if my confidence was not so low and if I had real job options" sux. Divorces do not happen magically. They happen because someone decided it is best solution for their present situation.
The "I am earning money and she does not understand and just do nothing whole day" resentment is real too.
reply