He Makes Dinner. I Make Money. Here’s How We Figure Out the Rest.
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A month before our wedding, my husband Ben lost his job. He’d been working for a bike company while pursuing professional cycling. The company folded, and Ben had a request: Instead of finding another job, how would I feel about him chasing his dream of getting a pro road racing contract? After all, his dream had an expiration date (his age) and my own dream (writing a novel) did not.
I was more than a little reluctant. He was asking me to financially support the household for an indeterminate amount of time and we were barely married. Even if he did get a contract, there was no money in American road racing—he would be lucky to make $25,000 a year if he made anything at all, and it would require near constant travel. But I acquiesced. I wanted a partnership based on big dreams and unwavering support—here was my chance to prove it. Plus, in some ways, I’d planned for this.
Five years before that request, I found myself on a date with a classical instrument repairman—what can I say? I love a niche nerd—who told me he made $27,000 a year about 20 minutes into our first date. He warned me, “I’m never going to make money, but this is my passion, and I like to get that out up front.” I excused myself to the restroom. I stared in the mirror, and having a movie moment with myself, said out loud, “Maybe you’ll just make all the money.”
That relationship didn’t work out, but that mantra did. I was the careerist, drunk on ladder-climbing. By the time I met Ben on a bike ride, I was making more than enough money to support us—I had just never imagined doing it alone. It felt satisfying to work against our heterosexual gender norms, but I’d always imagined a partner would be, at the very least, earning some money to ease the stress of potential layoffs and the myriad other ways life can go awry.
Choosing to marry Ben was easy, but no one prepares you for the part of a long-term partnership where you’re wrestling with all of your preconceived notions about gender, your finances, and your hopes and dreams for the future while locked in the most high-stakes, intimate relationship of your life. It’s something that even the most grounded couples struggle with. In an interview promoting her new memoir, The Light We Carry, Michelle Obama said of her own iconic marriage that it’s never 50/50 at any given moment, or even in any given year—that what you aim for is a balance over the course of a lifetime. But how you negotiate that daily, delicate split might say a lot about the strength of your partnership.
While Ben raced and I worked, people kept asking me when he was going to get a job. I was defensive. Why were they asking me and not him? Why was I in charge of this? This was a once-in-a-lifetime shot, and I was perfectly capable of managing the financial load.
What I wasn’t capable of, it turned out, was managing the mental load.
One quiet evening in our cabin outside of L.A., we heard a tap against the backdoor. We opened it to find a giant, orange cat with matted fur. He let himself in immediately, and we fell in love. We went about the work of cleaning him up, getting him checked for a chip, and introducing him to our pets. Until a few days later when he escaped out the kitchen window—the kitchen window I always told Ben to only narrowly open lest our own cat jump out of it.
I lost it. I was so mad, I couldn’t speak, and Ben asked the obvious question: “Is something else wrong?”
When I stopped mewling and calmed down, I finally understood and shared with Ben what I was feeling: the burden of carrying not just the financial responsibility but what seemed like all of the household responsibility. I made sure the windows weren’t open too far. I knew if the cats needed their litter changed. I remembered to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer. I paid the bills, I managed our insurance claims, I did the taxes, and I was burnt out.
It’s not that Ben knocked back beers while he watched me do chores or even that he asked me to do all of it. He was exhausted from training and racing and injuries, and I, a high-achieving professional woman conditioned to anticipate everyone else’s needs, just did it. Until that cat jumped out the window.
“I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed,” he said, concerned. “I’m happy to take over whatever you want me to.”
This was the key to understanding why I didn’t just feel overwhelmed, I felt resentful: The onus was still on me. To direct, to distribute, to plan, or in the words of our foremothers, to nag. And the last thing I wanted to be was a nag.
I harkened back to a conversation we had on our first anniversary. There’d been no card, no flowers, no nothing other than me asking him to make a dinner reservation. When I told Ben how defeated this made me feel, he said, “I’m not a flower-buying kind of guy.” To which I replied, “And I’m not a move-to-the-mountains, own-a-vehicle, sleep-on-a-futon-mattress, or live-40-minutes-from-my-friends kind of girl, but I did all those things because I love you. I’m not asking you to buy flowers because that’s who you are but because it’s who I am.”
He heard me, and he’s a romantic to this day. We had the same conversation about the division of labor in our household, both emotional and physical. Ben didn’t instinctively care about cobwebs or wrinkled clothes or using paper towels as toilet paper. What he did care about, though, was me. So when I was sobbing on the floor about a cat I’d known for three days, we got to work on changing things.
We spent a couple weeks making a list of tasks, from things as necessary as car maintenance to things as trivial as hanging Christmas lights. Then we talked about which things carried weight in our minds. It wasn’t just about completion of a task but about complete ownership of that task. I practiced letting things go, doing less, and trusting him.
It probably took us six months before I was singing how grateful I was that Ben cooked amazing dinners, scrubbed the toilet, and emptied the cat litter without me even thinking about it. I was delighted and no longer walking around annoyed at what needed doing.
And that’s the guide: annoyance. It’s the most important clue because when annoyance is left unattended, it turns to resentment. Now, when we get annoyed, we know it’s time to talk.
When Ben did get a job in our new town, it meant that fewer meals were homemade, some chores started to slip through the cracks, and because I was working from home, it was often easier for me to take over tasks like laundry. So we went on a hike, away from the grind of daily life, and talked about that balance: How much does he like his job? Does the money he’s earning make up for the changes in our household routines? Those are the honest conversations we keep having—about jobs, about hobbies, about potentially having a kid, about who feels exhausted and who feels enriched and how we can better balance the two.
I’m still uncomfortable having these conversations, but the discomfort is with myself. It is, even all these years later, difficult to reconcile that I can ask for help without “needing” it.
We are nearing five years past that initial request to support him. He never got that pro contract, but he did race with and win against his fair share of pros. More importantly, he showed me what could happen when I stopped worrying about whether the baseboards were dusted and started investing in my own dreams. He showed me what really pursuing your passion could look like. I now have a job I wouldn’t quit even if money were no object, and the novel is halfway done, because while Ben pursued his dream, he also kept the grocery list, did all the shopping, did the cleaning, maintained the cars, made our meals, did the laundry, and opened up enough space in my head so I could not only be a career woman but a writer too.
It would take several strokes of luck for Ben to make the kind of money I do, but I don’t need him to. What we’ve been able to see through every conversation, every struggle, every moment of despair is that at the end of the day, I like making money, Ben likes making meals, and as long as we’re wiping the counters clean of annoyance before it spoils into resentment, we can make it work.
Because it’s never an even split, but it can be a fair one.
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