A Couple's Guide to Happy Retirement and Aging by Sara Yogev

Author:Sara Yogev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Familius
Published: 2018-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Gender, Money, and Marital Satisfaction

Recent decades have brought substantial changes in beliefs about the role of women regarding work and their financial contributions to the family. Yet, despite this revision, society continues to view men as the primary family breadwinners. Our society also tends to equate money with success and power. Therefore, moneymaking is often connected to masculinity, and men generally have less conflict about it. It provides them with a means to be a caretaker. Men who achieve financial success are frequently viewed as the best “catches” in the marriage market. When it comes to selecting mates, research indicates that women rank earning power as the most important factor, while men place priority on beauty.

Certainly, there are many couples in which both men and women bring home money, and sometimes the woman earns more than the man. Nonetheless, many women, even those with successful careers, still allow their husbands to make most or even all of the important financial decisions. In fact, a significant percentage of women still agree with sex role stereotypes stemming from a patriarchal society, acceding to the concept that men are inherently better at handling money.

These assumptions may be traced to the fact that many women retiring now grew up in a household in which the father made and controlled all the money. In the 1940s and ’50s, children were taught that it is the man’s responsibility to make money and decide how it should be spent; therefore, women hold an unconscious belief that making and handling money is unfeminine. They expect their money to derive from a relationship with a man rather than from their own efforts. It has been said that men can be unsexed by financial failure, while women can be unsexed by financial success. The outcome is that many successful women hand over their money (and power) to their husbands, as their mothers and grandmothers did.

Studies from the 1950s and ’60s generally supported the proposition that socioeconomic rewards, such as income, education, and occupational prestige, increase the likelihood of marital satisfaction and stability. However, more recent studies yield inconsistent results and generally are not supportive of this premise. They show that when income meets one’s expectations, regardless of the amount, or when the husband is perceived as a successful provider, marital satisfaction is maintained.

Therefore, relatively poor couples can be as happily married as wealthy ones if their income meets their expectations. People who are not materialistic, believe in simplifying their lives, and are satisfied living in a modest home, for instance, often have happy marriages. When it comes to marital satisfaction, the stability of a man’s income plays a feature role: how regularly a husband brings home a paycheck matters more than how much he earns. Bringing in a steady paycheck means that he fulfills the expectation of being a stable provider to his family.

Research about financial power and marital satisfaction also reveals that the least stable and least happy marriages are wife-dominant; the greater the wife’s earning relative to the husband’s, the more likely divorce will ensue.

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