Grow Your Value by Mika Brzezinski

Author:Mika Brzezinski [Brzezinski, Mika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781602862692
Publisher: Weinstein Publishing

A LITTLE BIT LIKE A PARTNERSHIP

Incredibly, for some couples money and power dynamics just don’t seem to matter all that much. Being a breadwinner, no matter who it is, makes for a more relaxed dynamic in their relationship. To be clear, such people represent a minority: in our poll only 8 percent of female and 24 percent of male primary earners say there is less tension in the household as a result of them being the breadwinner. And you can feel the lack of tension from the laissez-faire tone of their comments, verbatim from our poll. “As long as we have income coming in, it doesn’t matter who’s making more,” said one woman. From a woman grateful to have fewer fights with her spouse over money concerns: “My becoming the primary earner has meant more money for us overall, so finances are less tight. Less financial worries equal less tension.” One reported a benefit: “The household duties are now done by my partner with no complaints, and I don’t have to deal with the stuff that I don’t like to do.”

Any one of these comments could have come out of the mouth of Dee Dee Myers, who was White House press secretary during the first two years of the Clinton administration and is now executive vice president for Worldwide Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at Warner Bros. I was talking to her on the phone from her (then) new home in LA when, curious, I asked her how it felt for her to be her family’s primary earner.

I could practically hear her shrug. “I don’t think about it very much, and I don’t think he really cares,” she said. “In the course of our marriage we have sort of traded back and forth, depending on who is doing what, and how flexible one is versus the other, depending on what’s going on. That’s always worked really well for us . . . [and] Todd does all the cooking.”

Wow. I hinted that it wasn’t going so easily for me, maybe because I was a newbie. “I sometimes feel guilty about it,” I said. “I don’t know why. It’s kind of a weird, new thing for me. Sounds like you guys have always had an evolving [breadwinner status].”

Dee Dee thought about it. “No, I think we always look at it a little bit like a partnership, almost like everything goes into the partnership, and some of it is monetary, and some equity . . . and Todd makes my life so much more interesting. How do you put a value on that?” she mused. “You know what the other thing is? Neither of us cares that much about money. We are responsible with that money, but we have never had a fight over money. Not once.” And they’ve been married almost eighteen years. What in the world was their secret?

Again I could almost hear the shrug. “[My husband] just doesn’t really care. He doesn’t need a lot. Like, it would never occur to him to buy an expensive car.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.