By: Revanche

Income as power and a more Zen perspective

March 28, 2016

I wrote a response to Nicole and Maggie’s question: How do you balance the importance of your salary with the importance of your partner’s?

But the site wouldn’t accept my comment either because WP.com is weird or I went way off track and it’s judging me. Whatever the case may be…

I’ve been single longer than married and that heavily influences my answer, as much as peering into some key past experiences.

My salary, Version 1.0

Just after high school, I started a minimum wage job full time. My parents were skeptical, college was due to start in a few months, but trusted my judgment juggling work and school.

Sidebar: Lucky for them, and lucky for me, that I took that job. It kept us afloat for the next four years.

A friend of a coworker was in her mid-40s when she joined our staff. It was an entry-level, no experience required, training on the job situation. She had no work experience. In her late teens or early 20s, she married a man who made the money and wanted a good looker on his arm to bear him children. Her job was to make him look good by looking good, raise the kids, and have an acceptable hobby or two to keep herself entertained. Her job benefits were a roof over her head and food on the table (that she cooked, of course).

At some point, and before he replaced her with a younger model, she realized she wanted to actually live a life while she had any hope of one. Giving it all up, she went to work for the first time and sank like a stone. I was in charge of training her and it took months for her to learn all the things people have to learn about the workplace, many years later than they do. Eventually even she, who was hardest on herself, was proud of how good she’d gotten.

That lesson was burned into my soul.

My salary, Version 2.0

In truth, I don’t think it’s just one single decision, it just looks like it. Over those 20+ years, she would have make that decision more than once not to work. But the sum total is that she trusted him to take care of her, and didn’t consider the bargain a poor one, until it was quite late.

Kids were not an option back then but for sure I didn’t want to be a stay at home me. My temperament was not suited for childcare. Mom was more than ready for grandkids but my mind, body, and soul needed to hustle and earn. Besides, I had more than enough to take care of: Mom and her illness, Dad and his badly hidden depression, Trainwreck Sibling and his multitudinous mistakes in life.

By the time PiC came into the picture, I’d been on the grind for what felt like a lifetime. 80 hour work weeks, school, family, my plate was full, stacked atop another full plate, and precariously wedged between a thumb and a finger while the other hand walked the dogs. Fresh at a new job and out of school, “only” working full time now, my earning power was laughable. Rather than wanting to lean on him, my pride was pricked. Until I could match, and overmatch, his salary, I didn’t consider us on equal ground.

We had widely disparate backgrounds and it mattered.

I hated that I was the poor girl from the poor family that had never had money while he came from a real upper middle class family that was quite comfortable and had never gone without a meal. Months before we met, I was still living off my puny earned wages, eating one meal a day, and our economic class differences burned.

It didn’t matter to him, it never mattered to him, but it did to me.

He didn’t know it for years because it also felt like a shameful weakness. So I buried it, and I earned. And I earned. I negotiated and earned some more. There were many other good reasons to do that, and they were much more important, but looking through the view of the relationship glass? I needed to make my way in the world, I needed to blaze my way, to prove my worth to myself before I would allow anyone, any man, or any man’s parent, question my worth, ever again.

I’d dated boys whose rich and racist parents weren’t shy about telling me that I was less-than-worthy, “because the Chinese are far better than the [insert any other Asian race here]”, and damned if I was going to let that shake me again.

I’d had a crawful of being demeaned and it taught me a simple lesson: if they didn’t respect you when you had no money, that’s not respect now that you do have money. (But go get the money anyway.)

My salary, Version 3.0

I went after the money for a lot of reasons. Survival. Self respect. Confidence. Achievement. Pure buying power. Investing power. Security. Most of those reasons still apply now. It’s less fraught, though.

At this stage of our money journey, PiC’s and my salaries are both respectably high and nearly on par. Together, we can afford our lives here, we can save, and take care of family. On one salary, we would survive but things would be much less pleasant. One salary would have to outpace the other by at least 50% before we’d even consider relying solely on one salary. I’m not sure what we’d decide at that point.

Philosophically, I still value earning power as an expression of my worth more than not. It gives me a competitive edge in the workplace but, mostly, it should be left there. PiC values it as an expression of money in the bank and the ability to buy foods and things. That’s better than the other way around, I expect.

How about you? Do you associate your worth with your earning power? Would you feel comfortable relying on a partner if you had that option? 

*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich, Disease Called Debt and Thrifty Meets Spendy

Sharing is caring!

Email

Twitter

Pinterest

0