Not too long after I sold my book to a Big Five publisher for a six-figure advance, my husband lost his job.
Even though money wasn’t an issue on account of the book deal — and I was actually relieved that he could take over the lion’s share of invisible labor that I’d been managing for years on top of my low-paid, part-time freelance work — I felt my partner’s stress level rise.
The book I sold, “Shame on You: How To Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification,” is a deep dive into how our unconscious emotions, and unfelt shame in particular, can keep us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. So it’s ironic that I was reticent to explore what the situation kicked up.
In retrospect, I felt guilty.
Pursuing my career goals, I believed, had impacted my partner’s abilities to pursue his. Even though I’d become the “provider,” I still felt as if I needed his permission to work. I felt irritated when I came home to a sloppy playroom or a sink full of dishes. (The house was always clean on my watch.) I felt, at times, as if my husband resented me — which made me resent him. I worried for our future and, yes, I felt ashamed: Was my marriage not as equitable as I’d always imagined?
According to financial expert Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez, my husband and I are in no way unique. In a 2023 article for Glamour UK, O’Connell Rodriguez used the term “ambition penalty” to describe the social, professional and financial costs that women face when they go after what they want.
“Research finds that women enter the workforce with the same or higher levels of ambition as men. But while men are praised and rewarded for their ambitions, women are far more likely to be penalised for acting on theirs,” O’Connell Rodriguez writes.
In the workplace, women who actively pursue leadership positions are labeled aggressive, demanding and money-motivated, and they are perceived as less likable and hirable. But according to O’Connell Rodriguez, our most intimate relationships suffer, too.
For example, O’Connell Rodriguez tells me, breadwinning women are up to three times more likely to get cheated on by their husbands. Or there may be, as she puts it, “backlash in the form of their partners withdrawing from the domestic labor and refusing to help out and support their careers and their households in the same way that women who are breadwinners do. And you even see higher incidence of emotional and physical abuse when women have career success. You’ll also see divorce rates oftentimes go up.”
Particularly when a relationship starts off as equal, and the woman has some kind of professional success that eclipses her partner, the backlash can be sudden and surprising.
“It can be very disorienting, and painful,” O’Connell Rodriguez says.
Between two successful careers — one in tech and another as a freelance journalist — Brianna makes over six figures, whereas her husband, she says, “works in nonprofit and just makes no money, unfortunately.”
“My husband has never felt emasculated,” Brianna says. “He loves that I make money because it’s what keeps us financially afloat.”
Even so, she continues: “As a couple we have had to battle out gender norms because I did a lot of household stuff when I was home, and it wasn’t a seamless transition to equitable labor. I’d say it’s a work in progress still. My husband has had periods where he’s been a stay-at-home parent and doesn’t do nearly the household labor I did as a stay-at-home mom.”
Intentional or not, it’s the kind of penalty that O’Connell Rodriguez says will cause some women to retreat from their ambitions.
In researching my book, I spoke with countless women who left their professions so that they could better fulfill the role traditionally prescribed to them. Working moms felt ashamed for not being at the PTA meeting, apologetic every time they came home after the children were already put to bed. For same-sex couples, the roles each partner takes are often more fluid, but they may still feel certain gendered expectations for themselves and each other. In some cases, our partners explicitly or unconsciously reinforce our painful feelings.
Tess and her now ex-husband, Lou, worked as professors at the same university. “Even though he always earned more, I was more well regarded on campus,” she says.
When Tess started publishing her work in well-known outlets, she says, “it became too much.”
Lou was frustrated by his lack of success, or “wins,” Tess says, “and was — I know now — crippled by anxiety.”
Tess says Lou relied on her for emotional support and reassurance that he was a good teacher, that he made a difference in his students’ lives, and that his work mattered even if he wasn’t winning accolades. “When I was just raising our girls and teaching, but not yet publishing, I think it was manageable to him,” she says. “But when I was doing those things and publishing — and making money doing it — he fell into that classic position of worrying that I didn’t ‘need’ him anymore.”
To salvage their marriage, Tess says, “it would have taken him going to therapy to have his anxiety diagnosed and treated.”
Instead, it ended in divorce.
