I took a certain path in life. I worked fulltime my last year of high school and all through college to pay for my education, I built a career and switched to a higher-paying field when I realized I’d never be able to afford to have a family while working in social services, and eventually pulled myself into the lower middle class. My boyfriend took a different path, going to music school, dropping out when he became an alcoholic, finally getting sober at 24, and becoming a professional musician. He works just enough to feed himself and “focus on the music”, waiting tables and bringing in roughly $18k/year (he makes enough from music to pay to go on tour but doesn’t actually turn a profit, as I learned from doing his taxes for him).
My ex-fiance made about 2-3x what I did when we were together and I was working in social services, and he was adamant that “as the breadwinner” it was his job to pay for almost everything, so I know that now that I am in the same situation, it’s only fair that I be the one paying with my current boyfriend. He very much wants to marry me and have a family together, but with things as they are, I’m having a really hard time accepting what the future will look like.
In my country (USA), among couples who both work full time, the woman still does 68% of the chores and childcare, so I know it really isn’t fair for me to expect that my boyfriend would do half of the domestic tasks, that’s just not how things are for men. My boyfriend is a terrible cook and finds the pressure of making a full meal (not just tofu from the package or boiled spaghetti) to be a big anxiety trigger, so buying and cooking the meals we eat together (3-5 nights a week) naturally falls to me. (I love to cook, so this isn’t a huge issue, but it does needle me to have to pay for all the food when he eats 2-3x what I do.) I was a babysitter growing up and a professional nanny for about a year after college, so as a highly experienced caregiver, naturally the childcare would fall fully to me if we were to have kids together. My boyfriend is also, somehow, even messier than I am. I’ve told him 1,000 times that I hate when he throws his towels on my couch after showers and scatters his things all over my apartment, but he “just doesn’t notice those things” and my asking eventually reached the point of nagging so I had to stop mentioning it. So, all that is to say that if we got married, 100% of the chores and childcare would be on me.
We’ve had a few conversations about how we would be able to finance having a family together, and he is adamant that “the money will come” and “it’s better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable”. But his perspective comes from being raised ultra-wealthy (his mom still pays a lot of his bills), while I feel like I had to scratch my way out of poverty after my dad left us and my mom had to raise us three kids on less than 20K a year. I’ve worked really hard to get to a place where I’m financially comfortable, saving for retirement, and building a nest egg. Realistically, I know he would not be happy to continue waiting tables three nights a week while I made good money and wore a pantsuit and heels to the office every day, so I’m fairly sure that he doesn’t plan to work for pay after we get married, just “focus on the music”.
Knowing that that is our future honestly just throws me into panic. I KNOW that I should be ok with it, that I’m a bad feminist for not being 1,000% excited to be the breadwinner, but I don’t see that being a sustainable situation. I feel doubly awful because my ex-fiance was adamant that he would cover me financially and wanted me to leave my job to focus on my art while we were together, but now that I’m in a position to even that out, I’m not ok with it.
Do I just suck it up, swallow my fears, and accept that this is the price of the “girl power” feminism I was fed in the 90’s? When I look around, pretty much all of my girlfriends are in the same situation, they’re college educated and successful, dating men without degrees or careers who don’t contribute domestically, which makes me feel…thirdly bad for my apprehension here. Is there any way for me to tell my boyfriend he needs to step it up financially without sounding like a greedy gold-digger? Whenever I bring up these concerns he just tells me he’s “not into material things” like I am, that poor families are happier than rich families (he points to our own differing upbringings to drive this point home), and that I’m “too focused on the future and not the present”. He’s also made some comments like “I had no idea you were so into a man’s wallet” and “if you want someone who’ll shower you with diamonds, you picked the wrong guy”, so I’m really worried that he thinks I’m only interested in what he can provide financially.
Is there any ok way to bring up the “you need to finish college or pick a trade, because I’m not doing all the chores and bankrolling your band” topic without sounding petty and greedy? I know that a woman talking about money pretty much automatically sounds like a gold-digger to most people.
Tl;dr: If I marry my boyfriend I will have to do all the domestic tasks on top of making all the money, and I don't think I can handle that stress. How do I tell him he needs to make more money, without sounding like a gold-digger?
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