When two people decide to build a family together, questions of who will and won't have a job outside the home often arise. For a lot of families, it's nearly impossible to raise kids and not have both parents working outside the home. For others, it's doable, but it doesn't feel great.
One man recently wrote on Reddit that his wife of five years left her job about a year into their marriage. That was fine, but now she doesn't want to go back at all — and he feels like they need two incomes to live their lives the way he wants to.
Her reasons for quitting her job were good.
"When we got married we both had jobs," the husband began. "However maybe about a year after we were married my wife tearfully confessed to me that she was miserable at her job and wanted to quit. She told me that her boss was treating her like garbage and that she woke up every morning wanting to vomit. She legitimately seemed dejected and so I told her to quit and to find another job where she would be treated better."
But she never found anything else.
"She quit. I expected her to go out and start looking for something else but she didn't seem too eager. Whenever I gently brought it up she responded 'I'm just trying to figure out my next move. Stop pressuring me.' Not long after she got pregnant with our son, and then while he was still very young she got pregnant with our daughter."
A few years have passed, and nothing has changed.
"A few months after she was born when I asked my wife what her plans were job-wise she finally just said 'I don't want to go back to work. You make enough for us to get by. Just let me be a wife and mother.' I told her that I was concerned that I don't actually make enough to give our family as good of a life as I'd like but she insisted that we can make it work."
To be fair, she does a lot of work at the house.
"I have to admit; she's probably a model homemaker and mom. When I wake up for work in the morning there is always freshly brewed coffee and breakfast waiting for me. The house is always clean and other than yardwork and repairs I basically don't have to do anything around the house. And she is a great mother to our kids. I am quite lucky in many ways."
However, he's really stressed about money.
"However, money is WAY tighter than I'd like. We are barely saving anything and I'm not even able to meet my employer's match on my 401K in order to have enough for us to get by. We are living lean; eating beans and rice for dinner a couple times a week, etc. I don't feel as if I signed up for this. We were both working when we got married and I never thought we'd have to live on just my income. I've tried to talk to her about going back to work–even part time–to help our financial situation several times but she just won't hear it."
He recently took action.
"Recently when I was going through our expenses I saw that we were signed up for five streaming services. I kept Hulu and Netflix because they had more child-based programming for our son and our daughter when she gets a little older but cancelled HBO and Discovery Plus because they are pretty exclusively for adults. I kept Shudder because it's cheap and I like horror. When I told my wife about it she got angry and said that I should have talked to her first; that she had shows she was watching on both of the services I'd cancelled. I just responded 'Well, get a job and you can pay for them then.'"
Now he wants to know: Was he wrong?
One person pointed out that child care is expensive.
Many commenters were pretty thoughtful while approaching the situation. One wrote, "If she goes to work chances are one salary will be eaten up by childcare."
But the man had a reply ready. "I work a pretty non-traditional schedule and so would be able to watch the kids while my wife is at work for a good portion of the time. We'd still have to pay for some childcare but we'd still come out ahead by a good bit. And if she took a part-time job we should be able to completely maneuver around my schedule."
But others knew that reasoning was coming.
But other people feel that using that line of reasoning doesn't really check out. "While that is true and important to realize, the children will eventually age out of childcare and both mom/dad will still have an employment history instead of a 5+ year gap," said one commenter. "My wife and I had similar discussions and decided even if one our our salaries went ENTIRELY to childcare, we both needed to stay employed for a variety of other beneficial reasons (having healthcare options, employer HSA contributions, 401k matches or pension plans, simply for resume building, loan applications, etc.)."
One commenter even called the response 'short-sighted.'
"This is often a very short sighted response. For one thing even if every penny of take home pay is going to childcare – she's still putting money towards her social security which will be increasing what she gets in retirement. A lot of employers have FSA for childcare so you can save money by using that and not having to pay tax on that money. Plus those companies that have a 401k match is free money if you can throw some in there. Furthermore children aren't in full time childcare forever – but an adult who has a 5+ year gap in the resume has a ridiculously hard time getting hired again without having to step way down from previous position."
Others took issue with how he went about canceling things.
"Cancelling some streaming services if you're struggling to budget is a perfectly sensible thing to do, but the way they went about it comes across as a petty 'punishment,'" said a commenter.
"If they keep this kind of attitude up, he'll resent her for being 'lazy' and; she'll resent him for being 'controlling' and the whole thing will fall apart."
This also opened up a conversation about financial bullying.
"Obviously there’s kids in the mix here and the situation has gone way too far now," said a commenter, "but hypothetically, if one partner just decides not to work without the other partner agreeing, where’s does line start for financial bullying? Does the working partner have zero independence for decisions on their own income anymore?"
Ultimately, most people agree that both parties are wrong.
"I’m confused about how they even got to this point," noted a commenter. "If money was this tight they should be sitting down TOGETHER to review the budget and decide what stays and what goes. Unilaterally canceling streaming services in the middle of shows she was watching without talking to her is rude. I get that it’s just television, but he’s not treating her like a partner in their decisions. And honestly, in her refusal to consider going back to work at the expense of her family’s well being is not acting like a partner."
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
