Woman's Boyfriend Asks Her To 'Postpone' Her Promotion So He Can Get One First & Be The Breadwinner
He's so afraid of being the only man in his office whose partner makes more money than him that he's asking her to jeopardize her career.
piranka, alexsalcedo, izusek, dimaberlinphotos | Canva Calls for a return to the days of "traditional wives" and "old-fashioned gender roles" are everywhere nowadays, especially as women have begun surging ahead of men when it comes to who is the breadwinner in male-female households.
One woman online is struggling with her fiancé's insecurities about this, and while he hasn't taken it quite so far as demanding she stay home making him breakfast every day, he has made a drastic request that has many other women seeing red flags.
The woman's boyfriend asked her to postpone her promotion so that he could get one first.
When it comes to breadwinners, heterosexual partnerships are definitely changing. A recent study by Pew Research found that roughly 16% of heterosexual households now have a female breadwinner with another 29% having equal incomes, both figures that have been steadily rising since 1972. Meanwhile, male breadwinner households have fallen from 85% to 55% over the same period — a dynamic causing anxiety and resentment in many relationships.
For a woman on Reddit, these dynamics have brought her relationship to a pretty shocking crossroads.
"Two days ago, my supervisor at work called me in and said he was so impressed that he wants to promote me to project lead," she writes in her Reddit post. "This position would be in the six figures and I am over the moon."
She had hoped her fiancé would be congratulatory about this huge milestone in her career.
"I expected my fiance to be overjoyed and over the moon about it," she writes, "instead, he looked a bit shocked and disappointed even, while pretending to be happy."
Her boyfriend told her he was afraid of being the 'laughingstock' of his office because he's no longer the breadwinner.
She approached him to ask what exactly was bothering him, and the answer she got left her rather shocked. First, he essentially asked her to turn down the opportunity.
"He told me he was hoping I would postpone the promotion date until after he got promoted." Not many employers would be willing to do that, of course, and the brass tacks of why he wanted this are even more bracing. "He said he's worried he would be the laughing stock since most of his coworkers either have housewives or have working wives who make less than them," she writes. She replied that this is "nonsense," especially since he still "makes great money" but he insisted she tell her employer to delay the promotion.
Thankfully, she refused. But that decision has had quite a bit of blowback. "He hasn't engaged much other than drink more and be an alcoholic since I told him I couldn't do that," she writes. And it left her asking her fellow Redditors for advice on how to "get his temper in control" — a red flag if there ever was one.
Men becoming resentful of female breadwinners is a huge problem — even though it usually means she still does the bulk of the household work.
Most people online felt like rather than asking how to tame his temper, this woman should be asking why she's with this guy in the first place. People were pretty shocked by how insecure he is. As one person put it, "bro who cares about what your coworkers got going on, your soon-to-be-wife got a promotion that'll bring in a lot more cash for the both of you!"
Sadly, this woman is absolutely not alone. Search the topic on TikTok, for example, and you will be bombarded with a cesspool of at times openly misogynistic men lamenting the rise of the female breadwinner. That trend is all the more galling given that studies have repeatedly shown even when they're breadwinners, women are still doing the majority of the household work in addition to their careers.
And that, in turn, has led to a divorce rate among marriages with a female breadwinner that is 50% higher than marriages where the man brings home the bacon. Even in those marriages that don't end in divorce, the toxic brew of male insecurity and societal judgment is so potent that a 2018 study by the US Census Bureau found that partners in couples with a female breadwinner tend to lie about who's making more.
So to sum up, men are benefitting from partners who make more money than them, and not even having to pick up any slack around the house because of it, but their egos are still so fragile that it's destroying their marriages. It just goes to show that women all too often can't win even when they're winning.
Still, there are plenty of men out there with their heads on straight when it comes to all this stuff. Here's hoping this woman can find one, instead of one who asks her to blow up her career to make him feel better.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.