In the end, Dan’s definitions won out more often. Kevin said, “I think the fact that some of the money isn’t mine almost means that I am more willing to kind of say, like, ‘OK, whatever.’ And I’m willing to kind of defer to his ‘Hey, we can afford this, we should do this.’” This imbalance had caused problems, especially in their renovation, which Kevin described as “contentious” and “fraught.” He had been inclined to make fewer changes, while Dan had wanted to do more. “And I think,” he said, “the renovation was a big wrestling with [money tensions] in some ways. In moments, it felt very significant to me. Like, ‘Whose apartment is this? Am I just, like, a guest in, like, your apartment? Or your and your family’s apartment?’” Now, he said, “I mostly feel like to the degree that we did have these tensions around [money differences], it’s mostly resolved.”
Miranda described struggling with her husband over hiring paid labor. Although they both worked for pay and had relatively flexible schedules, Miranda was also in charge of her young children’s food, their classes, and their play dates. She was responsible for supervising and communicating with the nanny and the housecleaner, on his behalf as well as her own. Her husband had resisted hiring an interior designer for their renovation because he wanted their home to reflect their aesthetic vision rather than someone else’s. But Miranda, who was responsible for executing this vision, wanted someone to help her find all the necessary fixtures and furnishings for their home. Her husband didn’t see her desire for this assistance as necessary—but he wasn’t willing to do the work himself.
Heterosexual male inheritors I interviewed sometimes acknowledged these issues, but they tended to frame themselves as not controlling their wives. Gary told me, “I have made a real point of not applying [to her] controls or judgment to the use of our money.” In fact, he wanted her to take more of an interest in the management of their money, partly because he had watched his mother’s “deep infantilization all through her life, around any financial affairs.” Donovan told me, “I manage all the finances,” but his wife was in charge of the family spending. When the credit card bill came, he said, “I look at the gross number, and if it’s a big bill I look to see what was the money being spent on, but I never say anything about it.” He said, “By and large, my wife and I have very few financial arguments. One that we had was about the budget for our bathroom. I’m not going to remember numbers, but she was interested in putting in marble tiling, I think it was. And that’s where I drew the line. I just said, ‘No.’ It was quite expensive, and, more fundamentally, I just—it rang contrary to so many of my beliefs about the proper use of money.” But he insisted it was the only decision he had ever vetoed in the course of their long marriage. The fact remained, of course, that, like the male earners I have described, he did have the right to prohibit the expenditure.
Not only the status of inheritor or spouse, but also the gender of the inheritor, mattered. Female inheritors married to men appeared less likely to try to control their husbands’ spending, either directly or indirectly, and they talked more about their spouses’ feelings than male inheritors did. They were not monitoring what their husbands spent. Instead they felt impelled to compensate for a feeling of powerlessness that their husbands might have related to their contributing less. Ellen, the progressive financial advisor mentioned in chapter 2, told me:
I work with a number of women with inherited wealth. And the pressure that it puts on heterosexual relationships is troubling. … When men have inherited wealth, and marry a woman, there is no swimming upstream for our culture because of the sense that the man is still taking care of the woman. And so he got it from inheritance? Who cares? Or he got it because he goes to work every day, or he got it—you know, no one cares. When the woman has the money, then it is swimming upstream. Because it’s against the messages that we’ve all had from birth of “He should support his family.”
Ellen said husbands in these situations sometimes felt that “they have to go work really hard to make some money that’s equal to that, or they have to gain it, in the sense of, they have to use it to invest.” Even when the family had enough money, she says, “often I’ll see that men make short-term bad decisions around money. … And they end up risking and losing it, because they were so eager to have their footprint on the money.”
Sara reported a similar dynamic with her husband. She had inherited over $10 million. Her husband worked in finance, earning about $250,000 annually; he had some family wealth, but his assets paled in comparison with hers. They lived in a rental apartment costing nearly $6,000 per month. As we saw in chapter 3, they were trying to work out what their spending limits should be. Having recently had their first child, they were beginning to consider buying and furnishing a more permanent home. Sara wanted to buy a place, but her husband was thinking about quitting his job, in which case they might leave the city. She wanted to upgrade her furniture and maybe buy some art, but starting this project proved difficult without knowing where they were going to live.
Also crucial, however, were her husband’s reluctance to spend “her” money and a lack of clarity around who was the ultimate decision maker about spending. Sara told me, “We’ve fallen into a dynamic that we’re trying to get out of. Which is, like, I want to spend money. He’s in the awkward position of being, like, ‘No, I don’t think we should buy that art or go on that vacation.’ And I’m like, ‘But we can afford it.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, it depends on how you define “afford.”’ And then, at the end of the day, it’s my money. And so it puts him in this really awkward position. So we’re trying to get through that. And we both agreed that having a budget that we agree to will be a good proactive way to say, like, ‘We agreed that we can spend X amount on trying to finish our apartment this year.’ And, like, work within that.” In part, her husband had a “Puritan ethic” about spending in general; but also, she said, “for him, I think a lot of it is like, ‘I shouldn’t be spending your money.’” She told me that her personal giving had declined to 5 percent of her income from 10 percent since she had started making decisions jointly with her husband, which seemed related to their general lack of clarity about how to spend.
Rebecca thought recent money problems she and her husband had had might actually have helped their marriage. Her husband had felt left out of their renovation process, she said, because the money they had used to buy and renovate their house came from her inheritance. She recounted, “I think that [he] felt like I was just throwing money at a lot of stuff to solve problems. And I think that he didn’t feel, maybe, like he was part of the game.” But, when they ran into economic challenges, she said, it became “less of a problem. … Like, we’ve had to actually come together to figure some of this stuff out. … I think that it might have actually been a good thing for our marriage, to have had a financial stumbling block.” Having more limits created a greater sense of equality between them—and having less money perhaps gave them a sense that it belonged to both of them.
A central way that both male and female inheritors compensated for this asymmetry was to transfer assets to their partners legally. Rebecca, for example, spoke of doing some “legal rearrangement” to make sure her husband felt that their home was “his house.” Although Sara said of her money, “I’m not entirely ready to not treat it as mine,” after a lot of discussion she was planning to transfer some assets to her husband and see how that felt to both of them. Donovan told me, “When I was working—and I made a lot of money on my own—what I did was, I paid our expenses. And anything that was left over—and there was a lot left over—I split evenly. Half went into her account, half went into my account. So she actually has a substantial amount of money of her own, and I’ve emphasized repeatedly to her, ‘It’s your money!’”
Olivia’s husband had given her significant assets as well. Yet Olivia, like several others I interviewed, had signed a prenuptial agreement that protected the bulk of her husband’s family’s substantial wealth. The prenup is, of cou
rse, a form of preventing transfer of assets. One stay-at-home wife of an earner told me that her husband had asked her to sign a prenup, and she had refused. But other earner families did not mention this to me. In part, perhaps, they simply did not want to tell me about it, and I did not usually ask. But if inheriting families are more likely to have such agreements, it might be because legal issues are different for inheritors, who tend to own the bulk of their assets before coming into the marriage, whereas earners typically accumulate them during the course of the marriage.
Legal transfer of assets became an issue, again, intergenerationally, particularly in terms of children’s inheritance. Several partners of inheritors felt their partners’ families played an outsized role in their own and their children’s lives. It did not usually bother them that grandparents often paid for kids’ private schools (a way of avoiding taxes on gifts above a certain amount). But grandparents also concerned themselves with establishing trust funds and other mechanisms of passing money down through the generations, which noninheriting parents often had no control over. One wife of an inheritor was frustrated at the way her in-laws treated their children on a quotidian basis in terms of values around spending. She said, of their preference to spend money freely and enjoy luxury, “I find it very hard to counter those arguments in a way that people who believe those arguments care about and will listen to.” She said, “The times I’ve raised this [issue], it’s sort of like, ‘You know what? Your kids are going to grow up with luxury whether you want them to or not. Fuck you.’”
In a few families, the women had inherited wealth but they lived mostly—or talked about living mostly—on their husbands’ significant earnings, thus framing themselves and their husbands as more like earning families. Nicole, as we have seen, tended to think of herself and her family as living on her husband’s earnings, and she talked about her inheritance as something she tried not to touch. Although her family members paid for her children’s school, she said that if she had to, “I think I could swing that” (using earned income). Nicole told me that she had no idea how much she and her husband spent every month but that her husband “absolutely” did know, because he was in charge of the family’s finances. She also said he trusted her to spend reasonably. “He knows everything I spend money on. Everything. … And I have absolutely no issue with it at all. I just don’t care. … He doesn’t give me grief about anything.”
But it became clear that Nicole’s husband had, in fact, been monitoring her spending and that she felt disempowered in the relationship in terms of entitlement to spend his earnings. She told me she had recently inherited a chunk of additional assets: “Actually, that’s been great. Because for a long time, I was like, ‘Brian, I need more money in my checking account.’ You know. And now I don’t have to do that anymore. Which is great. And I don’t have to have a huge discussion about, like, whether [her daughter] Felicity is going to take, you know, science camp for a week. And in the old days, I’d be like, ‘But Brian, she’s really good at science. I know it seems expensive, but, you know.’ And now I’m like, ‘She’s doing science camp.’” She laughed. “You know? Because I feel strongly about it, and I’m not going to, like—I don’t know. I mean, obviously, we still have conversations about things. But it’s nice to not always be the one who’s asking for a check.” Like Ursula, who said her husband was “very good” about not interfering with her spending and then said she wished she had her own income so she could spend without “having to justify” her new shoes, Nicole seems torn. She wants to feel that her husband doesn’t control her spending, but in fact he does, at least sometimes. Perhaps ironically, Nicole does have her own money, which she could have spent on camp or anything else. But her desire not to rely on this money for daily living prevents her from tapping into it, even in order to avoid the feeling of supplication (and apparent subordination) she describes when she has to convince Brian to agree to spend the money.
The flip side of this question of control is the question of contribution. I asked Nicole if her husband ever felt conflicted about her inherited wealth, a possibility that Ellen and others had suggested to me. She was surprised by this question, saying, “It never even crossed my mind that he would feel weird about me having family money. … Isn’t it nice to have a nest egg? Like, [I’d imagine] that he would feel a comfort.” But she also told me about a moment when his income had dropped unexpectedly and her work as a photographer, which varied seasonally, had brought in a little bit of income: “I said, ‘Well, isn’t it good, then, that I’m bringing in all this extra money that we’re not used to? ’Cause, you know, it can, like, fill the gap a little bit.’ And he said, ‘What you bring in would barely scratch the surface of what we need to come up with every month.’ And I was like, ‘What an obnoxious thing to say! I was not suggesting that I could cover all of our expenses. I’m just saying, it doesn’t hurt. I mean, that’s four thousand dollars you didn’t have. Like, come on. Throw me a bone.’ Obviously, I’m taking some pride in being able to, like, provide a little bit more than I have been, because it was a job that paid more than most. He didn’t throw me the bone.” It seemed to me that perhaps Nicole’s husband’s sense of recognition was zero-sum—that is, he could not recognize her earned contribution without somehow diminishing his own—and that this might have been related to the “nest egg” her inheritance provided.
Although these control issues mirror those of single-earner couples, inheritors seem to communicate more about them with their partners than did the stay-at-home mothers I interviewed. They did not mention being secretive about spending. Although the pool is small, it also seems likely that heterosexual female inheritors are more concerned about ameliorating their husbands’ discomfort than vice versa, given the great threat to masculinity that can come from not being the breadwinner.
Not every couple, however, talked about these concerns. Eliana said, “I did nothing” to get the money she inherited. “I feel like that gives me the right attitude toward it. Which is, it’s not mine. You know. It flows through. It flows to my children, it flows to the things I give it to. I’m a member of the economy. I employ people, I spend things. I just feel like a conduit; it doesn’t feel like mine. So, sharing with my girlfriend, for example. No problem. Why would it be my money any more than hers? It’s so arbitrary.” This idea of “flow” explicitly denies attachment or ownership.
Kate told me that she did not feel “dependent” in her relationship with Nadine, first of all because she had earned her living for many years and could do so again. She also felt strongly that Nadine did not try to control the money, saying, “I don’t think she sees that money as hers, either. She never has.” Also referring to “flow,” Kate said, “It kind of flows through us, but it’s not really ours. And [Nadine’s] really remarkable in that way. She’s never made me feel like somehow she brings the money to the relationship, so that gives her a different sort of footing or standing or anything like that.” Unlike most inheritor couples, they shared all the money jointly.
The lack of conflict may have to do with being in a lesbian relationship, in two ways. First, until very recently same-sex partners had to make extensive (and expensive) legal arrangements in order to gain the benefits of marriage in terms of taxes and inheritance, as well as many other issues. Thus these couples may have had to address these questions more explicitly. Second, in same-sex relationships questions of money do not map onto larger issues of male privilege that mark heterosexual relationships. Kate reflected on the gender issues associated with this situation: “I have to say, I think if Nadine were a man, I would feel differently. I know I would.” She mentioned that her childhood had been “very gendered,” saying, “And so if I was married to a man and I was totally dependent on the money that he had, it would bum me out.” But as Kevin and Dan’s story indicates, issues of control of money do not disappear in these same-sex relationships.
TIME OVER MONEY: DUAL EARNERS
Unlike most stay-at-home mothers
and wives of male inheritors, women in dual-earner couples typically had a grasp of the family finances equal to or occasionally better than that of their husbands. Willa had inherited wealth and a significant income of her own, although it was only about a fourth of her husband’s (with a household income of around $2 million, they were wealthier than most in this dual-earner category). She told me, of her husband, “I mean, almost from the first day we dated, he has not had any idea what’s in our checking account. He has no idea how much money we have. I pay all of our bills. I manage all of our accounts.”
These couples included the least affluent in my sample, and thus we might expect that they would struggle more over money. But I did not find that to be the case, especially in any gendered way. Margaret, for example, was a nonprofit fundraiser whose husband worked in entertainment. She earned a small proportion of their total household income of just over $250,000, but she was the one watching the family’s expenditures, including setting limits on what her husband could spend on his lunch.
Instead of money issues, these couples clashed over the household division of labor. Unlike families with one earner (always male) and most of the inheritor families, in which it was taken for granted that the women were responsible for the home front, men and women in straight couples who both worked at least half-time struggled over who would do this work. Like inheritors, the men in these families seemed to spend more time with and take more responsibility for the children. But they were less active in other areas. Keith and Karen agreed, for example, that Keith was “a very involved dad.” Keith said, “It pains me to be at work and not be in my kids’ lives.” However, he said that he and his wife had “hired a cleaning lady instead of a couples therapist.” This claim suggests, of course, that the conflict they had about cleaning had been significant; like many other couples before them, they chose to spend money on the labor of another woman to resolve it.18
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