I MAKE THE MONEY, HONEY

What happens to a marriage when the wife is the breadwinner? In this case, as Amy Sohn writes, it can mean the best of both worlds.

Rewriting the rules of domestic bliss

Recently I was at lunch with a friend, a mother of two who is supporting her family as an editor while her unemployed husband figures out his next move. She mentioned that although he had always been a capable cook, he spent more time in the kitchen now that he was home. And she liked that she didn’t have to worry about making dinner anymore. “What about you?” she asked. “Do you cook?”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I did a couple of weeks ago. Pork-shoulder stew with polenta. To my great surprise, it was delicious, but then I got busy and didn’t do it again for the rest of the month.” She laughed. ‘‘‘I’m trying?’’’ she said. “You sound like a guy. A wife could never say that. They can’t try to cook dinner for the family. They have to.”

“But I am the guy,” I said. “The cooking isn’t my responsibility. It’s his.” I have been “the guy” for all nine years of my marriage. My husband is an artist who, from the moment our now seven-year-old daughter was born, has been her primary caregiver. When she was an infant, we all flew from New York to Los Angeles three different times so that I could pitch ideas for television shows. I used a costly electric Medela breast pump so he could feed her in the hotel while I was in meetings, doing character descriptions and season arcs. It is said that the mother is the centre of the family, but for my daughter’s first year of life it was the pump.

Now that our daughter is in school fulltime, my husband, whose income is 10 to 20 percent of what I make, does the school run. On weekdays he makes us all breakfast, gets her dressed, packs her lunch, shuttles her to playdates, and shops for groceries while I work at a local writers’ space. He makes dinner for her and a second dinner for the two of us and gets her ready for bed. On weekends he vacuums and mops, and he cleans the bathroom. He was the one who toilet-trained her and taught her to swim and read. On top of all that, he reads everything I write (except this).

In return, what do I do? The laundry.

Just like Don Draper, I want a martini when I walk through the door, a spouse who has sex with me whenever I ask ... But it turns out that in 2013,

no one is allowed to be like Don Draper.

Within a generation it is likely that more households will be supported by women than men, Liza Mundy asserts in her recent book, The Richer Sex. Marriages like mine are the marriage of the future. So here’s a report from the trenches. For the most part, it works. When my income is high, I take pleasure in being the one who makes money. I like treating him to plays or laying down the credit card at expensive meals out (which only bothers him when we’re with my parents). And I like that he is supportive of my career. When I land a big book advance, he says, “You’ve done it again,” and I feel lucky to be married to someone who wants me to do well and doesn’t have any competition issues.

As a result of everything he does at home, I feel free of the anger and resentment that so many other women feel toward their clueless, working husbands. When a mother at the playground says that her husband “cannot even wash a dish,” I sit quietly because if I told her the truth, she would hate me. Sometimes, during an energetic game of “Blame the husband,” I confess, “Mine balls his socks and throws them down the hallway,” but the truth is I don’t mind. He straightens up constantly, he whips up dinner for 10, he cleans the toilet. What do I care about his socks?

Our arrangement also absolves me of a lot of worry about my child. Because of the focused attention he gives her, she’s turning out to be a bright, happy, and mostly wellbehaved girl. And since she has the benefit of a parent caregiver, as opposed to a paid one, I don’t feel the guilt that I might if she were with a nanny all the time.

On weekends I make up for the time I can’t spend with my daughter by taking her on excursions. I crave my days with her. We have marathon bonding sessions, and because I am not the everyday parent, I am the de facto “fun” one. Once in a while she calls me “Daddy” by accident, but I tell myself that it’s a natural consequence of her spending more time with him. (And to be fair, she sometimes calls him “Mummy.”)

Though our “deal” is what makes our family work, there are complicated aspects of our role reversal. For one, there’s the sex. Like many men, I get less sex than I’d like. I want it on demand, with no foreplay, three or four times a week, and I am like a man in the way I ask for it. I have all the subtlety of Paul Rudd in Knocked Up: “Want to have sex?” But after a long day of child care, my husband is often tired. He says he’d want to have sex more often if I was nicer.

“Try to be more tender,” he says. “What’s tender?” I think. “I’ll feel more tender after we have sex.” Our solution is to do it during the day when our daughter is at school. Something about her absence from the apartment frees him up.

For another, the relationship between my parents and my husband is somewhat strained. My father worries that I married a slacker. He’s from a generation where the men had to provide, and he can’t quite accept that our division of responsibility actually suits us well.

My mother, meanwhile, is jealous of my husband’s proficiency in the kitchen. When he makes an amazing chili or bakes homemade pizza, she eats every last bite but seldom gives the chef a compliment. If a daughter-in-law cooked the way he does, they would trade recipes. But because my mother is being upstaged by a man, it seems she doesn’t like it.

It can also be hard to shoulder the economic burden for an entire family. I often wonder whether men experience the same level of stress that I do. During one financially challenging period, I came home early to find my husband playing gypsy jazz guitar. He had a paying gig approaching, but I couldn’t help calling a dad friend. “He’s practising guitar instead of trying to sell his paintings!” I cried. “I know what you mean,” he said. “My wife just started pottery classes.”

But perhaps the most challenging aspect of our “deal” is the imbalance of responsibility takes its toll on him. “You never cook!” he says. “Why can’t you do it once a week?” Feeling defensive, I use the same lines as my girlfriends’ banker husbands: “It’s not that I don’t want to help out. I don’t have the time. Someone has to pay the mortgage.”

Even as I say the words, I recognise their ridiculousness. It turns out that I don’t really want to be the guy. I want to be the guy circa 1964, like Don Draper on Mad Men. Because I make 80 percent of the family income, I want to do 20 percent of the housework. I want my breadwinner status to absolve me of any task I don’t enjoy, like unloading the dishwasher or taking out the trash on a cold night. Just like Don Draper, I want a martini when I walk through the door, a spouse who has sex with me whenever I ask, and a child who goes to bed when I tell her to. But it turns out that, in 2013, no one is allowed to be like Don Draper. In the modern, egalitarian marriage, everyone has to pitch in regardless of income and everyone has to do some drudgery. No one can put his or her feet up on the coffee table during the witching hour. My therapist, who says he offers me the same counsel he gives his male patients, tells me to give up on having any personal time at night. “It’s not going to happen,” he says. “Put the laptop away when you walk through the door. Get your ‘me’ time on business trips.”

So nowadays, when my husband asks me to clear the dinner table, I get off the couch and say, “No problem.” If he walks into the kitchen and says, “It looks like a bomb went off,” I say, “I’ll do the dishes.” I tidy the living room for an hour after he and our daughter have gone to bed. I give her baths on weekends, even if I don’t spend nearly as much time as he does detangling her hair. And I try to cook a couple of times a week. It makes my husband grateful. He compliments every meal I make like it’s fourstar. “You’ve been hiding your skills from me all these years.” The compliments motivate me to cook more.

The old saw is “Happy wife, happy life.” I agree with that. It just took me nine years of marriage to realise he’s the wife, not me.