'I hide my salary from my boyfriend'

How will we ever close the gender pay gap if we can't earn more than our partners without hurting their egos?

I have a secret. Scratch that, it’s not really a secret. It’s something I regularly lie about to the one person in the world I share more or less everything with. My boyfriend and I live together. We share our home, our bed, our groceries, our hopes, our fears, and our joint bank account.

I know everything about him, even the stuff I wish I didn’t know – like the time he cheated on me when we were most definitely not ‘on a break’. He also knows all the stupid things I’ve done when drunk. Even the things I’ve tried to forget.

That’s love, right? Full disclosure.

But I earn more than my boyfriend, and I go out of my way to hide it from him. Why am I concealing this central part of who I am?

A 2017 survey on this subject recently went viral. One of its key findings was that millennial women were still likely to be embarrassed or “worried” about making more money than their male partners. An anonymous participant told the interviewer that she “felt shocked” and then “embarrassed” that her initial reaction had been shame when she realised that she earned more than her husband.

Quite rightly, this sparked a zillion tweets and a fair few articles about how young women are “just fine” with earning more than their male partners. It’s 2018, we’re desperately trying to close the gender pay gap, and outwardly we celebrate women who succeed and are paid fairly for it.

This is exactly what I said as well, in conversation with friends, as well as on social media. I pointed out that we will only ever redress the power imbalance between men and women in the workplace, the very imbalance that has allowed sexual harassment to thrive in industries around the world, when women earn the same, if not more than men. I even quoted statistics like the fact that, in 2017, the World Economic Forum warned, external that it’s going to take 217 years to close the pay gap, which makes this all pretty urgent.

And yet, privately, I kept my secret. At home, I still don’t practice what I preach, and I never have.

Right now, my boyfriend and I are both desperate to go on holiday. We haven’t been away together since we first met, because we just haven’t been able to afford it. Instead, we’ve just worked, and worked, and…worked.

However, it could have been different. After getting a lucky break and landing a big contract, I could actually have afforded it. I could have paid for us both to go away but, instead of offering to front the costs, I kept quiet about the fact that I’ve got over £5,000 stashed away in a savings account that he doesn’t know about. I hid it from him because I was worried he would feel bad.

When I met my boyfriend, I earned more than him by over £20,000 a year. He’s a gardener, and I work in publishing. With the exception of a brief lull in my earnings during 2016/17, because I took a pay cut for a job I really wanted, I have consistently earned more than him during our six year relationship. We now live together, and I hope we’ll be together until one of us dies, but he still doesn’t know the truth about my finances.

And here’s the thing: our relationship was the best it has ever been when he was briefly the breadwinner.

He loaned me money, and he paid for holidays. If we ate out it was on him and, a few times, he even bought me clothes. I hated it, and he moaned a bit, but, deep down, I knew he felt like he was finally living up to a warped societal pressure to be “the man of the house”. He has even gone as far as to say that he feels he is failing if he can’t provide for me.

During the year when I wasn’t earning much money, I won an award for my work. He was genuinely happy for me, and felt like he had played a small part in it because he’d been able to make it possible financially. I remember going for a celebratory dinner that year on my birthday. He paid, we got a cab home, and then we had great sex. In fact, during that entire year the sex was the best it has ever been. It felt, somehow, like we’d got the balance just right.

My boyfriend is brilliant, and successful in his own right, but, as much as I know he takes pride in my success, I also know that he feels good about me “needing” him. Maybe this is why I continue to conceal the truth? I’ve asked myself that question so many times while lying awake at night next to him in our bed.

So what am I playing at? It’s a good question. As if my own hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, the worst thing about all of this is that women who are the main breadwinners in their relationships could have reason to be cagey. A 2016 Harvard study, external found that couples are more likely to divorce if the husband works part-time or doesn’t work at all. The study’s author, Alexandra Killewald wrote that it’s because “the husband breadwinner norm persists”.

I don’t come from wealth, and the amount in my savings isn’t huge compared with what the likes of Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Meghan Markle have stashed. But, for me, someone who watched my family scrimp, answered the front door to bailiffs on more than one occasion, and listened to my mum on the phone as she resigned herself to selling all of her valuables, it’s a big deal.

My parents both came from very modest backgrounds. My dad then became a hotshot banker back in the Eighties. He had no qualifications and none of his family had ever imagined having the kind of money he earned. But, in the early Noughties, it all fell apart. My dad lost his job, and, shortly afterwards, we lost our house.

After a couple of years of struggling, my mum set up her own business and became the breadwinner. Eventually, this led to my parents separating. Why? My dad’s fragile ego couldn’t handle it. I would hear him talking to people and pretending that my mum’s company was “actually his”. I listened at the door as they argued because he’d spent the money she had given him for the week in a single day and, even though I was barely a teenager, I picked up on the snarky comments my granddad made about the whole situation.

I saw what my mum becoming the breadwinner did to my family as a teenager. And, more recently, I’ve seen what it has done to some of my friends’ relationships. There’s one friend, Melissa*. She is a successful freelance photographer. Over the last few years she has bought a house for her and her boyfriend, supported him when he wasn’t working, paid for holidays, sorted the bills, and overseen the food shopping.

In public, he says how much he loves being with a "strong woman". In private, I know they fight constantly because I’ve seen some of the emotionally manipulative messages he sends her, making her feel guilty for being away with work or out on a shoot.

And then, there’s another friend. Let’s call her Kayley*. She is a management consultant and easily earns double what her ex-boyfriend does. Notice the ‘ex’. In the end, Fred* left Kayley shortly after she moved out of the house she owned into a cheaper flat to make him feel more comfortable. Up until recently, she has been to scared to tell any of her Tinder dates the truth about what she earns.

Despite the fact that I openly tell her “it doesn’t matter”, and encourage her to “be herself” because “the right person won’t care”, the truth is that I’d probably do the same if I was single.

Having seen what being the female breadwinner has done to the relationships of those I love, and experienced what happened when my boyfriend felt like he was supporting me, I feel very conflicted.

I also feel shame. I am ashamed of the fact that I am being dishonest with the one person in the world, who I should be able to say anything to. And, more than this, I am ashamed of the fact that we still don’t live in a world where you can be a successful young woman and not feel like this.

How will we ever close the gender pay gap, let alone get more women in top earning positions, if some of us can’t even earn a few thousand pounds more than our partners without worrying about what it will do to their egos?

On a personal level, though, I really hope my boyfriend and I reach a point where the balance shifts. I want to be open about my earnings without fearing that he will resent me. Equally, I don’t want to feel a pressure to contribute more to our life together than he does. I don’t want to be supported by him, but nor do I want to support him. I just want us to be equals, regardless of what’s in our bank accounts.

*names have been changed to protect identities

This article was originally published on 3 July 2018.

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