I Suddenly Found Myself The Breadwinner In Our Family. I Didn't Expect What It Would Do To My Marriage.

Not too long after I sold my book to a Big Five publisher for a six-figure advance, my husband lost his job.

Even though money wasn’t an issue on account of the book deal — and I was actually relieved that he could take over the lion’s share of invisible labor that I’d been managing for years on top of my low-paid, part-time freelance work — I felt my partner’s stress level rise.

The book I sold, “Shame on You: How To Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification,” is a deep dive into how our unconscious emotions, and unfelt shame in particular, can keep us from knowing our worth and achieving our goals. So it’s ironic that I was reticent to explore what the situation kicked up.

In retrospect, I felt guilty.

Pursuing my career goals, I believed, had impacted my partner’s abilities to pursue his. Even though I’d become the “provider,” I still felt as if I needed his permission to work. I felt irritated when I came home to a sloppy playroom or a sink full of dishes. (The house was always clean on my watch.) I felt, at times, as if my husband resented me — which made me resent him. I worried for our future and, yes, I felt ashamed: Was my marriage not as equitable as I’d always imagined?

According to financial expert Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez, my husband and I are in no way unique. In a 2023 article for Glamour UK , O’Connell Rodriguez used the term “ambition penalty” to describe the social, professional and financial costs that women face when they go after what they want.

“Research finds that women enter the workforce with the same or higher levels of ambition as men. But while men are praised and rewarded for their ambitions, women are far more likely to be penalised for acting on theirs,” O’Connell Rodriguez writes.

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