The ugly truth about how some men act when your career success tops his
By Leslie Bennetts | March 11, 2009 5:00 p.m.
valuable career advice
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When I began my career as a journalist, one of my best friends was a fledgling prosecutor and the other was finishing medical school. A strange pattern soon emerged. The lawyer’s boyfriend invariably started a huge fight the night before she had an important case to try; the doctor’s boyfriend kept her up all night before every major exam. Needless to say, neither woman’s work performance was enhanced by emotional angst or lack of sleep.
Both eventually realized their boyfriends would not make ideal future mates, broke up with them, and married more supportive partners. But what happens when you’re already committed to a man and professional jealousy becomes an issue in your relationship? My husband and I met as reporters in a New York newsroom. But our equal status was disrupted when I received the job offer of my dreams just as he was transferred to a beat he hated. Suddenly, I earned twice as much as he did and our easy professional camaraderie was replaced by escalating tensions that culminated in a screaming fight one night after my new editor called during dinner. As soon as I got off the phone, my husband exploded about this intrusion into our family time and forbade me to take work-related calls after 7 p.m. Fortunately, he soon got a great new job and forgot all about interfering with the demands of mine as he fielded calls until the wee hours from his own editors on the West Coast. In the 20 years since then, both our careers have gone through good times and trying ones, but I’ve noticed that my husband is more generous about my successes when he’s feeling good about his own.
The current economic crisis has thrown such touchy issues into sharp relief. With the recession intensifying financial pressures on millions of families, many men have lost—or are afraid of losing—their jobs. Even in prosperous times, husbands often feel threatened when their partners’ achievements or incomes surpass their own. More than a quarter of working wives now outearn their spouses, and as women’s economic empowerment and professional clout transform the American marriage, couples are becoming increasingly egalitarian. But even if a husband remains the major breadwinner, his wife’s financial autonomy may threaten his control or erode a fragile sense of self-worth. Needless to say, problems can be greatly exacerbated if the man’s economic power is diminished or jeopardized.
“A man who’s successful in the world may be, but isn’t necessarily, a mature man,” says Roger Gould, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and a couples counselor in New York City and Los Angeles. “And if he’s insecure, his spouse’s independence becomes a threat to his power or dominance over her.”
For most of us, such dramas occur behind closed doors, but high-profile couples often act out their versions of spousal sabotage in mortifying headlines. During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Bill Clinton committed so many gaffes that people suspected he was subconsciously trying to undermine her prospects. Hillary was already saddled with the baggage of Bill’s White House sex scandal and impeachment hearings, but in that, too, she had lots of company; spousal scandals have dogged prominent women all over the world, from the late Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan to former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in the United States.
In person, watching a husband sabotage his wife can be harrowing. Two years before Hillary’s presidential bid, Jeanine Pirro, then the Republican district attorney of New York’s Westchester County, announced that she would challenge Clinton for her Senate seat. Like Clinton, Pirro had long struggled to transcend the sordid headlines generated by her husband, a lawyer and lobbyist who not only went to prison for federal tax fraud but also fathered an illegitimate child and lost the resulting paternity suit. And yet even those embarrassments failed to teach Al Pirro to return the favor of loyal political spousedom.
One night during the Senate campaign, my husband and I attended a dinner where Jeanine Pirro worked hard to charm guests at one end of the table, while Al pontificated loudly at the other about why his wife shouldn’t be running for Senate. “It’s the wrong race!” he kept repeating—loudly. Jeanine soon withdrew from the Senate contest and declared that she was running for state attorney general instead. When she lost that election, the Pirros announced that their marriage was over.
While Al Pirro took the sledgehammer approach, other spouses use more insidious tactics, communicating their pique in ridiculously petty ways. A foreign service officer’s wife spent the first decade of their marriage following her husband’s career from country to country. When they finally returned home to Washington, DC, she was eager to resume work as a freelancer. The mother of two set up a home office, from which things kept disappearing—stamps and staplers to ink-jet cartridges. “Inevitably, it would turn out that my husband had used up my supplies—or borrowed them without informing me and then stuck them somewhere out of sight,” she says. “Subconsciously or otherwise, he didn’t like the new order. But he couldn’t exactly tell me not to restart my career, which would have been most un-politically correct, and besides, we needed the money.”
Indeed, men are rarely honest about such subterfuge—even with themselves. “It’s common for men to be threatened by their wife’s success and to say they are totally encouraging,” attests Gould, the author of Shrink Yourself. “They’re feeling abandoned and left out, but they almost always deny it. The husband has secretly relied on his superiority over her as a foundation for his self-worth, and he sees her success as something that’s taken away from him. Yet he can’t present himself as an adversary; it’s not socially acceptable, and it’s not acceptable to her.”
Men’s dishonesty about these issues can also ratchet up the pressure on their wives to deny or conceal the truth. “There are two ways women lie,” says gender studies expert Susan Shapiro Barash, the author of Little White Lies, Big Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie. “There’s lying to yourself that it’s all okay—pretending that the husband is being supportive when really there’s a component of jealousy. And there’s consciously lying to your husband. So many women lie to their husbands when they get a raise or promotion because they don’t want tension in the marriage.”
In her research for Little White Lies, Barash found that the more well-known the women became, the less they took their husbands on business trips: “The husbands would make such faux pas, they became an albatross,” she says. “They were so jealous and uncomfortable with their wife’s success that they would drink too much or say something to mortify her.”
More covert forms of sabotage may occur on the home front when a man tries to reinforce his wife’s responsibility for traditional female duties. When one mother went back to graduate school, “her husband was so passive-aggressive she would come home to find the kitchen a mess and clothes strewn all over,” Barash reports. “It was like, Screw you for getting ahead!”
Another subversive tactic is for men to accuse their partners of neglecting the family.“ ‘You’re never home,’ ‘Why do you have to go to that meeting?’ ‘Your children need you!’ ” are typical charges, says psychiatrist and couples therapist John Jacobs, MD, author of All You Need Is Love and Other Lies About Marriage. “When the wife says that to the husband, he can shrug it off. But when the husband says that to the wife, it’s a knife to the heart, because women are often feeling guilty and ambivalent to begin with.”
Such conflicted emotions reflect our struggle to keep up with the rapid evolution of gender roles. “What’s really changing is the power structure of the family,” Jacobs explains. “The golden rule of marriage is: ‘He who makes the gold makes the rules.’ Men have traditionally fallen back on being the breadwinners to trump their wives in making the decisions. In egalitarian families, men can’t do that anymore, yet there are still hidden but powerful traditional role values. When the woman has all the power because she’s the mother as well as the major earner, that causes a great deal of anxiety, because if she exercises that power, the man may feel he has very little say.”
Many therapists see such tensions as a manifestation of the emotional needs men try so hard to conceal. “Men are not supposed to be vulnerable or dependent, so the deeper psychological threat is the fear of abandonment,” explains family therapist Terrence Real, the author of The New Rules of Marriage. “The more successful the woman is outside the marriage, the more insecure in his grasp she is inside the marriage.”
High-achieving women may agonize over whether they should sacrifice their advancement to protect their marriage, but couples counselors say that’s usually counterproductive. “Our grandmothers swallowed their voices in the service of maintaining the peace,” Real says. “But the problem now is that when American women resort to 1950s strategies and forgo their deepest wishes in order to protect the marriage, they hate it—and resentment in women eats at marriages like a cancer.”
Besides, diminishing one’s own success rarely saves a relationship in the long run. “I can’t tell you how many marriages I’ve seen where the woman accommodated the man and progressively withdrew, and then the guy leaves her anyway, because it’s a dead marriage,” Gould says. Sex is often the first casualty. “As soon as the wife begins to see her husband as her enemy, she loses her sexual interest in him. She wants to punish him, and then sex becomes a matter of his ‘rights,’ whereupon she feels violated by his anger at her for not doing it. So many of these situations end up in divorce.”
So what’s the alternative? “You’ve got to push on,” Real advises. “You have to say, ‘Hey, this is the third time you’ve done such and such, and I think you’re picking a fight with me because you’re threatened.’ ” But it’s crucial to combine that challenge with an affirmative message, one that’s “strong and loving at the same time,” Real says. “Tell him, ‘I love you to pieces, and you will always be my first priority. Let’s work this out.’ ” Real also suggests some old-fashioned sexual validation; it’s worth finding your own version of “You’ve got to knock this off, because I’m not tolerating it. Gosh, you look hot tonight—let’s go to bed!” he says. Such reassurance quells a common male fear that “the more powerful women get, the less they’re going to care about or need you, because under the system of patriarchy, power and connection are mutually exclusive. But the next step for both men and women is integration and wholeness—strong, bighearted guys and strong, bighearted gals.”
With such power shifts becoming increasingly common, men—particularly younger ones—are adjusting more easily and often find they actually welcome the benefits. “As women earn more money, many men are relieved to be let out of the straitjacket,” Real says. “The old roles were very toxic for men as well as women, and it’s a relief to have two incomes in the family.”
These days, in fact, such fluid equilibrium is eminently attainable. “It’s absolutely not true that women have to choose between success and marriage,” Gould says. “I see so many men with very accomplished wives. The true independence of two independent people who enjoy each other is difficult to achieve and maintain. It’s easy to lose for a time, if one is stronger and one is weaker. But healthy people keep up the struggle and get back there. There’s a lot of hope.”
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