When the memoirist Belle Burden, author of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, told Drew Barrymore in April that no woman should give up complete control of her finances, my breath caught in my throat.
Sure, in reading her book I felt fairly sure that how Burden was going to pay the electric bill or put food on the table was not among her concerns. (Recent reporting by The New Yorker illustrated that Burden’s inherited assets at the time of her divorce landed well into the multimillions.) Still, her words were like a warning shot heard across the country—and they reminded me of a key piece of wisdom my father impressed upon my sister and me early on.
From the time I was a little girl, my father would preach about the importance of independence—about following your dreams, establishing your own path, and never relying on a man, under any circumstances.
I grew up in the 1980s, a time when it wasn’t unusual to be surrounded by single-earner households headed by men. And even if his advice painted a pretty grim and sordid picture of the opposite sex in general, I did eventually understand what my father was talking about.
Over time, I saw the women in my family—all “traditional” wives of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, long before #tradwives became a trendy Instagram business model—reap the consequences of relying on their husbands financially, and those women always ended up far worse off than the men ever did. My dad’s own mother was tricked by her husband into signing a will that she didn’t understand. According to the will, if her husband were to die first, she would be left with nothing to hold her over—not even the home they shared. Every dime was going to his multimillionaire adult children from his previous marriage.
My grandmother had a middle-school education. There was no way she could have known what she was signing away, and her husband—and, I presume, his lawyer—were aware of that. So it was a blessing that she happened to go first.
My grandmother’s story—like Burden’s—fits into a well-established pattern. According to the University of Michigan Retirement and Disability Research Center, elderly divorced women are five times more likely to live below the poverty line than elderly married women, and one-third more likely to than widows. Other research indicates that a man’s risk of entering poverty after divorce actually decreases, while a woman’s goes up—especially if she has children.
My mother was no exception. I can still remember how, after her separation from my father, she scrambled to find full-time work (her income until then had been “supplemental,” filling part-time positions after my sister and I started school) and racked up credit card debt just to put me into pants that fit. My parents lived paycheck to paycheck before they split; afterward, our working-class family suddenly had two sets of bills to pay, from rent to utilities. And I know my mother worked hard to keep the most devastating financial details hidden from her children.
As a result of what I’d seen happen to the women around me, at 39 I married my husband with a nest egg and a major decision in place: We would be keeping most of our finances separate.
Five years before I said “I do,” I graduated with an advanced degree and a net worth of negative sixty thousand dollars. Over the next six years, I paid down my debt and opened my first retirement account. My sister and I are the first women in our family in a position to build generational wealth. Merging my finances with someone else’s, to my mind, would eliminate all traces of my efforts to achieve financial independence. That wasn’t just a nauseating prospect—it was a nonstarter.
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