I haven’t written much this summer, but this is not a post to apologize for that. It’s a post to come clean about part of the reason I haven’t written.
The truth is I’ve been focusing on my marriage. Rebuilding it, in fact. Which seems a little ridiculous, considering I have been married less than two years and a marriage should not get broken that soon.
People are always shocked that I’m married when they meet me. Like jaw dropping, please excuse me while I pick my mouth up off the floor, shocked. After all, I’m 24 years old, I’m in graduate school, and I’m working at a start up. My husband is a full-time student in a four year professional optometrist program. And we’re both seemingly a little self-absorbed with our careers.
I spent an entire year focusing on everything else. For a year I neglected my marriage, thinking that I could “have it all” without putting much work into it.
And now, my generation is obsessed with talking about marriage. There is a lot of talk from single people about why they are not married, why they are waiting to get married, or why they don’t think there’s a point to marriage. There are also a lot of married people in Gen Y that are happily married, or happily engaged. And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for them.
What annoys me is when people write about their lovey dovey marriages as if it’s all rainbows and sunshine. I don’t think I’m jealous – I just want to taste reality in those posts. Because let’s face it – marriage does not have much in common with a bag of Skittles.
But when something is as dear to your heart as your marriage, it takes a lot of courage to write about the bad days. This is why nobody my age writes about how hard it is to be young and married, and how it’s exceptionally difficult when both people want careers also.
I do write about it. All the time. And let me tell you, marriage is not about being in love. E and I have been in love since we first met. That stuff is easy. The hard part of marriage is in the details. Because marriage is really about taking your turn at washing dishes and making sure the mortgage gets paid on time. Pulling the shower curtain shut after a bath and not leaving wet clothes in the laundry machine for long periods. You get the picture.
That’s how we fixed our marriage. I started washing dishes. E started inviting me out to dinner more (after we were sure we could pay the mortgage). We stopped pretending that we were two individuals trying to make sense of our careers, who just so happened to be married to each other. We started to put each other first again. And now that we’ve had our first major trial in marriage, a little ahead of schedule, I feel like I could maybe never let our marriage fall apart like that again.
But you never know. Marriage is the decision that you will never know if you made correctly. Ever. That’s the other part no one talks about, because nobody wants to talk about how they sometimes wonder if they made a mistake on their marriage.
If you have advice about how to keep a marriage together, please don’t email me about it. You do not know what’s best for me, and in the end, this post is really not about solving my problems. It’s about telling another truth about marriage to my generation, because I know there are young married couples out there who do not feel lovey dovey anymore and cannot figure out why. Don’t give up. Things can get better if you pay attention to the little stuff.
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My husband and I fight a lot about our finances. Namely that I spend too much.
Which is not true. A typical week of spending consists of me buying lunch and sometimes dinner for myself. What is does not consist of are expensive shopping trips (binges, really), manicures/pedicures, eyebrow waxes, or elaborate skin treatments. All of which I would love but that I don’t partake in because I also love being able to pay my mortgage on time.
“Why don’t you pack your lunch?” he asks. Because I don’t want to make the time. And please don’t leave me a comment about how you make all your food on the weekends and organize it into little containers labeled by day so you can just grab and go in the mornings. I don’t care. I don’t want to use this method and I have a good job and I work hard to earn my paycheck and I deserve to spend $75 on lunches every week if that’s what I want. Damn it. Besides, I’ve already sacrificed a high-maintenance lifestyle and I should not sacrifice networking opportunities also.
My husband hates this attitude towards money. He thinks that I’m the one in control of our money because I make it and don’t feel I need to ask to spend it. I’m not sure how this works, because my husband and I have a joint account and joint credit cards, and his name comes first on everything we own together, including our condo, simply because he’s a male. By the way, there is plenty of advice from smart women who advise against this setup because it can leave a high-earning woman powerless in a divorce, but out of respect for my husband and his ego I have agreed to it anyway.
Yet he still feels the need to ask before spending money, for whatever reason. This is why I received a call from him on the train last weekend asking if he could buy a cable package that shows every national baseball game on Chicago stations. (My husband is a die-hard St. Louis Cardinals fan.)
I told him I didn’t care either way and his friends started cheering in the background. Kind of like the evil wife had lifted the chains, unlocked the basement door, and let her husband spend one hour in the sunlight. Exasperated, I followed with “You know, you don’t have to ask me about these things.”
In truth, the train I was on cost more than the cable package he was asking for. This is because I bought the tickets two days in advance even though I’ve known about this trip since February, and the prices for train tickets skyrocket as the date nears. He doesn’t know I did that yet, and when (if) he reads this he will promptly scan our credit cards to see exactly how much more I had to spend because I procrastinated, and I will probably get a lecture about how irresponsible I am even though the only reason I procrastinated is I wasn’t sure if I was actually going or not. It was worth it to pay more so I could have extra time to get over the anxiety of revisiting my past.
Two days after this incident, my husband called me about finances again. This time he was buying a plane ticket to Kansas City for his friend’s bachelor party, and wanted to know if it was worth an extra $33 to fly into an airport closer to our house.
It’s worth an extra $33 for you to stop calling me at work about asinine finance questions, I thought. Here’s my logic: $33 is what I spend on two taxi rides. $33 is the morning hours I spend at work where I’m not productive anyway because I don’t function before 10am. $33 is what I pay for a blouse at Nordstrom Rack. Asking for permission to spend $33 is absurd in my book.
And that’s what personal finance management comes down to for me: cost-benefit analysis, where the benefits aren’t always tangible. It’s not that I don’t care about saving money, but I’m a firm believer that the little things don’t add up if they are a wasting your time. My husband loves penny-pinching, which is not a bad thing, just a nice-to-know thing.
And maybe that’s why we fight a lot about our finances.
So everyone I know is going to read the article about higher divorce rates for female MBA’s (Hat Tip: Brazen Careerist) sometime this week and I feel obligated to write about it, even though the numbers in the article will bother me until the study itself is published. Here’s an overview of the study’s claims:
- Education Level for Females – Divorced or Separated
- 12% MBAs (business)
- 10% JDs (law)
- 9% medical degrees
- 11% only bachelor’s degrees
- Education Level for Males – Divorced or Separated
- 5% MBAs
- 7% JDs
- 5.1% medical degrees
- only bachelor’s degrees not given
The first question I have is the statistical significance between women MBA divorcees (12%) and women w/only undergrad divorcees (11%). The article doesn’t list the details of the study, but there is a range of error for both these percentages due to the sample population. If that value is 1% or more for either (say women MBA divorcees are actually in the range of 10-12%), then comparing the two is moot. What makes these statistics more suspect is that both law and med. female graduates have a lower divorce rate than women with only undergrad degrees.
My second issue is that the author doesn’t compare these stats to all women, and studies show that women with any higher ed. degree are less likely to get divorced than those without.
So if there isn’t much of a difference between undergrad vs. grad degrees, and there is still a huge difference between no degree and any higher ed. degree, then getting a graduate degree is still a fine idea for a woman. Between these two issues, it’s doubtful that getting an MBA as a woman is an automatic marriage death sentence. My gut tells me it has little statistical significance actually; but I guess we’ll see when the study is published.
And yes, I have a third issue. For MBAs, the author fails to mention that the actual number of women and men getting divorced is about the same. With roughly 30% of MBA candidates as women, the number of MBA divorcees is about 7% total, with half men and half women. What’s interesting is in law and med programs, women make up roughly 45-50% of the population, so the disparity is much clearer there; though the gap between women and men is much smaller than with MBA graduates.
Despite disliking the way the study is portrayed, I do think there is some truth to the conclusions the author presented; namely that highly successful women are attracted to similarly successful men but might be better matched with men who have less stressful careers and thus more time to support a high-earning spouse.
This is not representative of all professional “high-earning” women, but every female MBA I know falls into one of two categories: “single” or “serious relationship with highly successful man.” My friends date dentists, lawyers, their fellow MBA candidates, or PhD candidates from other fields. My own husband is going to be an eye doctor.
But this partnership is difficult when trying to run a household, even without kids. My husband and I know we’re being pulled in different directions trying to balance two careers and the possibility of a family in the distant future; so we recently decided we each need to compromise on one thing until we finally meet somewhere in the middle. The first thing I asked of him was that he support my career decisions and trust me to make good financial choices while still following my entrepreneur dreams.
He asked that I cook at least once a week. I’m not joking. Way to waste your three wishes Aladdin.
So that’s the (impossible?) challenge for a woman who wants her dream career: conquer the world, but be home in time to start dinner. Because most men still just want wives who will take care of them the same way their mothers did (Hat Tip: Art of Manliness). And really, I can’t completely blame them, because I sometimes get irritated that I’m the sole breadwinner. It goes both ways.
Will this compromise work for us, or other couples who both want high-powered careers? I have no idea. But when posed the question: do you need an extremely supportive spouse to have a high-powered career as a woman? My answer is a resounding hell yes. I guess the article got something right in the end.
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This is the first of many articles I will write about marriage and relationships, so I wanted to share my story about how I came to be married at 22 years old and what it has brought me so far.
Love at First Keg
I basically met my husband at a frat party. Technically we met 6 months before through a service organization we were both members of, but we didn’t become friends until our junior year when my sorority and his fraternity were on the same homecoming team. I had a boyfriend of 2.5 years that had been falling out of the picture for about a year at that point, so it wasn’t long before my future husband and I started dating.
We fell in love almost instantly. People thought we were crazy, especially when he proposed to me at the beginning of our senior year 10 months after we started dating.
Seven months later, we graduated from college and moved 4 hours away from all our friends and family to a town in northern IL, where we spent our first year as an adult couple.
The Worst Year of Our Lives… (Fingers Crossed)
If I had to describe my own personal hell, it would be that year right after college. I was at my first real job and my fiance/husband had taken a year off before grad school and worked as an optometry assistant, then a waiter/bartender. We were on our own for the first time, planning a wedding in a different state, trying to get into grad schools, and had literally zero friends and not much more in our bank account. It almost ripped us apart. At the end of our first year of trying to build a life together, all we had to show was a clean, sterile, white-walled apartment and wedding money equivalent to the down payment on a house.
So we moved again. Not just to another apartment or another town, but to another life – and it worked. I changed jobs, we bought a condo in Chicago, started our grad school programs, and ran the Chicago marathon together. Within four months, we were back to our college days where we had lots of friends from different social circles. We became students again, went out again, and quickly adjusted to the rapid pace of city life. Our condo is incredibly messy, but we are happy.
I thought I should retitle this article “My Life Post-Undergrad,” but then nobody would want to read it.
Instead, I’ll answer the question. How do you make young love work? You survive. You do what’s necessary and make it through the downs so you can enjoy the ups. You learn how to transition to a different life and still remember why you loved the person at the beginning. You spend lots of time doing the wrong things and screwing everything up until you accidentally do something right. You just make it work, because you have to. You’re married.
If you aren’t ready for that, don’t get married. Marriage is hard and being young only makes it harder. I don’t regret getting married because I’m very happy; I know, however, we will struggle again and change lives again and it will be a challenge to keep our marriage grounded in its roots – Love.
Monica O'Brien is the Director of Digital at Fizz and author of the book Social Pollination, which helps businesses leverage social media for crazy growth!
