Women don’t like to be breadwinners and I am yet to meet a man who wants his woman to be the breadwinner but pardon my French, sh*t happens. The bad trend is all over the place, threatening to take over totally from the natural order of things. More and more women are earning big, some three times more than their men. More money all over the place but less happiness. I guess there is a limit to what even the best acrobat can do with his head on the floor and legs in the 
air. The pose is entertaining for only a short while. It cannot and should not be encouraged to last a minute longer than necessary to avoid tragedy .Just like this women-as-breadwinner thing. It is spreading like wildfire, displacing the world order and it does look like it has come to stay. The women feel frustrated. The men feel castrated. But today is not really for probing the emergence of the female breadwinner and her man. It is about the deep thoughts and feelings of the men and women who have to endure relationships where the women earn and spend more.
What the men said:
She thinks she’s an Empress
She sees herself as the empress and acts it to the hilt. Everything is in her name and she gets really really bratty.
Things are so bad now that she is either threatening to walk away from the marriage or screaming that she would throw me out of her house. I feel so emasculated, so useless. Every word coming out of her mouth just makes me want to commit suicide. Even when I am pursing a new opportunity, all I get is. ‘ This one had better work or I will stop fuelling or servicing the car.’ She just makes me feel like a pupil who is constantly failing and repeating a class.
I just don’t have her drive
I’m not a deadbeat. I am not lazy. I am actually a civil servant who goes to work every working day but my wife is an overachiever. She has a highflying job and is constantly looking for new openings in her industry where she can get higher positions and better packages.
I’m not built like that and she simply can’t understand why I’m contented with my kind of routine job.
She thinks that earning a salary that is regular and small is not what a real man should do. She resents the fact that she has to pick all the big bills but that is because she wants to live big. Why can’t our children attend Federal Government College like we did? Why do we have to do things just because her colleagues hared doing them? She sees and treats me like an NFA – No Future Ambition.
-Biodun
Our sex life is almost gone
Our sex life is almost dead. She just seems not to have any space left for intimacy. She’s all about work, work and more work. If I touch her, she tells me, it’s okay for me to be all hot and ready because I close at 5pm unlike her who drags herself in at 9pm at least three times a week. It’s either her business is now more important than our marriage or she is getting some somewhere else.
-Uche
She talks down on me
Once I told her I wanted to take the Lexus 570 out and she looked at me like I’d grown horns. She launched into a sermon on how much I’d need to fuel the SUV and what if I scratched it. In other words, Lexus 570 is not for a man like me. I left the house quickly before I could say something she’d never forget.
-Mike
She’s irritated all week
She’s just angry every day she walks through the door and finds me at home. That she has to go out every day and I get to watch daytime soaps just irritates her. She’s barely civil during the week.
–Ado
What the breadwinner women said:
I feel like I have four children
I have to take care of the needs of the children and my husband’s. If I’m buying socks for his sons, I have to remember to by his. I do all the buying, yet he’s the man. Sometimes I just feel like I have four children instead of three. It’s tough being there for everybody and watching your husband just take and take and rationalize why he’s not doing well.
-Agatha
A kept man is less than a man
Look, I don’t know if this means I’m mean or a bad woman but I have this prejudice that a man who doesn’t work is somehow a lesser being.
Yes, I’m a 21st century woman but I’ve not evolved that much. I don’t have the capacity to feel good about a man who thinks the high point of his day is his lawn tennis and his major achievement his six-pack abs. No man should call himself a man if his wife picks his bills.
-Nelly
He told me there’s only room or one man in this house.
Can you beat that? I’m the one who brings in the bacon. I‘m the one who’s been paying the children’s school fees in the last three years and he can even bring half the rent. Yet he thinks he’s the man just because he has something dangling in between his legs and I don’t. He throws his lightweight around the house giving the house-help counter instruction, ordering that the car has to be parked in a certain way the freezer has to be arranged in a different way. What is that?
-Joke
He spends so much and earn so little.
He’s the one with three of his siblings living with us. He’s the one who has to send money home to his aging mother regularly. Yet he’s the one who brings in so little. I simply resent it all. He likes to show off to his friends and his people do not even know how the money they spend so easily is made. They have this idea that it’s all my husband’s doing. I plan to tell them soon if he doesn’t slow down on the lavish wedding plan he’s making for his sister’s wedding. It’s my money, ain’t it?
-Bola
This one is just lazy
I am the primary breadwinner and financially motivated one in the relationship. My boyfriend is totally unmotivated. He just wants his little salary at the end of the month and he does not understand why I’m bugging him about his 30-days-make-a-ppay. He is lazy and doesn’t worry about financial security.
Somehow I think it is his attitude to financial security that will not let this relationship get to the altar.
I am not cut out to be a breadwinner on a long time basis and I will not pretend about it.
-Somto
Sex, what sex?
It’s the truth, I no longer find my boyfriend attractive. He drives my car and now practically les in my apartment. I even have to leave money on the dressing table for him. Haba, and we are not married yet o. doesn’t it sound like I’m paying for the sex? And that is one thing I won’t do. Of course, he thinks I’m seeing someone else but I’m not. I just don’t find his lazing around my house sexy, that’s all.
-Fatima
Now, what is your take? Is there a middle road, a meeting point to save a relationship where the woman picks all or most of the bill?
Re – When a lie is kinder than the truth
I stand with you when it has to do with sincerity and trust in relationships and marriages.
If I were Idowu, I would tell my Uche when we are far advanced in age or when our last child gets married, when I’m sure his staff of office is no longer functional and he can easily forgive. Well, what if I don’t live that long? Only God can unravel all the secrets that followed and will follow women to their graves! Mine will be no exception.
-David Lucky, Jos.
I believe Idowu did the right thing. She couldn’t bear the trauma alone, she needed someone, a confidant close enough, to let off the steam. He did well to send her abroad for a break but his present attitude will send her to an early grave.
Uche should urgently restore his wife’s self worth.
–Pst. Prince
Aunty Funke , I feel truth is always the truth ,painful or not, it’s always the best. Keep shining and writing,
–Hannatu.