Whether you’re newlyweds or not, your marriage can only benefit from a better balance that eases the stress on both of you. But be ready to talk — “we” statements only, please.
A year and a half of pandemic living has revealed — or reminded us of — some persistent patterns around money, gender, marriage and families. And they aren’t always pretty.
There is anecdotal evidence of men confiscating their wives’ federal relief checks, and data showing a link between financial stress and domestic violence. And millions of women felt they had no choice but to leave paid employment to provide care for children or other family members.
Matrimony and parenting involve compromise, without question (and sometimes, seemingly, without end). But it need not be disproportionate.
There are plenty of reasons to equalize the financial decision-making in your marriage — and this goes for every couple, heterosexual or not. If you’re among the many getting married now as part of the great pandemic wedding boom, consider adding another promise: that yours will be a financially egalitarian marriage.
Here is what that might mean.
First, understand where the power lies.
When a new household is setting a financial baseline, it is almost impossible to avoid talking about power.
Rachel Sherman, a sociology professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, examined arrangements of authority in the marriages of the affluent in her book “Uneasy Street.”
While gender and the troubling norms that can come with it in heterosexual couples can play a role, she suggested that at least two additional vectors influenced the power dynamic.
The first involves the source of any household resources, including earnings, unpaid labor and inheritance. Who gets or takes credit, and for what? What privileges, if any, come with the answers to those questions?
The other is about spending styles — who has license to do what, and when and who decides? Confusion here can stem from having grown up in a family with a dysfunctional relationship to money.
Conflicting habits can cause real trouble, but understanding them is an important first step. “People are lucky if they have a partner who has the same ideas that they do,” Professor Sherman said.
You’ll have to talk. A lot.
Financial planners get to participate in many conversations with people who have recently married, and they can spot worrying patterns. One frequent issue: Only one partner speaks.
“They’ll often have a meeting with just one half of a couple,” said Marci Bair, a financial planner in San Diego.
More often than not, it’s the man in heterosexual couples who shows up or calls alone (or wants to), several advisers told me this week.
At Fyooz Financial Planning (pronounced “fuse,” as in joining together a couple’s portfolios and peccadilloes), that sort of exclusion or neglect isn’t allowed. Moreover, every couple meets with a couple: Dan and Natalie Slagle, who jointly run the business in Rochester, Minn.
It can feel a bit like a double date, and as on many dates, there are red flags. “They typically have to do with the pronouns that are used,” Mr. Slagle said. “‘You’ as opposed to ‘we.’”
Ms. Slagle picked up the thread. “If they are not seeing themselves as a partnership, it’s going to be very difficult to create a successful financial plan for two people,” she said.
So consider your pronouns, and not just if you’re talking to a professional. Be a united front.
There should be no ‘financial spouse.’
Even if you’re both present and equally engaged in any conversations about your money, many couples have just one person running all of the household’s finances.
“I call it the financial spouse and the nonfinancial spouse,” said Annelise Bretthauer, a financial planner in Hillsboro, Ore.
She’s generally not a fan of that setup or default, in part because of what can happen when a marriage ends, either when one spouse dies or when the relationship goes sour.
Much of Ms. Bretthauer’s pro bono work is with recently divorced women, who may have spent decades as the nonfinancial spouse.
“And then they’re drinking from a fire hose,” she said. “They don’t know how to make the best decisions in the divorce because they haven’t been privy to financial information for years.”
And there’s not one right way to do it.
You may be certain about the wisdom of a joint bank account and rigorous spending accountability. Or perhaps you prefer a trio of virtual piggy banks labeled Yours, Mine and Ours. Both can work.
“Whenever people ask, I say that the right way to organize your money is the way where you don’t fight about it,” said Alexandra Killewald, a sociology professor at Harvard.
Keeping your finances separate doesn’t prevent you or your spouse from inadvertently picking that fight.
“If you have separate accounts, how separate are they really?” asked Lazetta Rainey Braxton, a financial planner in Brooklyn. “Can you spend with no judgment? However you want? Only within your shared value system?”
But you can budget wrong.
Be wary about how you talk — or even think — about whose income is for what.
Viviana A. Zelizer, a sociology professor at Princeton, spent years examining how couples would assign labels to the money that came in. Often, women’s earnings fell into particular patterns of allocation — for child care, vacations or summer camps and not for, say, the mortgage.
“Somehow they were a bit different, and maybe more secondary, than the big money items,” she said. “I would tell couples to notice how powerful this is.”
If you have at least one joint account — to pay for all shared expenses — perhaps no one will feel that their income is less relevant.
Consider the influences outside your front door.
For all your efforts to have a financially equal marriage, inequality in the outside world may come through the door each night and hover over the dinner table.
Ms. Braxton, the financial planner in Brooklyn, encourages clients to consider the following set of possibilities and the sensitivity that is necessary to manage them in a marriage.
Perhaps you earn less, on average, because you are Black. Perhaps you earn less, on average, because you are female. And perhaps you feel more vulnerable to job loss.
A couple of things could happen at home. You might save and invest more conservatively out of fear. Or you might spend with abandon on occasion, just to cut loose.
“People in that situation need planning to rise above what they are experiencing,” Ms. Braxton said. For instance, you might build savings backstops as a “cushion” fund for softer landings or as a kind of “go to hell” account.
Giving up authority can give you something more.
If any of the above sounds familiar, it doesn’t make you retrograde. After all, there’s a decent chance that you’ve never done marriage before. Change, however, may actually put you at ease.
Husbands who have taken on traditional financial gender roles can feel a palpable sense of relief when they are not operating solo, especially if the household finances grow more complicated over time, said Ms. Bair, the financial planner in San Diego.
“It’s all on their shoulders,” she said. “And they know that they’re probably not fully equipped for it, either.”
Hiring professional help may bring some comfort, too, but it doesn’t obviate the need for deep conversation with your spouse. Ms. Bretthauer said the best financial planners were in the behavior-change business, not the stock-twirling one.
“Are you looking for someone who will tell you what to do?” she said. “Then don’t hire me.”
Colonialism Made the Modern World. Let’s Remake It.
This is what real “decolonization” should look like.
“Decolonize this place!” “Decolonize the university!” “Decolonize the museum!”
In the past few years, decolonization has gained new political currency — inside the borders of the old colonial powers. Indigenous movements have reclaimed the mantle of “decolonization” in protests like those at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline. Students from South Africa to Britain have marched under its banner to challenge Eurocentric curriculums. Museums such as the Natural History Museum in New York and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels have been compelled to confront their representation of colonized African and Indigenous peoples.
But what is “decolonization?” What the word means and what it requires have been contested for a century.
After World War I, European colonial administrators viewed decolonization as the process in which they would allow their imperial charges to graduate to independence by modeling themselves on European states. But in the mid-20th century, anticolonial activists and intellectuals demanded immediate independence and refused to model their societies on the terms set by imperialists. Between 1945 and 1975, as struggles for independence were won in Africa and Asia, United Nations membership grew from 51 to 144 countries. In that period, decolonization was primarily political and economic.
As more colonies gained independence, however, cultural decolonization became more significant. European political and economic domination coincided with a Eurocentrism that valorized European civilization as the apex of human achievement. Indigenous cultural traditions and systems of knowledge were denigrated as backward and uncivilized. The colonized were treated as people without history. The struggle against this has been especially central in settler colonies in which the displacement of Indigenous institutions was most violent.
South Africa, where a reckoning with the persistence of the settler regime has gripped national politics, reignited the latest calls for decolonization in 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall movement. Students at the University of Cape Town targeted the statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but saw its removal as only the opening act in a wider struggle to bring white supremacy to an end. Under the banners of “more than a statue” and “decolonize the university,” students called for social and economic transformation to undo the racial hierarchies that persist in post-apartheid South Africa, free university tuition and an Africa-centered curriculum.
Now, partly riding the global surge of Black Lives Matter mobilizations, calls for decolonization have swept Europe’s former imperial metropoles. In Bristol, England, last month, protesters tore down the statue of Edward Colston, the director of the Royal African Company, which dominated the African slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Across Belgium, protesters have focused on statues of King Leopold II, who ruled the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as his personal property from 1885 to 1908. King Phillipe II of Belgium recently expressed “regret” for his ancestor’s brutal regime, which caused the death of 10 million people.
Colonialism, the protesters insist, did not just shape the global south. It made Europe and the modern world. Profits from the slave trade fueled the rise of port cities like Bristol, Liverpool and London while the Atlantic economy that slavery created helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution. King Leopold amassed a fortune of well over $1.1 billion in today’s dollars from Congo. His vision of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, which opened in 1910 soon after his death, reproduced a narrative of African backwardness while obscuring the violent exploitation of the Congolese.
By tearing down or defacing these statues, protesters burst open the national narrative and force a confrontation with the history of empire. This is a decolonization of the sensory world, the illusion that empire was somewhere else.
Laying a flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo on the statue of King Leopold or hauling the Colston statue into the sea, where thousands of enslaved women and men lost their lives, tears apart the blinders and boundaries between past and present, metropole and colony. Insisting on the presence of the past, the protests reveal Europe’s romance with itself, unmasking its political and economic achievements as the product of enslavement and colonial exploitation.
This historical reckoning is only the first step. Acknowledging that colonial history shapes the current inequalities and hierarchies that structure the world sets the stage for the next one: reparations and restitution.
Reparations is not a single act. The Caribbean Community has already demanded reparations for slavery and Indigenous genocide from Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands. Although there is little movement at the level of states, the University of Glasgow agreed last year to pay 20 million pounds (about $25 million) for development research with the University of the West Indies in recognition of how the university benefited from the profits of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The Herero of Namibia, who suffered the 20th century’s first genocide at the hands of Germany, have also called for redress. Their efforts follow the successful bid for reparations by the Mau Mau of Kenya, many of whom were tortured during Britain’s brutal suppression of their independence movement in the mid-20th century. In other contexts, activists have focused on the return of the looted artifacts that fill Europe’s great museums. France, for instance, has committed to returning 26 stolen artworks to Benin.
But reparations should not focus only on the former colonies and their relations with European states. Colonialism lives on inside Europe’s borders, and Europe itself must be decolonized. Black Europeans experience discrimination in employment and education, are racially profiled and are subject to racist violence at the hands of the police and fellow citizens.
The European Union recently avowed that “Black lives matter,” but its policies deprive Black people of equal rights, imprison them in camps and drown them in the Mediterranean. Overseas imperialism was once believed to be a political necessity for European states; today, anti-immigrant politics plays the same role. In either case, European policymakers disavow responsibility for the misery they bring about.
Repair and redress is owed as much to Black Europeans as it is to former colonial states. It would mean treating Black Europeans, and all migrants from the colonized world, as equal participants in European society. And this form of reparation cannot be perceived as one-off transactions. Instead, it must be the basis of building an inclusive and egalitarian Europe.
This is no easy task and will not happen overnight. But we should remember that just 80 years ago, colonial rule appeared to be a stable and almost permanent feature of international politics. In just three decades, anticolonial nationalists had transformed the world’s map.
The struggle for racial equality in Europe is a fight for a truly postcolonial condition, and its creation is implied by each dethroned statue. If colonialism made the modern world, decolonization cannot be complete until the world — including Europe — is remade.
What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns
In the 17th century, they also suspected that the rules of grammar stood between them and a society of equals.
Pronouns are the most political parts of speech. In English, defaulting to the feminine “she/her” when referring to a person of unspecified gender, instead of the masculine “he/him,” has long been a way of thumbing one’s nose at the patriarchy. (“When a politician votes, she must consider the public mood.”)
More recently, trans, nonbinary and genderqueer activists have promoted the use of gender-inclusive pronouns such as the singular “they/their” and “ze/zir” (instead of “he/him” or “she/her”). The logic here is no less political: If individuals — not grammarians or society at large — have the right to determine their own gender, shouldn’t they get to choose their own pronouns, too?
As with everything political, the use of gender-inclusive pronouns has been subject to controversy. One side argues that not to respect an individual’s choice of pronoun can threaten a vulnerable person’s basic equality. The other side dismisses this position as an excess of sensitivity, even a demand for Orwellian “newspeak.”
Both sides have dug in. To move the conversation forward, I suggest we look backward for an illuminating, if unexpected, perspective on the politics of pronouns. Consider the 17th-century Quakers, who also suspected that the rules of grammar stood between them and a society of equals.
Today the Quakers are remembered mainly for their pacifism and support for abolition. Yet neither of these commitments defined the Quaker movement as it emerged in the 1650s from the chaos of the English Civil War. What set the Quakers apart from other evangelical sects was their rejection of conventional modes of address — above all, their peculiar use of pronouns.
In early modern England, the rules of civility dictated that an individual of higher authority or social rank was entitled to refer to himself — and to be referred to by others — with plural, not singular, pronouns. (A trace of this practice survives today in the “royal ‘we.’”) The ubiquitous “you” that English speakers now use as the second-person singular pronoun was back then the plural, while “thee” and “thou” were the second-person singulars.
When Quakerism emerged, proper behavior still required this status-based differentiation. As one early Quaker explained, if a man of lower status came to speak to a wealthy man, “he must you the rich man, but the rich man will thou him.”
Quakers refused to follow this practice. They also refused to doff their hats to those of higher social standing. The Quakers’ founder, George Fox, explained that when God sent him forth, “he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low; and I was required to thee and thou all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small.”
The Quakers thus declared themselves to be, like God, “no respecter of persons.” So they thee-ed and thou-ed their fellow human beings without distinction as a form of egalitarian social protest. And like today’s proponents of gender-inclusive pronouns, they faced ridicule and persecution as a result.
But there is also an important difference between the Quakers and today’s pronoun protesters. While modern activists argue that equality demands displays of equal respect toward others, the Quakers demonstrated conscientious disrespect toward everyone. Theirs was an equality of extreme humility and universally low status. Even the famously tolerant founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, couldn’t stand the Quakers and complained of the “familiarity, anger, scorn and contempt” inherent in their use of “thee” and “thou.”
Indeed, the trend in pronouns at that time was toward a leveling up, not a leveling down. By the middle of the 17th century, in response to increasing geographic and social mobility, the plural “you” had begun to crowd out the singular “thee” as the standard second-person pronoun, even for those of a lower social station. This meant that everyone would soon become, effectively, entitled — at least to the honorific second-person plural.
One might expect principled egalitarians like the Quakers to celebrate a linguistic process whereby all social ranks experienced an increase in dignity. But Fox and his followers looked on the universal “you” with horror, as a sign of the sin of pride. Long before he founded Pennsylvania, the Quaker William Penn would argue that when applied to individuals, the plural “you” was a form of idolatry. Other Quakers produced pamphlets citing examples from more than 30 dead and living languages to argue that their use of “thee” and “thou” was grammatically — as well as theologically and politically — correct.
The Quaker use of “thee” and “thou” continued as a protest against the sinfulness of English grammar for more than 200 years. (In 1851, in “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville could still marvel at “the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom.”) But eventually, in the 20th century, even the Quakers had to admit that their grammatical ship had sailed.
Modern practitioners of pronoun politics can learn a thing or two from the early Quakers. Like today’s egalitarians, the Quakers understood that what we say, as well as how we say it, can play a crucial part in creating a more just and equal society. They, too, were sensitive to the humble pronoun’s ability to reinforce hierarchies by encoding invidious distinctions into language itself.
Yet unlike the early Quakers, these modern egalitarians want to embrace, rather than resist, pronouns’ honorific aspect, and thus to see trans-, nonbinary and genderqueer people as equally entitled to the “title” of their choosing.
To their critics, however, allowing some people to designate their own pronouns and expecting everyone else to oblige feels like a demand for distinction. Yes, some of these critics may be motivated by “transphobic” bigotry. But others genuinely see such demands as special treatment and a violation of equality. They themselves experience “he” and “she” as unchosen designations. Shouldn’t everyone, they ask, be equally subject to the laws of grammatical gender?
According to the Quakers, both sides are right: Language reflects, as well as transforms, social realities. But the dual demands of equality and respect aren’t always in perfect harmony. Sometimes they are even in conflict. Respect can require treating people unequally, and equality can mean treating everyone with disrespect.
At present, the battle over the third-person singular subject in English seems to be resolving itself in the direction of the singular “they” — at least when referring to a person of unspecified gender. (“When a politician votes, they must consider the public mood.”) Pedants naturally complain. They argue that applying a plural pronoun to a singular subject is simply bad English. But as linguists note, spoken English has been tending that way for many years, long before the issue became politicized.
If the rules of grammar are indeed an obstacle to social justice, then the singular “they” represents a path of least resistance for activists and opponents alike. It may not be the victory that activists want. Still, it goes with the flow of the increasing indifference with which modern English distinguishes subjects on the basis of their social position. More fittingly, if applied to everyone, “they” would complete the leveling-up progress of equal dignity that “you” started centuries ago.
Of course, a 17th-century Quaker would be likely to dismiss the singular “they” as diabolically bad grammar. But hey, who asked them?