Re: Divorces, compatibility, and wages

Daniel recently brought up a point in my previous entry about how it was insulting to divide wives into trophy wives and achieving wives and that I completely discarded the domestic stay-at-home wife. Short answer: yes, I did discard the group from the discussion, mainly because it was of no interest in this scope. As Daniel will also note, the article from The Times that I referred to was also speaking about the alpha males. I can with quite a safe assumption say that I nor any of the people who read this blog qualify in that category of (U)HNWIs. In the same way it is insulting for us normal men that I didn't cover us.

As for the domestic stay-at-home wife... Well... Different people have different values. I can sort of see the point of an arrangement like this. I personally do not prefer one, since in my view in a family both spouses should engage in both working and domestic lives. It's a question of balance. Managing a household is obviously not easy and I can imagine it must include tons of tensions, be they political, financial, or whatever. And if one spouse works and the other runs the household, the overall setting is in imbalance and might trigger outbursts when they start questioning the amount of effort that each puts into the overall (an analogy might be how marketing and R&D never seem to get along in corporations). However, here again holds the point that there are different types of families. Some families require much household effort (households with e.g. many children, pets, etc.) whereas other families/pairs may not put any effort on household issues and prefer to subcontract them to third parties.

A family that resides in an urban setting and employs the services of cleaners and nannies, amongst others, the role of the stay-at-home wife is at best questionable. One might argue that with (U)HNWIs, these are often the cases, meaning that while simplifying the situation, two archetypal roles arise: the achieving wife and the trophy wife (which has the questionable workload of drinking wine and spending their spouses' wealth).

I hope this helped to alleviate some of Daniel's concerns.