Gen-Gen Bender Question

[7Wannabe5]

I have a question for the younger than Boomer heterosexual men of the forum (although please feel free to answer if this does not describe you.) Let's say you had 2 to 5 years of income saved up and your current and/or realistically-ideal partner who happened to be employed said "Hey, babe. I know you want to retire and do that freedom-to thing you want to do. Go ahead and do it. I've got the financial end covered." What would you do?

Would your answer change if the only way this might happen would be that your female partner is approximately 10 years older than you, employed as a mortgage broker for Glengary Glenn Ross (but loves it!), and has a definite edge of "Angry Mom" in her personality?

[Ego]

My free-to, her free-to and our free-to are all connected. If she is bound to full-time work with no ability to free-to herself, and I can only free-to alone, then no.

It is a recipe for disaster.

[Henry]

Glengary Glenn Ross

Although I know it probably has no material impact on your inquiry, as a barely below boomer age male heterosexual, a reference to a film (I'm assuming you are not referencing the stage play) with quite possibly the greatest ensemble of male heterosexual boomer actors in cinematic history in a thread targeting a younger than boomer heterosexual male audience seems incongruous. Not to mention the only woman in the movie was the cashier at the Chinese restaurant so the idea of a female Glengary mortgage broker just conjures images of Alec Baldwin in drag.

That being said, not a chance I am sticking my neck into that dog collar.

[7Wannabe5]

My free-to, her free-to and our free-to are all connected. If she is bound to full-time work with no ability to free-to herself, and I can only free-to alone, then no.

What if she has 2 million she inherited in the bank and she devotedly works 30 hours per week for $60,000/year as a semi-volunteer surgeon repairing cleft-palates? Would her lack of availability to freedom-to in your company remain an issue? Would the fact that you weren't solo financially independent still bother you?

BTW, I think the fact that you and your wife seem to have a shared mission statement which is not the default mission statement is significant factor in your marital success.

That being said, not a chance I am sticking my neck into that dog collar.

LOL. Everybody on this forum should watch that movie, as one reviewer noted, it is concerned with "masculinity, morality, and capitalism." Anyways, the best I can come up with as an attractive older female celebrity with same personality type (ESTJ)as Alec Baldwin would be Martha Stewart. I obviously suck at coming up with completely fictionalized hypotheticals, because the last man who provided me with financial support was pretty much a lower-rent Alec Baldwin doppelganger.

The very basic relationship model that Daylen posted on other thread kind of got me thinking (again) that the youngsters are attempting some revival of archaic masculinity and analysis of female mating habits, but not quite getting it right. For instance, on the model, the "gold-digger" is taking financial advantage of some guy who has zero percent bad boy, but that makes no sense in the real world, because except for the day after Gomer Pyle won the lottery, there is no human male who has zero percent bad boy, but enough money to satisfy a "gold-digger." When I was in a relationship with a much older affluent man (he recently died in his 80s), I was literally accused of being a "gold-digger" (by his daughter-in-law), but I was really attracted to him because he was such a sexy bad boy, I was able to overlook the age difference.

Anyways, my semi-dysfunctional experiences put aside, what I am really trying to get at here is under what circumstances would teaming up for financial independence possibly work out functionally? Also, it amuses me to consider the other end of the spectrum in which there would theoretically exist a man in my dating pool who would be content to be financially supported by me in my current lifestyle.

[AxelHeyst]

I have a question for the younger than Boomer heterosexual men of the forum (although please feel free to answer if this does not describe you.) Let's say you had 2 to 5 years of income saved up and your current and/or realistically-ideal partner who happened to be employed said "Hey, babe. I know you want to retire and do that freedom-to thing you want to do. Go ahead and do it. I've got the financial end covered." What would you do?

I’d give it a go. My ideal partner is emotionally explicit and independent enough to not being doing this in order to trap me. But for me all this would mean is that my partner buys my groceries and pays the rent/mortgage/whatever, assuming in this scenario I’m not at my current place, which isn’t a big deal.

I’ve done the reverse and it didn’t work out because we weren’t actually compatible partners. With a compatible partner, why not? As long as our conversation explicitly outlined that it’s an at-will arrangement where either partner can opt out at any time with no expectation of back-payment etc.

I wouldn’t really think of it as being FI though. I’d think of it as ‘our arrangement.’ Presumably I’d be contributing things to the relationship e.g. cooking, house maintenance, logistics, whatever makes sense for that relationship dynamic, and there’d be regular checkins to make sure we’re both still happy with it. It would undoubtedly require tweaks and tuneups, like any relationship.

The book Radical Homemakers is relevant to this topic I think, especially the point about labor in the informal economy.

[7Wannabe5]

The book Radical Homemakers is relevant to this topic I think, especially the point about labor in the informal economy.

Yes, good note. Excerpt from the Amazon description:

It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.

Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.

It's post-feminist, so it assumes that a Radical Homemaker can be male or female. I read the first few chapters a few years ago, and remember thinking that it resembled my Lentil Baby scheme, but absent the slightly disreputable edge that differentiates a "scheme" from a "plan." In my defense, I will note that the fact that I was born in the first year of Gen-X means that virtually every man I have ever dated/partnered/mooched-house-space-from-without-sexual/romantic-aspect-to-relationship with has been a Boomer, so unlikely to be able to fully comprehend the difference betwen a post-feminist radical homemaker (me)and a pre-feminist conventional homemaker (his Mom.) Oddly, I have even found that "knocking boots with two other guys" does not detract from "bakes my favorite pie from scratch" as value contribution.

I wouldn’t really think of it as being FI though. I’d think of it as ‘our arrangement.’ Presumably I’d be contributing things to the relationship e.g. cooking, house maintenance, logistics, whatever makes sense for that relationship dynamic, and there’d be regular checkins to make sure we’re both still happy with it. It would undoubtedly require tweaks and tuneups, like any relationship.

Yes, I agree that such an arrangement is not the same as being FI yourself, unless made explicit in marital or similar binding long-term contract. One thing I'm wondering, as I contemplate the "waste" associated with living in my own apartment by myself for the first time ever and how easy it is to become acclimated to solo living, is whether a solid history of being able to make such arrangements constitutes an ERE skillset towards consistent lowering of lifestyle expense? I made an attempt to recreate a historical record of this for myself; like the calculate your lifetime earnings exercise in YMOYL, and in at least 19 of the 39 years since I graduated from high school, somebody has been willing/able to cover majority of household bills in exchange for my radical homemaker/lentil-baby skills; in 17 of the other 20 years, including approximately half the years of my long first marriage, I chipped in around 50% or my share of group pie financially; and for one year when my ex was unemployed, and two years when he went AWOL after we separated and our daughter was still a minor, I financially supported a household solo. I also provided my kids with some financial support while they were in college, but that overlapped with a household "arrangement" with a male family friend, my second "marriage',and the fact that they worked for my business in the summer.

Anyways, if I contemplate the possibility of financially supporting a man with whom I am in relationship, I realize that my tendency towards always having a half-dozen self-employment projects sitting on the back burner would likely result in the arrangement quickly dissolving as soon as he realizes that he is actually slaving away for sub-minimum wage exchange rate on the sort of radically odd Honey-Do list I would likely create in such a situation. For instance, I would probably at least make him go out fishing and scavenging for scrap metal on any day I couldn't come up with anything better.

[suomalainen]

Assumes a “freedom-to thing you want to do”, so moot question for me. Having lived thru a failed experiment in financial dependence, I don’t think it’s feasible unless both partners are basically doing what they’d be doing were they each financially independent (of the other). So if @gravy wants to support me in my dotage, I’m all for it, provided that my dotage support is a side effect of, and not a reason for, her continued working.

Also, “make him go out”. [shudders]

[Ego]

What if she has 2 million she inherited in the bank and she devotedly works 30 hours per week for $60,000/year as a semi-volunteer surgeon repairing cleft-palates? Would her lack of availability to freedom-to in your company remain an issue? Would the fact that you weren't solo financially independent still bother you?

This reminds me of the progression from dependent > independent > interdependent. It seems to me that the ability of each person to stand on their own feet is necessary for interdependence. Otherwise the relationship is veering toward codependence.

Relationship economics plays a big role in codependent relationships. Codependents tally each other's assets and liabilities. If earning potential, reputation or looks fade, the person is exchanged for someone new, because they were only ever the sum of their parts, and the parts devalued.

So, yeah, that wouldn't work for me.

[AxelHeyst]

In this hypothetical each person does have the ability to stand on their own two feet, but are choosing to collaborate/ pool resources etc. The question is for an arrangement between my actual self, who I know to be capable of standing on my own two feet, and ideal partner, which I define as ‘not codep’ / capable of standing on own two feet.

If we diagrammed the inputs to the relationship and represented contributions with arrows, and then replaced $ with X and cooking labor with Y and etc etc… would we think^H^H^H feel about this differently? If decentering $ is one of our aims as post consumer polymaths, is this not a fair exercise?

(It might be unfair for me to comment on this thread because I no longer have any interest in partnering up with any one person in an entangled way, very much inclusive of financial intertwinedness, so I’m having to roleplay…)

[7Wannabe5]

I don’t think it’s feasible unless both partners are basically doing what they’d be doing were they each financially independent (of the other).

Yeah, I basically agree, although there should also be some collaboration and/or other dimensionality beyond parallel play.

Also, “make him go out”. [shudders]

I was chuckling pretty hard to myself as I typed that, because if the average human male scores a 5 on the Oppositional-Defiant-Shithead Scale, the average human male I tend to end up in relationship with would be at least an 8.5. So, I actually can't even vaguely imagine such a scenario occuring in my reality. You can't tell or ask them to do anything. The only thing that works is to use your feeling words. For instance, maybe in my brain I might be thinking "Go get me a fish." or "Please. go get me a fish." (because I am well mannered), but what I have learned to say when interacting with an ODS 9.2 is something more like "In my belly here, I feel hungry." , and that usually works, but it's pretty much a crap shoot whether I will end up with fish, pancakes, a bag of oranges, etc.

Anyways, "Alec Baldwin" is attempting to lure me back into his semi-gilded cage, so I have to hang tough with my counter-visualizations, etc.

This reminds me of the progression from dependent > independent > interdependent. It seems to me that the ability of each person to stand on their own feet is necessary for interdependence. Otherwise the relationship is veering toward codependence.

Yeah, I grok what you're getting at here, but how do you square this with the fact that historically most women were not financially independent prior to marriage? Was almsot every relationship prior to approximately 1973 co-dependent? And the reality is that in the current cultures where women are most financially independent, marriage is on the serious decline. So, it seems like a rule-of-thumb that only applies to a very specific slice of history or socio-economic reality. This narrow tipping point where a woman is just economically independent enough to be able to choose to marry for primarily romantic reasons, but not economically independent enough to choose to not marry at all. I'm not being snarky here. I'm as semi-baffled as anybody by the cultural changes that have occurred in our lifetime.

[ertyu]

I'd only do it with the full awareness that it's very likely to explode the relationship. People enter into arrangements like that with all sorts of implicit contracts ("if I parent and I do the housework without complaining, she will finally fuck me as much as i want") and then get resentful when, surprise, the other partner wasn't aware they've been signed up for this contract at all. All parties entering an arrangement like this should be able to introspect like whoa, be brutally honest with themselves, and be brutally honest with each other, or the relationship will implode.

And when it implodes, if my formal economy skills are the type that are prone to quick obsolescense (as in tech), i might end up back out on the street in two years, this time with diminished earning ability. So, I probably wouldn't do it before FI, though I see why it would be tempting af. The entire institution of traditional heterosixual marriage is basically this -- and implodes for exactly these reasons.

[suomalainen]

(I)s almost every relationship ... co-dependent?

Yes

[AxelHeyst]

With postconsumer praxis, this is just a semiERE style.

“This circumstance will make the relationship explode.”

Nah, incompatibility and inability to adapt and overcome will make the relationship explode. I’d sign up for this because it sounds fun in a hard and unique way tbh.

Circumstances don’t make relationships codependent. People make relationships codependent. (Remember that codependency is a technical term and means something specific, and is not an umbrella term for dysfunction). You can avoid tempting circumstances but if you’ve got the underlying dysfunctional traits it will haunt all aspects of your life. You can run but you can’t hide etc.

Welcome challenging circumstances imo. If your relationship can’t handle something as basic as the woman being the one who generates primary income flow into your two-agent wog holon, what else can’t it handle?

ETA: my previous relationship failed because we were codependent. Did we put ourselves in situations that exacerbated our codependent traits? Yes, thank god: if we’d avoided challenging circumstances we might still be together in a relationship that milquetoast toddles along but holds us back from being the full versions of ourselves. Now we’re apart and better for it, having done a lot of healing and growth work etc.

[Ego]

I am fortunate to come from a long line of strong women. My great-grandmother was widowed in her twenties with four children and she raised them well. Her son married a strong woman, as did his son, as did I. All of these relationships lasted (so far) until death and I don't believe any of them were what we would call codependent.

Just as ERE isn't really about the money, so too becoming independent on the road to interdependence, has never really been about the money. At least not entirely.

[Frita]

Yeah, I grok what you're getting at here, but how do you square this with the fact that historically most women were not financially independent prior to marriage? Was almsot every relationship prior to approximately 1973 co-dependent? And the reality is that in the current cultures where women are most financially independent, marriage is on the serious decline. So, it seems like a rule-of-thumb that only applies to a very specific slice of history or socio-economic reality. This narrow tipping point where a woman is just economically independent enough to be able to choose to marry for primarily romantic reasons, but not economically independent enough to choose to not marry at all. I'm not being snarky here. I'm as semi-baffled as anybody by the cultural changes that have occurred in our lifetime.

In my opinion, traditional marriage and family situations set up codependency. Women are trained to overlook it, while their husbands feel entitled to the win-lose relationship. The idea is that women take care of the home, stand by their men, offering them unconditional love as if they were children, and take subservient positions to their husbands. The men are kings of the castle, breadwinners, decision makers, and protectors. Because all parties are fulfilling roles, there is no discussion and co-creation toward healthy relationships.

Even as women are more likely to be financially independent, they have also internalized needing partners to be okay. That is codependence.

@ertyu
Open, honest, direct, and respectful communication are necessary for any close relationship to be healthy. Unspoken expectations create massive dysfunction. And these conversations have to be ongoing with both parties contributing the emotional labor.

[ertyu]

i guess where im coming from is that i think the people capable of the introspection, communication, and honesty to make it work would be the exception rather than the rule. I don't deny that -if- one and one's partner are capable of said honest communication, all is surmountable.

[okumurahata]

I would probably accept the offer, but discuss the implications if the freedom-to thing doesn’t work after a period of, let’s say, 2 or 3 years.

I might be concerned that it could lead to resentment in the couple in the form of: ‘I’m working my ass off at the brokerage firm, and you’re a lazy idealist. Please put your feet firmly on the ground and do something useful for society.’

If my partner is 10 years older and has an ‘Angry Mom’ personality, it might happen sooner or later.

[guitarplayer]

I might be simplifying, but I think having 2-5 years of income saved up (I understand: enough resources to cover 2-5 years of life) is a sufficient condition to pursue freedom-to regardless of what partner does or says. More broadly, take freedom-to as a starting point of any pursuit at all.

[Frita]

i guess where im coming from is that i think the people capable of the introspection, communication, and honesty to make it work would be the exception rather than the rule. I don't deny that -if- one and one's partner are capable of said honest communication, all is surmountable.

Thank you for clarifying. You’re right that people capable of and willing to introspect, use good communication, and be honest seems outside of the norm. Both people have to be on board for things to work.

Personal connection: These three features, or lack of them, explain why work and even volunteer positions became non-starters for me.

[chenda]

I might have misunderstood the situation but @7 if you are going to rely on a SO to provide for you as FI I think you will need to take out some financial guarantees like having him put money in a trust fund for you every month so if relationship fails you won't be cast into destitution. Kind of like Indecent Proposal but more of a long term arrangement.