Wealth is health — unless your wife makes more than you.
A recent study suggests that men who earn less than their wives are not as happy.
The study, published in The Economic Journalfound that when a wife outearns their husband, there is a higher incidence of mental health issues for both spouses — but especially the husband.
Around the world, there’s a rising trend of the wife being the primary earner in a marriage, including with celebrity couples, such as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce or Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.
“The share of couples where the wife outearns the husband is increasing globally,” the authors wrote.
“In both the United States and Sweden, it has increased by approximately 25% since the start of the millennium.”
Even with the increase of women outearning their husbands worldwide, there hasn’t been much research on the mental implications of the matter.
Scientists from the University of Durham analyzed the link between spousal income and mental health, looking at heterosexual couples in Sweden who got married in 2021 and had an average age of 37.
The couples were observed for either a 10-year period or until they divorced, which happened with about 20% of the couples surveyed.
Researchers found that “crossing the threshold where the wife starts earning more significantly increases the probability of receiving a mental health diagnosis,” and the chances are higher for the husband.
“In the most restrictive specification, the likelihood increases by approximately 8% for the whole sample and by 11% for men.”
The analysis also showed that mental health was associated positively with both their own and their spousal absolute income -—but the association was negative when it came to just the wife’s income.
“Mental health is a crucial outcome linked to a host of important economic and life outcomes,” the authors wrote. “In this study, I find tangible evidence of relative income in couples playing an important role in mental health outcomes, even in an ostensibly more egalitarian society like Sweden.”
For men, the increase was mostly driven by mental health diagnoses related to substance use, while for women it was driven by neurotic and stress-related disorders.
However, the researchers did not look into the potential reasons that could lead to the findings.
Lead researcher Demid Getik cautioned that study results based on databases and registries don’t reflect why individuals feel a certain way about a given situation.
“It’s a bit difficult to speculate here,” Getik told MailOnline. “A downside of register data is that it doesn’t inform us much about people’s perception and attitudes, like survey data could.”
Getik noted that based on earlier literature, it seems as though the reasoning is due to “a consistent preference for the male partner to earn more in a couple.”
“It’s a bit more difficult to say to what extent that preferences comes from women or men,” he added. “What is interesting though is that you still see this in a country like Sweden, which prides itself on its gender parity.”
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