The #1 antidote for income-gap couples is to stay close. An ideal way is to keep up shared hobbies and spend extracurricular time together as often as possible. Focus on the other pieces of your life – the ones you can share only with each other. Most important is to keep the avenues of communication open. Make sure you’re having a weekly date night – a minimum of two hours alone – outside the house and doing something fun. Simple rule: talk about anything but 3 things: work, money and kids. Most couples laugh at this and tell me that there’s nothing else to ever talk about with their spouse. That’s the problem. You didn’t fall in love by talking incessantly about the stresses of work, money and kids. It’s not what made you fall in love; it’s not what’s going to sustain your love either. Creating closeness through time spent together will go a long way to protect your marriage and remind you of why you got together in the first place.
Often, women who earn more expect their husbands to pitch in much more at home. But studies show that women still end up doing much more housework than their less-earning husbands. Stop fighting about it and get extra help in the house so that the two of you, as a couple, can create the pockets of uninterrupted time. Time set aside to create a romantic, caring, and appreciative space for this communication is like money in the bank.
