While Black women still face the issue of unequal pay and systemic challenges to upward mobility, there’s still apparently a pretty significant number of us who are making more than our significant others. A 2023 Pew Research report found that Black wives are “more likely than wives from other racial or ethnic groups” to be the breadwinner in their marriage. Almost one in four Black wives (26%) out-earn their husbands.
Black women are also more likely to earn college degrees than their Black male counterparts, making the earnings gap even more of a reality whether you're married or not.
If you’re dating and your salary is higher than your partner’s, it can seem awkward or downright scary to talk about money with them. And as a woman earning more than her partner (or who has the potential to more than likely out-earn a love interest), you might be tempted to go all in with questions and investigations related to investments, car choice, child support cases, and credit score on the first date.
But before you do that, pause and think about this: Why ask about credit scores and salaries on a first, second, or even 100th date when you don't even know if that person has integrity, values that align with yours or isn't out here trying to make you the next Reesa Teesa?)
How To Have The Money Conversation As The Breadwinner
I’ve been in several relationships where I earned more than my man, and while it’s not something I’m ashamed of, that gap did have its implications. For me, if the man was treating me with respect, love, and attention, I really didn’t care that he might be taking home less pay. The tragic part of that would be when some of the guys I'd dated saw me spending money on designer bags, going out to eat more than three times a week, or taking trips, there would be issues of passive-aggressive judgment, resentment, and eventually relationship sabotage. (I’ve also dated men who earn six figures and above, but that’s a whole other story.)
Sometimes we become the breadwinners due to circumstances that are beyond someone's control or due to a life transition. Maybe your spouse was laid off from the job two years into the relationship or marriage, or they had to take on the care expenses for an elderly parent. Maybe they're in the throws of launching a new business or pursuing higher education, or the person was hit with a lawsuit, health scare, unforeseen tax bill, or other financial emergency. So it's not always an issue of fault, fraud, or scandal, and can be more of a case of life life-ing.
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All relationship dynamics are different, so what one woman sees as a red flag might not be a huge deal-breaker for others. I’m super-ambitious and self-employed, have found long-term success in a media industry perfect for independent go-getters, and I’ve always embraced having a side hustle.
Considering what many Black men face in society in general, I could understand and accept the possibility that my ideal mate might earn less money than me.
In my current relationship, ongoing for seven years, the breadwinner status has shifted multiple times, and for the most part, my man is my man. Period. After getting through some very tough times including surviving a whole pandemic, healing from surgeries, and coping with deaths in our families, there are things beyond money that have become golden for me in my love and loyalty toward him.
Whether you're married or you've been in a relationship for the long haul, here are a few helpful tips I’ve learned along my journey as well as what the experts say about it:
1. Use fun and humor to spark the money conversation.
I've always been one to shy away from talking about money with anyone, as that's just not something we did when I was growing up. For the most part, I saw the men in our family, whether they were the breadwinner or not, taking charge of the spending in the household and they oftentimes paid for everything, even if, for some, the bulk of the money was earned by their wives. It seemed to be an unspoken rule that everyone must have the perception that the man was calling all the shots financially (when I'd later find out, that one man in the family, for example, was often unemployed.) I only learned through observing things, not through conversations for clarity, confirmation, or understanding.
So when I started working and dating seriously, I'd just avoid speaking up when men would love-bomb me after seeing how I dressed, or when I'd find out that a guy who had spent $200 on a first date was actually struggling—making $1200 a month before taxes—and was just trying to impress me.
Today, humor and fun are helpful in having conversations about money. Early in our relationship, my man and I would play a game and ask questions of each other about how much we'd spend on a house or what we would do if we had $1 million. We might find humor in the money mistakes we've made in the past and those conversations would often lead to very serious conversations about debt, current bills, quality of life standards, and how we can work together to help one another achieve our respective goals.
Leaning into humor has helped me have those hard conversations—to get to know my partner more—and they've allowed him to feel a bit more comfortable about sharing information about his finances with me. One expert agrees that adding humor to conversations about money can be beneficial. “I think that keeping it light is the best way to learn. If we lower the temperature, if we make it fun, if I tell you how I have screwed up everything and I still did okay, that we can all come out of this much, much better, we'll relax and do a better job with our money,” Joe Saul-Sehy, co-host of NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, shared during an episode.
2. Put mutual respect and consideration at the center and approach with grace and love.
Bola Sokunbi, founder of CleverGirl Finance, breaks this down very well in sharing her own experience with being the breadwinner in a relationship. “Just because you earn more doesn't mean you should become the evil queen dictating how every penny is spent, checking all the bank accounts, and asking for a play-by-play of every transaction your partner made,” she writes. “Think of how you would want to be treated if the roles were reversed. Allow your partner to make financial decisions; remember you are part of a team, and it is a partnership.”
While you should feel no shame or guilt for your success as the breadwinner, there's still a way to talk about money with your spouse that does not demean or belittle them. And you need to be clear about your own financial blind spots, habits, and mindset in order to come correct in a conversation about money with someone else.
Just because you're the breadwinner doesn't mean you're great at managing money or have the best personal finance habits, so consider humility and decency when talking with your partner about their own. (I can admit that I've dated men who made less but treated their money better than I did. Several were even better at managing what they had and building savings versus always living check to check, which was my reality at certain times in my life.)
Whatever your desires are when it comes to money and its role in your relationship, approach the conversation with respect, grace, love, and consideration that you’re talking to someone you care a lot about. Figure out what you're willing to compromise on and what you're not, and go from there.
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3. Instead of pausing, tip-toeing or avoiding, address behaviors that reflect habits and values.
Timing is a sticky aspect when you're talking about finances with your partner or spouse, whether you're in a long-term relationship, in the early stages of a romance, or you've already walked down the alter. From my own experience, being strategic in talking early on about what matters to me, in general, is key. And using my own senses of observation and gut feelings is important, too.
"'Fess up about the debt too soon and you risk scaring that special someone away, " Kimberly Foss, a certified financial planner, told Forbes. "However, if you wait too long, it can complicate things. If you are becoming very serious in your relationship, it is time to speak up. [If you carry a lot of debt], think of the roles being reversed — wouldn’t you want to know? You might be surprised just how understanding and open your partner is."
At the end of it all, it's not really about the money but about compatibility in one's outlook on what success means, what trust entails, what quality of life they want, and how they see partnership in a relationship. A few observations I think are more telling than outright asking a man about his credit score would be to watch early on for signs of greed, jealousy, uncontrollable anger, indifferent complacency, scarcity mindset, and ego.
Experts also recommend that married couples should especially embrace open communication to come up with a plan of action that they both can agree on. If you're expected to carry the financial load at any time in the relationship, set healthy boundaries and hold your partner accountable. You can also get help in the form of a therapist, counselor, or financial adviser to create or adjust the plan and help you navigate through bumps in the road without heading to TikTok for a 50-part series or, worse, divorce court.
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A Goddard College graduate, who earned an MFA from Pratt Institute and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Marymount Manhattan College, Mahogany offers unapologetic realness with a side of grace and empowerment. "I started touring locally. I started creating chat books so that those poems will go in the hands of the people who were sitting in the rooms," she shared.
"And then I started facilitating poetry workshops, so I used my chat books as curriculum. And that, in turn, allowed me to further invest in my art and show the community and people who were hiring me that it wasn't just a one-off, that it's not just, you know, a fly by night—that I am invested in this art as much as I am invested in your community, in your children's learning, in our growth."
Mahogany has a special way of moving audiences, and her superpower sparks shifts in perspective, post-performance introspection, and strengthening of community bonds, especially among Black women. (One can undeniably recognize her gift for arousal of the spirit and mind merely from her listening to her insights from the other side of a Google Hangout call. I can only imagine the soul-stirring, top-tier sensory encounter when watching her perform in person.)
In this chat with xoNecole, Mahogany reflects on sustaining a creative career, the aftermath of writing a banned book, and using poetry for both healing, community-building, and activism.
Anthony Artis
xoNecole: What are three key things that have laid the foundation for a sustainable creative career for you?
Mahogany L Browne: What has helped me is that I'm willing to go in being an expert at knowing poetry and knowing the way in which art can change the landscape of our lives, not just as a poet, but also as a poetry facilitator. How you move through classes, those things are mastered, right? So when I go into another space that's maybe tech-heavy, I don't mind learning and being, you know, a student of the wonder of how we can make this magic, work together.
Two, you’ve got to know how to pivot. Sometimes we say, ‘Alright, this is what my life is going to be. I'm going to be a New York Times best-selling author. I'm going to, you know, have an album that's Grammy-nominated. And then, say you get dropped from your record label. That doesn't mean you can't make an album anymore. You can also still create an album that can be submitted to the Grammys. So, what does a pivot look like as an artist who doesn't have an institution behind them? Pivot being a student of the wonder.
Relationships also really help. How do I serve the community? And in turn, that tells me how the community can show up. For me, I have long-standing ties with a community that will outlast my one life. So, what does it mean to create space where these relationships can develop, can be nurtured, can be rooted, can be cultivated? Creating space—it happens through relationships.
xoN: With today’s economic challenges, what does your current creative process look like, and what are you working on?
MB: I’m always thinking five years ahead. I just reviewed the pages for two children’s books and recently released a YA novel. I’m drafting an adult fiction manuscript now.
Anything I create is founded with the root of poetry, but it can exist in captions. It can exist in commercials. It can exist as a musical. So that's where I’m at now.
xoN: You started performing "Black Girl Magic" in 2013, had an acclaimed performance of it via PBS and the work went on to viral success shortly after. Talk more about the inspiration. And what do you think about the continued relevance more than a decade later?
MB: I wrote it as a rally cry for the mothers who had been keeping themselves truly in harm's way by, you know, being a part of the community right after the death of their child or their loved one. They are usually mothers of victims of police brutality—and just seeing how they showed up in these community spaces, they are devout to the cause but obviously still grieving.
"I wanted this poem to be just a space of reclamation, of joy and of you, of your light, of your shine, of your brilliance, in any which way in which you fashion. Every room you enter is the room you deserve to be in. What does it mean to have a poem like that that exists?"
And the first time I did the poem, the Weeping that occurred, right? It was like this blood-letting of sorts. The next time I performed it, I'm moved to tears because I'm seeing how it's affecting other women who have just been waiting to hear, ‘You belong. You deserve. You are good. We see you. Thank you, despite everything that they said to make you regret being born in this beautiful brown, dark-skinned, light-skinned, but Black body.’
Black women are the backbone—period. Point blank. And so, that that poem became a necessity, not just to the fortitude of Black women in the community, but like you know, in service of healing the Black women.
xoN: One of your books was banned at a school in Boston, and it was later reinstated due to parental and activist support. What was that experience like?
MB: Well, I think it happened because they were racist. That's it. Point blank. The reversal of it was empowering, right? I realized, oh, I thought we just had to sit here and be on a banned book list. But no, parents are actually the leaders of this charge.
So to see that, the parents said, ‘Nah, we're not gonna let you take this book out of my baby’s school just because it's a Black kid on the front saying, ‘Woke’ and they're talking about being a global citizen. They're talking about accountability. They're talking about accessibility. They're talking about allyship, and you don't want them to have compassion or empathy or have even an understanding, right? So no, we rebuke that, and we want this book here anyway.’ To see that happen in that way. I was, like, reaffirmed. Absolutely.
xoN: You recently organized the Black Girl Magic Ball at the Lincoln Center in New York. Honorees included author and entrepreneur Rachel Cargle and National Black Theater CEO Sade Lythcott. What impact did it have and what expanded legacy do you hope to leave with your creative works?
MB: I was really interested in not celebrating just the book, but celebrating the community that made the book possible. And so I gave out five awards to women doing that thing, like, what does it mean to be a Black girl in this world?
I just thought it was gonna be an amazing time. Everybody's gonna dress up—we're gonna celebrate each other. And boom, I then realized that it responded to like a gaping hole. There was a missing thing for Black girls of all walks of life, all ages, right?
"It's very intergenerational. That was intentional to come together and celebrate just being us."
You have all these instances where just being you is either the butt of a joke or it's diminished and not worthy of a specific title in these larger institutions. So what does it mean to just to be loved up on and celebrated?
It felt like a self-care project at first. You know, for the first couple of years, folks were coming and they were getting that sisterhood. They were getting that tribe work that they were missing in their everyday lives.
I love the Black Girl Magic Ball because we got us. If I go out with a bang, they'll remember that Mahogany worked her a** off to make sure all the Black girls everywhere knew that she was the light. We are the blueprint.
For more information on Mahogany L. Browne, her work, and her future projects, visit her website or follow her on IG @mobrowne.
Featured image by Anthony Artis
