All my socks suddenly have holes in. Weird how that happens, huh? One minute you’re frolicking in the autumn leaves, kicking up your heels and admiring the terracotta cable-knit peeking out of your boots; the next you’re hopping from foot to foot on a chilly bedroom floor, scrabbling in your sock drawer for a pair that hasn’t been dined on by a particularly ravenous moth. On discovering the situation I wondered whether my socks had engaged in some sort of collective action — a group unravelling, perhaps, in protest at my laziness with the nail clippers. Then I realised I was experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: a cognitive bias that describes the uncanny sensation of becoming aware of something for the first time then — whoops! — noticing it everywhere. Nevertheless I decided it was high time I treated myself to a few new pairs of thermals. So off I popped to the shops.
If you believe the internet, someone somewhere once offered this sage advice: Do not cheap out on things that separate your ass from the ground. These words swam up through my subconscious as I loitered in the M&S lingerie department, umming and ahhing over a six-pack of cotton ankle socks and a trio of the sort of sturdy woollens your nan or the coolest young person you know might wear. I grabbed the latter and turned towards the checkout…then spun on my heel, put the socks back where they came from and hurried out of the store. Do you really need them? remonstrated the voice in my head. You can manage without.
We all do it — talk ourselves out of purchases for one reason or another. Often it’s an eminently sensible decision — how many of us have a glittery jumpsuit with the tags still on hanging in our wardrobe? — but sometimes a more malign force is at work. Arriving home empty-handed from my shopping trip, I thought about all the things I have hesitated to buy myself recently: socks, jeans, new glasses, a haircut. These are hardly frivolities — my jeans are ripped to the point of indecency and my glasses are scratched and wonky, the prescription five years out of date — yet I cannot bring myself to hand over the cash. Conversely, I will happily spend money on my daughter, my partner and products or activities to enhance our life together. So what’s going on?
It’s guilt, of course. Women are great at guilt. We excel at it — even science says so. Time and again, research has found that women suffer guilt more frequently than men, while guilt proneness — a personality trait characterised by a lower threshold for experiencing guilt even when a so-called transgression is private, or before it has been committed — has been linked with a higher tendency among women to engage in prosocial behaviour (voluntary acts which are intended to benefit others), according to this study from 2016. On the one hand there’s the religious worldview that says Eve bit into the apple and we’ve been paying for it ever since; on the other there’s the generally accepted fact that girls are socialised to be more caring than boys, to make amends after an argument and to assume responsibility for the wellbeing of others. Whichever way you look at it, if you’re a woman, guilt is inescapable.
You know what makes an angst-ridden situation more fun? A reversal of traditional gender roles! My partner is currently taking some time out of work to look after our daughter, which means I am the sole earner in our family. This dynamic may not be as unusual as it was — research carried out in 2020 by the Office for National Statistics found that women out-earn their male partner in 23.3% of UK households — but it has taken some getting used to, not least for my partner whose less enlightened friends continue to rib him for not bringing home the bacon. (R29 readers will need no reminder but on the off-chance that Kemi Badenoch has stumbled across our site, let’s say it one more time: Childcare is work, too.) Female breadwinners report a number of frustrations including loss of attraction to their partner and an unfair division of domestic labour — according to one study from 2019, 45% of female breadwinners do the majority of household tasks, compared to 12% of male breadwinners — but for me the difficulty lies in balancing my family’s needs against my own. We are lucky enough to live in a part of the UK where the cost of living remains lower than elsewhere so we can make it work on my slightly below-average salary. Yet I am acutely aware that when my paycheque runs out, there is no more money. So yeah, I could get my hair cut — but what if the car runs out of fuel or my daughter needs more nappies or there’s a cold snap and we have to turn the heating up? The guilt would be enormous. Hence I find myself making do.
Worried I might be developing a tendency towards martyrdom, I reached out to other women in my position to find out if they experience similar feelings of guilt about spending money on themselves. Unhappily (and unsurprisingly) they do. Thirty-year-old Marie* lives with her husband in southwest England, where she is studying for a PhD. Marie’s husband runs his own business but it is failing — Marie says that it hasn’t made a profit in a long time — and so the couple is surviving on her PhD stipend and the money she makes from side hustles including waitressing, marking and tutoring. All bills and shared expenses come out of Marie’s account; her husband “rarely” contributes unless Marie is “really struggling” and asks for help. Marie is clearly grafting hard to support herself and her family and no one would begrudge her a treat here and there to reward her effort — yet she is unable to give herself that same grace.
“The other day I just thought, F**k it, and went on a bit of a clothes shopping spree,” she says when I ask about her attitude towards spending money. “It felt like I wanted to treat myself and that I had been working really hard with no reward. It did feel nice at the time but afterwards I felt guilty and worried what my future self would think when money was tight again.” Marie’s fear for her future self tallies with my reluctance to loosen the purse strings and supports findings that women tend to be more future-oriented and express higher concerns about financial security than men. If you’re getting by on a budget, little spends like these — not necessities per se but the kind of purchases that enliven a dull day — are often the first to go, offering a modicum of control in an economic climate that can feel terrifyingly unpredictable. They are also, of course, the spends you rue the most when the “f**k it” mentality becomes too powerful to resist (as it always does).
I expected to find stories like Marie’s among women whose income mirrors my own but I assumed, perhaps naively, that guilt would subside as fortunes grow. Jess* is 29 and a civil servant in the northwest. She lives with her fiancé in a house that she owns and describes her financial circumstances as “comfortable”. Jess earns around £70,000 — approximately three times her fiancé’s salary — and pays the mortgage and council tax on her property herself, although the couple splits the rest of the bills. By her own admission she has “a good chunk of savings and money leftover at the end of the month” but that does not stop her agonising over “wasting” money.
“I definitely deny myself things when I don’t need to,” says Jess. “I often see clothes I would like but can’t bring myself to spend £50/60 on a pair of jeans so find myself looking for similar on Vinted. [Also] I used to get my eyelashes done — it was about £70 every month. I researched kits online and now do them myself, which I feel less guilty about. But I do miss the relaxing feeling of going to the salon.” Jess has a long-term health condition that could leave her unable to work for an extended period of time. She says this contributes to her anxiety about money and it is likely at the root of her reluctance to indulge herself, despite having the disposable income to do so.
It’s a different story when Jess shops for her fiancé. “I treat my partner all the time and don’t bat an eyelid at treating him to designer T-shirts or items and small treats regularly,” she says. “I want to show him I appreciate how hard he works and make him happy. I don’t feel like this is wasting money nor do I feel any guilt attached to this spending.” If this looks like a paradox, that’s because it is. And it is so familiar to me. About this time last year I spent a lot of money on a coat for my partner. He was celebrating a big birthday and only ever shops secondhand so I wanted him to have something that was his alone — something that didn’t come with the whiff of someone else’s aftershave. I cannot remember the last time I spent (or would have considered spending) anywhere near that amount on myself. Even the prospect makes me uncomfortable.
Perhaps Jess and I are martyrs after all. Or perhaps we are simply fulfilling the expectations of our gender. A study published in 2021 in Financial Planning Review examined the differences between men’s and women’s attitudes towards and beliefs about money. It found that “women express their love more through gifts and spending money on others more than themselves.” The researchers suggest this behaviour stems from women’s “agreeableness” — but where does that agreeableness come from? It is not innate. We do not emerge from the womb with two X chromosomes and a compulsion to bend over backwards for others. From the moment they are given a doll to play with, little girls are taught to put other people’s needs above their own — preparation for adulthood when they will be obliged to assume caring responsibilities within the family or perhaps occupy a professional caring role, like the 88% of NHS nurses who are women. Is it too great a stretch to imagine that the guilt we feel when we spend money on ourselves is our subconscious reminding us that, really, we should be spending that money on someone else? That by caring for ourselves we are demonstrating a lack of care for others? How selfish of us to get that massage. How unloving.
Freelance journalist Rachael* lives in London and at 27 years old is enjoying not living paycheque to paycheque for the first time in her life. Although she earns more than her husband, he insists on contributing equally to their expenses as a couple. Rachael’s higher salary comes into play in the amount she is able to save each month: approximately £300 more than her husband. I am heartened to learn that Rachael uses those additional savings to treat herself — to “a bag, a nice bit of jewellery, a holiday” — but regardless, the guilt is there.
Rachael tells me about a recent city break where she paid to check in a bag containing her “myriad eczema creams”. Her husband thought it was a waste of money and asked if she could decant the creams into travel-size bottles instead. “I could [have],” says Rachael, “but for me, the extra £50 was more than worth it for the sake of easing my anxiety. What’s the point in working hard and earning more if you can’t make your life a little easier?” It strikes me that Rachael’s guilt springs from a subconscious belief that she should be saving every penny she can for the future — she mentions, almost in passing, that she is determined never to rely on anyone else financially and is “perpetually fearful” that her current circumstances will change. Yet she is hardly spending recklessly: The money she uses to treat herself is over and above the money she deposits in the couple’s joint savings account every month. Rachael is doing everything right and still, she tells me, feels like she has to “justify where [she’s] at”.
In their 2019 book, Burnout: The Secret To Solving The Stress Cycle, Emily and Amelia Nagoski talk about something they call “human giver syndrome”: the “deeply buried, unspoken assumption that women should give everything, every moment of their lives, every drop of energy, to the care of others”. Human giver syndrome dictates that women earn less than men as a result of our caring responsibilities, like having children, which impinge on our careers, and/or because we disproportionately occupy professional caring roles, which are typically lower paid. On the face of it, a woman who is the breadwinner in her household has circumvented societal expectations; she has assumed a position traditionally assigned to a man — yet she cannot inhabit that position as a man would. The guilt I experience, and which all the women I spoke to for this story have experienced, would seem to confirm as much. But then I asked my partner whether he ever felt guilty about spending money on himself when he was earning a wage. “Not at the time,” he said, “but I would often get buyer’s remorse. Particularly when we had bills to pay.” The truth, I realised, is that women might be more prone to guilt than men — but guilt is not a woman’s preserve. I didn’t understand that until I became the breadwinner in my family.
Part of the problem, I think, is that “breadwinner” is a very misleading word. The breadwinner is triumphant. The breadwinner is self-congratulatory. The breadwinner stands on the podium alone. In reality, the breadwinner has to withstand an enormous pressure to provide for — that is, care for — the ones they love. It is a huge ask of anyone and for women it is an extra helping of responsibility on top of all the caring responsibilities we already shoulder. Of course we’re going to feel guilty if we think we’re dropping the ball — even if “dropping the ball” means buying a £10 nail polish to reward yourself for a hard day’s work instead of putting that £10 towards the weekly shop. So yes, not just if you’re a woman but especially if you’re a woman and you’re supporting your family, guilt is inescapable. Perhaps we just have to learn to live with it. I’m off to buy myself some socks.
*Name changed to protect anonymity
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