Like most people, I probably spend an hour or so of my life every day mindlessly scrolling through social media.
Most of what I see disappears from my head almost immediately. But every now and then, I come across a particular kind of argument that, for some reason, genuinely stresses me out.
You have probably seen some version of it too.
A man says he wants a traditional wife, but thinks she should pay for her own hair appointments because those are her expenses. Someone insists that everything in a relationship should be 50/50, even when one person earns considerably more than the other. A parent talks about everything they sacrificed for their child and, therefore, why that child should listen to them.
Then, naturally, the other side arrives.
If I’m doing all the housework, why should I pay anything?
I gave up my career for you.
You wouldn’t be where you are without me.
And within about thirty seconds, everyone seems to be keeping accounts.
I find these conversations strangely stressful.
Not because I think I know the correct arrangement. I don’t. What works perfectly well in one marriage might be completely unacceptable in another, and I certainly don’t know enough about a stranger’s life from a thirty-second video to decide who should pay for their haircut.
But there is something underneath these arguments that bothers me.
I just couldn’t quite work out what it was.
What Are We Actually Dividing?
Maybe it is because 50/50 sounds so obviously fair.
Half the rent. Half the electricity.
Half the groceries. Half the holiday.
Two adults. Two equal shares.
There is something wonderfully clean about it.
Except 50/50 only means something once we decide what exactly we are dividing.
Suppose one person earns €200,000 and the other earns €30,000. They could still split every bill exactly in half.
Mathematically, that is 50/50.
But suppose the person earning €30,000 moved countries for the other person’s career.
Before the move, perhaps they had spent years building their own career. They knew the industry. They had a network. They spoke the language. They were progressing.
Then they moved.
Now they have to learn another language. Their experience doesn’t translate perfectly into the new market. They take a more junior position and start building again.
Five years later, one spouse is earning €200,000 and the other is earning €30,000.
Look at the household accounts at that moment and the conclusion seems obvious. One person is contributing much more financially. And perhaps they are.
But something is missing from the accounts.
The other person gave up a path.
Maybe they would have become a senior manager if they had stayed. Maybe their salary would have tripled. Maybe it wouldn’t have.
We can never know, because that version of their life no longer exists.
In finance, we have a name for something close to this. Opportunity cost.
The cost of choosing one thing includes what we give up by not choosing the alternative.
It is a perfectly ordinary idea when we are evaluating an investment. It becomes considerably stranger when the investment is your life.
How do I put a number on the career my husband might have had?
I can’t. And perhaps I shouldn’t pretend that I can.
He gained things from moving too. Another language. Another country. Experiences and perhaps opportunities that would never otherwise have existed. Life does not provide us with the alternative scenario at the end so that we can compare the two. There is no spreadsheet showing what would have happened if we had chosen differently.
There is only the path we took.
Then Someone Has a Baby
This is where trying to price everything starts becoming slightly ridiculous.
Suppose a couple decides to have a child. The woman becomes pregnant.
For nine months, she carries another human being inside her body. Her body changes. She gives birth. She recovers. Perhaps she breastfeeds. Perhaps her career pauses for a while. Perhaps it doesn’t. Pregnancy might barely affect her professionally, or it might change the trajectory of her career considerably.
What number should we attach to that contribution?
There isn’t one. But the absence of a price doesn’t make the contribution zero. If we insist that everything must have a monetary equivalent before it can be considered valuable, then perhaps we should follow that logic all the way through.
How much should her husband pay her for carrying their child?
€50,000? €500,000? Everything he earns for the rest of his life?
It sounds absurd because perhaps money was the wrong language in the first place. Some things are valuable without being sensibly convertible into a price. Once I started thinking about it this way, 50/50 became much harder to understand.
Half the bills is easy.
But what is half a pregnancy? What is half the physical risk of childbirth? What is half a career opportunity? What is half the ability to move countries?
Some things cannot be divided equally. Perhaps they cannot be repaid either.
But We Understand This at Work
The strange thing is, we seem to understand some version of this much better inside companies.
Imagine a business that generates €100 million in revenue.
Sales brings in the customers. Someone designs the product. Someone manufactures it. Finance keeps the company funded and the accounts running. HR recruits people. IT maintains the systems.
Their contributions are not equal. The CEO may genuinely contribute substantially more economic value than the person packaging boxes. Their skills may be scarcer, their decisions may affect thousands of people, and they may carry much greater responsibility.
But imagine the founder of that company standing up tomorrow and saying:
I built this company. I created all of this. The rest of you simply work here.
I think most of us would be furious.
What do you mean, you created all of this?
We make the products. We deal with the customers. We run the systems. We solve the problems. We stay late when something goes wrong. You may have built the company, but you would not have a €100 million business without all the people who make it work.
And we would be right.
We understand perfectly well that contribution does not have to be equal to be real. We don’t need to pretend that the person packaging boxes contributes as much as the founder to understand that the founder did not create everything alone.
We understand perfectly well that the absence of revenue is not the absence of value.
Then we go home.
And somehow, some of that understanding seems to disappear.
Suddenly, the salary becomes the contribution. The person bringing home the bigger number becomes the person who provides. The things another person does become strangely difficult to see once there is no number sitting beside them.
This is perhaps the part that frustrates me most.
Because we know better.
We know better when it is our work being dismissed.
We know better when somebody above us takes credit for something hundreds of people helped create.
We know better when our own contribution is the one in danger of disappearing.
Then we go home, look at the person beside us, and somehow ask for a receipt. And suddenly the person with the number has something incredibly powerful.
Evidence.
It’s the ‘Therefore’ That Bothers Me
Suppose I earn €200,000. My husband earns €30,000. There is an objective fact there: I earn considerably more money. But watch how easily that fact can become something else.
I earn more.
Therefore, I provide more.
Therefore, I paid for this life.
Therefore, I should have more say.
Something happened between those statements. The first is a fact. The second requires us to decide what counts as contribution. And the last is an entirely different claim.
I think this is what bothers me about those social-media arguments.
It isn’t really the money. It is the therefore. Because we do this everywhere.
A founder says: I built this company.
An employee says: My project generated €5 million.
A parent says: I gave my children everything.
A successful adult says: Everything I have, I earned myself.
All of those statements may be substantially true. And none of them may be completely true.
A founder may genuinely be the reason a company exists. They had the idea. They risked their savings. They worked through the night. They made decisions nobody else was willing or able to make.
But they didn’t manufacture every product, answer every customer, process every invoice or write every line of code.
So perhaps I built this and I didn’t build this alone can both be true.
The same is true in the opposite direction.
Someone may have supported me enormously while I built my career. Maybe I genuinely couldn’t have done it without them. That doesn’t mean they did what I did.
I still studied. I still worked. I still developed the skills. I still made decisions and accepted consequences that belonged to me.
I couldn’t have done it without you does not mean you did it.
But:
I did it does not mean I could have done it without you.
Dependence does not erase agency. Agency does not erase dependence.
Maybe most things we achieve sit uncomfortably somewhere between the two.
So Who Decided the Exchange Rate?
This becomes even stranger when contribution starts creating a debt.
A parent says, I gave you everything.
Perhaps they did. Perhaps they worked two jobs to pay for school. Perhaps they gave up things they wanted. Perhaps they spent twenty years organising their life around their child.
That sacrifice is real.
But what follows from it?
Does the child owe them gratitude? Probably.
Care? Perhaps.
Money? Maybe.
Obedience? The right to decide where the child lives? What career they choose? Whom they marry?
At what point does I did this for you become therefore you owe me this?
Who decided the exchange rate?
Because there was never an invoice. There may never even have been an agreement that a debt was being created. The child certainly didn’t negotiate the terms before being born. Yet twenty or thirty years later, the accounting can suddenly appear.
After everything I’ve done for you.
Somehow everyone understands what that sentence means.
There is a ledger. You are on the wrong side of it.
Perhaps relationships contain more of this invisible accounting than we realise.
I supported you when you had nothing. I moved here for your career. I raised you. I paid for everything. I gave up ten years.
These can describe enormous contributions and very real sacrifices. But sometimes another sentence is hiding underneath them.
Therefore, I am entitled to something from you.
We remember what we gave. We remember what they didn’t. And eventually, somebody wants to settle the account. Except I’m not sure there is a clean account to settle.
What Happens When Someone Has Nothing to Give?
There is another problem with linking contribution to entitlement.
Eventually, one person may not be able to contribute very much at all. Someone loses their job. Someone becomes ill. Someone grows old. Someone becomes pregnant and cannot work for a period. Someone simply needs to be carried for a while.
What happens then?
If my husband earns nothing this year and I earn €200,000, do I acquire more rights in our marriage? Do I get more say over where we live? Does it become more my house? Do my preferences matter more because my payslip is bigger? Does financial dependence somehow make him less equal to me?
And if that sounds uncomfortable, perhaps equality was never supposed to depend on equal contribution in the first place.
A child contributes almost nothing economically to a household. Yet the child has enormous claims upon their parents.
A sick partner may temporarily give very little and need very much.
We don’t normally conclude that their dignity has decreased in proportion to their productivity. Perhaps this is where our belief in equality is actually tested. It is easy to call two people equal when they earn similar amounts, carry similar responsibilities and need roughly the same things from one another.
The difficult part is what happens when they don’t. Because two people may never contribute equally. They may not even contribute things that can meaningfully be compared. One brings money. One gives up an opportunity. One carries the child. One provides stability when the other needs to be carried. Over a long enough life, perhaps they will swap places several times.
How would we ever make that exactly 50/50?
So What Does 50/50 Actually Mean?
I still don’t know.
Maybe splitting every bill equally is exactly right for some couples. Maybe proportional contributions work better for others. Maybe one person pays for everything.
The arrangement itself isn’t really what interests me anymore.
What interests me is our confidence that fairness can always be found by measuring what each person put in.
Some contributions have prices. Some have opportunity costs we can only guess at. Some have no sensible monetary equivalent at all. Some periods of life may require one person to give far more than the other without knowing whether the balance will ever reverse.
Perhaps relationships do create obligations. I don’t think love means nobody owes anybody anything. That would be a rather convenient interpretation of love.
We make commitments. We rely on each other. Sometimes someone genuinely does take repeatedly without giving anything back.
But perhaps contribution itself does not automatically purchase rights over another person. Maybe carrying our child doesn’t mean I own part of my husband’s future. Maybe moving countries for my career doesn’t mean he owns part of mine. Maybe earning most of the money doesn’t mean I get to matter more.
Perhaps these things can simply be recognised for what they are: different contributions to a life that neither person could have built in exactly the same way alone.
Perhaps that is what has been bothering me while I scroll through arguments about hair appointments and restaurant bills.
The argument looks like it is about money. But underneath it is a much bigger question.
If I give more than you, what does that allow me to ask from you? If you need more than I do, does that give me more power? If what I contribute can be measured and what you contribute cannot, does mine become more real?
And if, for a while, you have nothing at all to give me, are we still equal?
Maybe a payslip can tell us exactly what somebody earned. It can tell us who paid the bill.
It just can’t answer the question we keep quietly asking it to answer.
How much does that person get to matter?
