Money Is Power in Every Relationship, Even If You Don't Admit It
Money Is Power in Every Relationship, Even If You Don't Admit It
Someone named Veronique put this question into our podcast topics, and people upvoted it to the top. You can do that on happysubmissive.com now, drop in the things you want Master and I to talk about, and the rest of you vote them up like Reddit. It's a democracy. This one won.
The question was the one nobody wants to say out loud: why can't you dominate a woman who makes more money than you?
And my answer is the whole episode. Whether you want to admit it or not, money equals power. That's just it.
You can't lead in one room and follow in the rest
The fantasy a lot of women carry is that a man can lead in the bedroom and nowhere else. He pulls your hair, he takes over for ten minutes, and then the lights come on and you go back to being the boss of everything. We have watched friends try to live this exact arrangement.
"Actually, again, what she wanted is for him to lead in bed, not in life. I want you to lead, but just in bed." — Master
It doesn't work. And here is why it doesn't work.
"They don't work because you humiliate the man by telling him to pick up his socks and you tell him what to do all day, every day. And then you're like, okay, take the lead." — Marian
How is a guy supposed to grab your hair and not flinch, not brace for you to say no, don't do it like this, when you have spent the whole day correcting him? It's already been installed in the rest of his life. The dynamic in the bedroom is not separate from the dynamic at the kitchen table. They are communicating vessels, like we say in French. So if you want a man to lead, he needs to actually lead. Which means he needs to be better off than you, already, from the start.
That doesn't make submission slavery. It never has. But mastery and submission come from a real hierarchical difference, and money is the cleanest way that difference shows up early.
When the woman makes more, she leads. Full stop.
So here is the practical advice for men, and it's blunt. You're at a bar, you meet a woman, she's lovely, she tells you about her great job, and then you do the math and realize she makes more than you. Run. Don't take that woman.
"Because it's not going to go well at the end. Because she will always say like, I make more money than you, blah, blah, blah." — Master
She will always be the leader in the couple if she's making more. There is no way for the man to feel like a man in that arrangement, no matter how it starts. The financial power dynamic is a real thing, and you have to watch for it in your own relationship.
The exception is when you don't start equal. If you start as the one with more, the skill, the experience, the income, then you grow together, and that gap stays. The danger is the reversal, where you wake up one day and the roles have flipped because you let the gap close on the wrong side.
How it actually went for Master and me
Logan asked the question straight on the live: Piper, do you make more money than your Master? It's a complicated one, so let's go into it.
When we met, I did not have more. I had a lot less. And not just less money, but less of the capacity for it.
"When I met you, you had nothing." — Master
He's right. I could hold a job, but I didn't want the jobs I had, restoration and all that. Master had a business, knowledge, his own place, everything running smoothly. I wanted to do what he was doing. So he took me in.
"You wanted it to work with me. So then just like right there, the money for me, my money was your money." — Master
And now? I don't make more than him. We make equal, because everything is shared. Joint accounts, business accounts, no counting pennies. The brand is my face, but Master built it as much as I did, so it's our business. I go to the little shop and buy the expensive cream and he says nothing, because it's my money, it's his money, it's our money. And if we couldn't pay the rent, it would be our fault.
"But I told you how to run the money thing, the business, so you know how much expensive cream you can buy." — Master
That's the part people miss. The cream keeps me beautiful, which benefits us and the business. He buys a guitar and makes the riffs for our songs. Every decision is supposed to be for the good of both of us. That is what shared money looks like when there's a common goal underneath it.
Stop saying everything is too expensive
A lot of the 50-50 talk comes from rent being high, food being high, everybody chanting that everything is expensive. Master's tired of it.
"We need to stop saying that everything is expensive. It's been like that since the 1920s." — Master
We watched old documentaries, old Vox Pop interviews, and people were saying the exact same thing decades ago. It costs the worth that it costs. So when someone says, because times are hard I want to split everything half and half, I understand where it comes from. But understand the trade you're making.
"If you want a leading man, if you want a man in your relationship that will keep the power, the control, and all of that, and make the decisions for you both, well, you can't have that 50-50. That dilutes everything about the relationship and the dynamic." — Marian
You can't have the man who leads and the perfectly even ledger at the same time. Pick one.
Growing her is not keeping her small
The objection I hear constantly is that if men have all the money and all the power, women just stay home and do nothing. No. That's not what this is.
A man with a real skill, who brings a woman in from a lower level and mentors her, she will make more money over time. Just not more than him. Master tried to make me code for two or three weeks, and it was a disaster, I still have the notes in the archive. But he wasn't handing me a broom and saying go make cakes. He was trying to find what actually lit me up, what was me, so that we could build it together. That's the difference between leading someone up and keeping someone down.
And it has to go both ways in the end. If you build a whole life together over years and the man dies and the woman is left with nothing on the street, then he was a bad master. You train your woman to be able to stand, to make money, to lead later, precisely because you love her. Master says I have access to all of it in case I ever want to run. Run, Forrest, run. We both know I won't.
"If you want to lead, you have to have more money. That's it. That's the way it works. You start like that." — Master and Marian
Start there, and the rest of it constructs itself. Money isn't the whole relationship. But it's the biggest divider of power there is, and pretending otherwise has never made a single couple happier.
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