the funniest thing about the tiktok tradwife craze is people learning financial abuse exists but like, as a hypothetical. "wait what if the relationship doesn't work out and you have nothing of your own and nowhere to go?" congratulations you figured out a common reason people remain in abusive relationships and why it's important to maintain some level of financial independence
It's important to remember this even if your partner is not abusive.
There are lots of reasons that a relationship might end (or should end, amicably, with no one at fault), but if one partner has no income, a big gap in their work history, and no savings....
I work in finance and the number of widows/divorcées (and widowers/divorcés, but notably fewer of those) I have talked to who have no income of their own, no savings of their own, no accounts of their own, and no idea what to do with the money they have received from their spouse is frankly terrifying.
One woman told me openly, "Oh, I married at 21. I went right from Daddy to Hubby, I never had to pay my own bills. Now I'm lost. This is all so confusing to me." She was 43 - not old, not senile, just incredibly sheltered and now thrust into the world with little or no support system and an overwhelming learning curve.
Even if you get money in a divorce, the skills that come with earning, managing, and spending your money are vital. People who don't have those skills, or have let them atrophy from years or decades of disuse while society and technology kept moving, are in a profoundly precarious and vulnerable place.
Also, if you are not earning income in your own name, you are not contributing to social security. So when you are 65, or 70, your social security check will not exist, or will be tiny because you only started contributing when you were 40+. That means your government-provided retirement security DOES NOT EXIST.
And this isn’t usually “financial abuse”—couples genuinely just don’t know this or don’t think about it. If you “don’t work” because your spouse “owns the business,” YOU need to make them list you as an employee with an income. And if you don’t work at all, then you need to build it into your divorce negotiations that you get some sort of compensation for the social security you won’t receive.
While the main message here is very important and I don’t want to detract from it, just in case people don’t know, divorced spouses (if they were married at least ten years) are eligible for the spousal social security benefit. It’s half of what the spouse earned, if the number is larger than what they’d be eligible for based on their own earnings. Not enough, but they should still apply and get what they can!





















