Standing in the bedroom, tugging socks on to my four-year-old son’s feet, I felt my phone buzz with the news every working mother dreads. Our child’s nursery had been forced to close for the day.
Before I’d even processed this, my husband was already tapping at his phone, scrolling through his calendar.
‘I can cover nine to ten,’ he announced, ‘then I’ve got calls. I could maybe do an hour at three.’
I stared at him in disbelief. Only one of us had a paying job at that moment – and it wasn’t him.
Yet here he was, casually allocating slivers of his time. ‘But you know I’ve got an important lecture to prepare for,’ I bit back.
‘Well, I’ve got a lot on today,’ he muttered.
I looked at him, on the brink of tears. Then something inside me snapped.
‘Like what?’ I shot back furiously. ‘That business you’ve been playing at for three years still hasn’t paid a single bill. I’ve got a real job. And if I don’t get time to do it, I’ll lose it.’
Corinne is a professor of economics at one of America’s top business schools and her speciality is in gender economics
I had buried my frustrations for so long. Now I found I couldn’t stop. All the hurt, the pain at being so taken for granted, erupted.
Before I knew it, I was saying the one thing I knew I could never take back.
‘I need you to know I’ve checked out of this marriage,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want to be with you any more. Or any other man.’
And then I dropped the bomb: ‘If I’m going to be with anyone, I want it to be a woman.’
Saying this wasn’t just me being gratuitously cruel, or seeking to provoke a response. I felt on that morning in 2021 that it wasn’t just my husband, but men in general, who couldn’t meet mine or my child’s needs.
This was about years of me carrying the unseen, unending domestic load. About the fact that not only was I the breadwinner, but I was the one holding everything together – my husband ‘helping’ but never really owning any of the tasks that constantly buzzed around my head: childcare, housework, meals, school meetings, birthday parties, doctors’ appointments.
You might wonder why I decided to jettison an entire gender, rather than just assume the particular man I married was the issue.
Well, I wasn’t just any frustrated wife. I’m a professor of Economics at one of America’s top business schools and my speciality is in Gender Economics – how inequality plays out not just in the workplace but inside traditional nuclear families, with women too often left the loser.
‘Women’s careers are forced to twist and stretch endlessly to accommodate raising a family, while men’s are deemed immovable,’ writes Low
Call it ‘Femonomics’, if you will.
I knew the facts and figures proved my life was just like that of so many other women – as they’ve entered the workforce and earned more, men haven’t adjusted to the new reality of family life.
Every day I show students how women’s careers are forced to twist and stretch endlessly to accommodate raising a family, while men’s are deemed immovable. When women’s domestic burdens soar with young kids at home (the period I call “the squeeze”), their careers stall.
I lecture on this. I publish research on it. And then, suddenly, I realised I was living it. I had been ever since our son was born in May 2017.
So, yes, my outburst about seeking a female lover was fuelled by painful emotion. But it was also powered by logic.
I don’t want to make it sound like the breakdown of my marriage, and me turning to lesbianism, was as easy as solving an equation.
After all, it’s one thing to analyse the numbers in a lecture hall; quite another to get home at midnight after a six-hour commute – a journey only made more difficult by having to pump your breast milk in a stinking train toilet, because you had to return to work when your baby was just three months old.
I still remember the sting of my tears, perching in that loo, knowing I wouldn’t get back in time to put my baby to bed.
‘When women’s domestic burdens soar with young kids at home (the period I call “the squeeze”), their careers stall. I lecture on this. I publish research on it. And then, suddenly, I realised I was living it’
My marriage made the academic truth I’d been teaching brutally personal. Women are sold the lie that if only we are organised and focused enough, we can raise families and build stellar careers at the same time – and all without the support of our too-busy-to-help husbands.
But standing there with swollen breasts and a broken heart, I knew there was no such thing as ‘having it all’. I didn’t even have the basics. I was just exhausted.
Yet I kept going. By the time I told my husband I’d had enough, our son was four, and nothing had changed.
So me announcing I wanted to date women wasn’t about sex – though the knowledge that I wasn’t entirely straight helped. It was more about fairness, about believing that only with another woman could I build a partnership where the load would be shared.
I’d met my husband when I was 21, long before I’d had the chance to explore any attraction I had to women. He was a nice guy, who said all the right things about equality between the sexes. Of course my career was just as important as his, he assured me.
But when I tried to raise my son, the brutal reality of living in a heterosexual marriage became harder to ignore.
My husband had left his reasonably well-paid marketing job soon after our baby was born to launch his own marketing start-up. Up until then, we’d earned similar amounts.
But four years later, he still hadn’t made a penny out of it, and the full financial responsibility fell to me. What his ‘business’ did manage to do though was consume his time and energy. Hours my husband might have put into supporting me.
I knew a woman in his shoes would have shelved what amounted to a self-indulgent project for the good of the household.
While a man in my position – fighting for a permanent role at one of the world’s top business schools – would have had his career treated as sacrosanct.
I wanted another child, but knew I couldn’t face raising one in this dynamic. If I was going to do it again, I wanted someone hardwired to pull their weight at home. A woman.
It wasn’t that I wanted a traditional wife type to take on all the domestic chores, leaving me as free as my husband to pursue work ambitions. No, it was parity I was after.
Statistics from the Institute of Fiscal Studies prove that in the UK, working-aged women average nearly two hours more unpaid work per day than men.
My own research shows that after divorce, women’s housework hours drop while men’s rise – proof, surely, that men can do it; they just choose not to.
When I announced I was becoming a lesbian, my husband was of course blindsided.
At first, I told him I wanted to stay married for the sake of the kids – our son, and the stepchild we were raising full-time. I said we would be co-parents without being romantic partners.
He agreed, but I’m now sure that’s only because he thought I just needed to get this out of my system.
The opposite happened. If anything, saying it all out loud solidified my intentions. I realised I needed to leave my home and my marriage for my own good.
When I did leave I announced it unapologetically on Facebook: I was leaving my husband, we were becoming loving co-parents, and I was becoming a lesbian. This wasn’t something I wanted advice on or needed other people’s approval of.
I think that came across so unequivocally, people responded in a similar tone, offering their congratulations, liking my post and saying they wanted me to be happy.
Not long after my son and I moved out – closer to my workplace, slashing my hours-long commute to a ten-minute cycle – I wondered what took me so long.
It was upsetting, of course, but the feeling of having myself returned to me eclipsed my sadness. I explained it to my son in the most simple but honest terms – that I thought our new lifestyle could make us all happier.
And, to my surprise, I saw our relationship blossom. Because I was happier. More relaxed. More patient with him.
The impact on my own mental state was immediate. My new home was tidy. No more cleaning up after a fully-grown adult. The acidic resentment I felt eating me inside just died away.
But I didn’t start dating women immediately. It took friends’ encouragement for me to nervously set up a Tinder profile after a few months. This was like a second adolescence for me – worrying about whether the women I found attractive would like me too, worrying if I knew how to do… any of it? (Hilariously, a lesbian friend bought me a book called So You Want To Be A Lesbian?)
Sondra, then 42, had always dated women. From the first coffee, the conversation flowed. At the time, I was going through IVF with a donor sperm, hoping to create the frozen embryos that would be my future family once I found the right partner.
When the first freezing cycle failed, Sondra and I had been dating a couple of months and were already getting really close. I knew she was exactly the kind of woman I could happily share my life with.
I nervously asked her a question bigger than proposing: should I use a donor who looked like her – she’s African American – for my next cycle?
She knew that I was asking if we wanted to raise a family together – and her answer was yes.
When Sondra, an events producer and musician, moved in, she put on loads of washing without comment, cleaned our bathrooms after us, and picked up my son’s favourite snacks on the way home.
They were ordinary acts, but what struck me was that they were automatic. In so many heterosexual marriages, even if a man does pull his weight, it’s often because his wife has told him what needs to be done; he doesn’t take equal responsibility for the running of the household.
With Sondra, for the first time, I wasn’t running on the quiet panic of knowing that if I didn’t remember, it wouldn’t get done, or of having to delegate and write lists for everything. And this was life-changing.
We both worked similar hours and I earned a little more than her, but that’s not the point. It’s never been about money, but about sharing the domestic load.
Of course it wasn’t all about sharing the workload – we also had great fun together. I felt genuine physical and emotional attraction towards Sondra. I was head over heels in love.
Sondra was also impeccably kind to my son. They have their own set of inside jokes and he calls her ‘S’mores’, his own version of ‘stepmum’.
When we discovered we were having a baby of our own together, it was a moment of great joy. We married in December 2024, five months before our daughter was born. My son, now eight, gave me away.
When our baby arrived, Sondra took her fair share of night shifts, juggled her work around feeds, kept the fridge stocked, and got stuck in without needing to be asked. I felt so much calmer than first time around.
It wasn’t that the work disappeared. It never does with small children. It was that it was finally shared.
Maternity pay isn’t the same in America as it is in the UK – I got eight weeks paid leave from my employer, but nothing from the government. But I timed the birth to come at a point in the academic year where I wouldn’t be teaching.
Sondra took the first three months off too, before starting a new job last month. Our baby is four months old now and while it’s a demanding time for us both, we make it work. When my mother came to visit after the birth, she said: ‘I’m so happy to see you happy.’
As for co-parenting, my ex has our son every other weekend. It doesn’t bother me that I still have to pack up my son’s things or make sure there are healthy snacks so he doesn’t eat junk all weekend. The bigger battle, the one inside the marriage, is over.
I don’t think every woman needs to leave their husband to marry a woman—they just need someone who does the laundry. That’s why my book offers strategies for women to find the right partner, or renegotiate the deal with the one they already have.
That’s why my book offers strategies for women to find the right partner, or renegotiate the deal with the one they already have.
I used to think that having it all meant doing it all. Now though, married to a woman, I’ve discovered it simply means not doing it all alone.
Interview and extract by Rachel Halliwell
HOW TO USE FEMONOMICS TO SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR HUSBAND
1) Bin the half-dead houseplants
And not just the plants. Look around and identify what’s crossed over from pleasure to chore: the hobby you don’t enjoy, the WhatsApp group you dread, the PTA commitment that drains you. Women collect obligations like trophies. But if it’s more burden than joy, cut it loose.
2) Peak hate-your-husband time
The mid-30s are when women fall out of love with their husbands in droves – not because they’ve changed, but because the deal does. Careers peak, babies arrive, housework doubles. If you haven’t already thrashed out a fair division of labour, you’ll find yourself doing it all instead of having it all. Before you even think about a family, nail down a decent deal. If you don’t, you’ll end up subsidising his life with yours.
3) It’s never too late
Once the children have grown up, a new deal is possible and probably long overdue. The invisible labour doesn’t vanish just because the kids do; it mutates into caring for elderly parents or running adult children’s lives. So renegotiate. Claim back time for yourself: hobbies, friendships, work you actually want to do.
4) Pay yourself first
Most women treat leisure time as something earned once the jobs are done. Men don’t. That’s why they get the run, the golf, the pint. Start taking your lie-in, your reading time and insist on whizzing through the chores together.
5) Audit the household
Write down every single job: bills, forms, birthdays, cleaning, buying loo roll. Don’t keep the list in your head – put it on paper. Then show it to him. Once he sees the sheer volume of invisible work, there’s no wriggling out of it.
6) Boundaries beat ‘flexibility’
Men rarely go for flexible working. They know it really means being forever available. Women, meanwhile, are conned into thinking flexibility is freedom. It isn’t. It’s just another way to be exploited. So be a man and protect your work/life boundaries instead.
7) Deliberately drop the ball
The women happiest in their marriages are the ones who say: ‘Oh, I don’t cook at all.’ Men have been weaponising incompetence for decades, burning the toast so they’re never asked to make breakfast again. It’s time for you to do the same. Pick your domestic domains, then abandon the rest wholesale.
Femonomics: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How To Get The Most Out of Yours by Corinne Low is published tomorrow (September 25) by Hodder Press (published as Having It All in the US)
