Gen-Z women are paying for, and parenting, their boyfriends.
At first, McKayla didn’t care that her boyfriend worked for Instacart. He had just finished college, after all, and she was in her senior year, busy writing papers and trying to figure out her adult life. But once McKayla landed a full-time job as a reporter at a local newspaper, just a few months after graduating, she started to see things differently. She moved into her own studio apartment and still found the time to freelance for extra cash. Meanwhile, he was living at home with his parents and in no rush to put his economics and history degree to use. “I would send him links to jobs every couple of weeks and he wouldn’t open them,” she said. “He just wasn’t motivated to find anything.” She picked up the bill when they went out to dinner and bought them tickets to see Chris Rock and Bill Maher (the latter, she says, was her boyfriend’s choice). Sometimes she’d help him deliver other people’s groceries during their date nights.
Since the dawn of paychecks, women have made less than men. But while the overall wage gap persists, some Gen-Z women are living through a more hopeful reality. They are ten points more likely than men their age to get a college degree and are more likely than their male peers to find work once they graduate. While pink-coded jobs in therapy and health care are growing at record-high rates, there have been hiring dips in traditionally male-dominated fields like tech, finance, and blue-collar trades like construction and plumbing. A few years ago, a Pew study found that in a handful of cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., young women are actually earning more than their male peers. With that extra money they are also buying almost twice as many homes as young men and saving for retirement at higher rates. Women of this generation are more likely than any other time in history to date a man who makes less than them — or who makes nothing at all.
Young men, I assumed, must be humiliated by this state of affairs, their masculinity in tatters. But for the most part, they seem comfortable with being pampered and paid for — maybe a little too comfortable. On TikTok, they call their girlfriends “mommies” and refer to themselves as “sugar babies.” “My girl makes more than me, and it’s awesome,” one guy told me. “She’ll be buying me all the fancy tools I want,” said another. I recently came across a Reddit post by a 23-year-old who wasn’t sure how he felt about making less than his girlfriend. All the commenters told him to get over it. “Bro just love your girl, and do what you can,” one said. “If she’s taking you with her on the trips, you’re gucci.”
Women are less thrilled about being treated like ATMs. Men, they say, are in their “princess era.” “I feel like when I go out with a guy that I need to show up with flowers and I need to open his car door,” said one woman. “Like, ‘Anything for you, princess!’” Things are so dire that on TikTok, women are lip-syncing to a new country song about how “If those fairy tales were re-written today / The tramp would wine and dine the lady / And then he’d make her pay.” “All the girls in my life are investing in real estate, they’re making ‘fuck you’ money in sales, they run a business,” one woman said in a car confessional. “And all the guys that we meet our age are just not.” The women I spoke to don’t mind being breadwinners. But they feel like babysitters too.
Naomi’s worst fear was turning into her boyfriend’s mother. But in truth, the 24-year-old paid for everything, helped him with his résumé, and made sure he was looking for jobs. He reassured her that he’d make some changes, like going to therapy and showing up on time when they hung out. Instead, things got worse. While she cobbled together a six-figure income working two retail jobs, he talked about applying to law school while lying in bed at her apartment on the Upper East Side, watching Reels on his phone.
It wasn’t a big deal that he couldn’t buy Naomi dinner at Le Veau d’Or. But she didn’t like how he used money as an excuse to shirk basic responsibilities. He never planned dates and didn’t even get her a birthday present. “If you can’t afford something, write me a love letter,” she says. “He could have literally made me Kraft mac and cheese.” They talked about moving in together, but Naomi couldn’t justify the cost. “If I wanted to finance a human being,” she says, “I’d have a kid.”
But perhaps the most enraging part of their now-finished relationship is that Naomi’s boyfriend used politics to justify his apathy. He considered himself a communist, read Marx in his spare time, and was part of a friend group full of other jobless men who found it embarrassing to care about work. “They hate the finance bro,” Naomi says, “But in their push to reject that, they’re now doing nothing.” McKayla, who requested a pseudonym along with the other women in this story, has clocked a similar phenomenon. She says her boyfriend and his friends are “super-granola crunchy liberals” who see striving for power as anti-feminist. They want to separate themselves from predatory CEOs and men on the right who think women are working pretend “email jobs” and shouldn’t even have the right to vote. “They think treating women respectfully cannot exist with being a hyperambitious provider,” she says. “They think if you make six figures, you’ll suddenly wake up and hate women.”
One 27-year-old, who describes himself as a “modern leftist,” says that he and his friends are more concerned with finding jobs that align with their values than with getting rich. “A lot of the women I know are hyperambitious,” he says. “A lot of the men they date are not.” I heard from one guy who said that while he has no problem with his partner making more money than him, he always tries to pay in public, lest a barista judge him for “taking advantage of his girlfriend.” Another man, whose girlfriend earns twice as much as him, told me he provides in other ways: His work-life balance means he has the “emotional availability” to comfort his girlfriend when she comes home from a stressful day at work. “I’m a caretaker to some degree,” he says. “What I bring to the relationship is arguably not traditionally masculine, but it is fulfilling and valuable.”
The women I spoke with had a different definition of “valuable.” While their boyfriends struggled to chip in for groceries, they also seemed strangely reticent to contribute in other ways — like, you know, doing the dishes or handling the laundry. Jessica couldn’t seem to escape this kind of guy. A few years ago, while the then-19-year-old juggled an engineering internship with a part-time job, she dated someone who was supposedly in the process of applying to med school. Not only did Jessica pay for everything, she organized all their dates as well. “I would buy the candles, do all the cooking, pick the music, and pick a time,” she says. “All he had to do was show up.” More than once she heard him boast to his friends that he didn’t have to worry about money because “Jessica’s such a mommy.” At the club, he’d ask her to flirt with single guys to score free drinks. She broke up with him right before graduating from college and soon started dating a fellow engineering classmate who talked a big game about getting a corporate job. “At that point I was like, ‘I just want someone who will pay for things sometimes,’” Jessica says. “He was like, ‘Don’t worry, baby girl, I’ll take care of you.’” Then he moved back into his parents’ place while complaining about how tough the job market was.
She worked long hours at her consulting job and still picked up the bill when he felt like having a $300 meal (“he had expensive taste,” she says). “I was again trapped in this role of planning activities and doing chores because he would say he ‘didn’t have the capacity,’” Jessica says. “At a certain point it felt like there’s nothing this guy is adding to my life that I can’t just provide for myself.” She dumped him, too, and found a new man who, despite making less money than her, at least brings something to the table. Now that Jessica is getting her master’s degree while running a group focused on educating people about climate change, she needs help getting the rest of her life together. Her boyfriend recently quit his job to go back to school and spends his free time driving her to work events, booking her yoga classes to help her relax, and packing her leftover pasta for lunch. “He’s like, ‘You’re going to change the world,’’’ she says. “‘So I need to help you do that.’”
McKayla resents her boyfriend’s nonchalance. As someone who didn’t have money growing up, she’s clawed her way toward a quality of life she refuses to give up. Her boyfriend, who was raised in an upper-middle-class suburb, is not as forward thinking. When they spoke about moving in together, he told McKayla he has only $1,000 in savings. “I was like, ‘Oh, he isn’t taking this seriously,’” she says. “He just thought that he would somehow come up with the money we need for first and last months’ rent and a security deposit.” When she talked about sending their future children to an Ivy League school, he responded, “Why would we do that?” “I just wish he would exhibit more hunger,” she says. “I know what I could do with the leg up he has, and he just sits on it.”
For many young women, ambition doesn’t feel like a choice. If they want careers that pay the bills, they can’t afford to lay around, putting off job applications and 401(k) contributions while bragging about their perfect politics. They need to buckle down, fast. While it might seem like their boyfriends are lagging far behind, they’ll probably catch up anyway. Historically, the wage gap tends to be narrowest before the age of 35; it gets much wider later on, especially after women have kids. While fathers tend to get a pay bump, women make half as much as they did before becoming mothers. It’s one thing to pick up the tab for your boyfriend who’s genuinely struggling to find work. It’s another to subsidize rent for a guy who spends leisurely afternoons on the couch because he has a feeling that, eventually, he’ll get what he wants.
At least McKayla’s not going to wait for her boyfriend to get himself together. “If the New York Times called me tomorrow and was like, ‘Can you move here in 48 hours,’ I don’t even think I would tell him,” she says. “I would just do it.”
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