Marraige, Money Matters

With marraige issues lurking all over the place, discussions though not very pleasing on the subject are often indispensible. I dont think I am complaining about it as such, because more often than not a discussion on this dreaded issue ( I wonder if the issue in discussion is so dreaded, how it would be in experience...but anyway...dont have the time to think about that) brings to the table an important aspect of the dynamics of marraige, and forces me to think about it. The result is a clearer picture of what i want from marraige...and whether my expectations & desires are in sync.
Someone asked me yesterday, whether the guy earning less than me could be an issue in the relationship. I cant comment about the relationship part here, because that depends on two persons' mutual consent, but my personal view in this may have a big role to play in what the mutual consent may finally be. Of course, my first complaint about this question is that it is a very hypothetically designed one, because it enumerates no other features of the guy who earns less than me. I mean, its not that he is going to be my husband only for the pay-day in the month. I mean I still have to live the other 29 days with him. Though this day is an important one (atleast in my current life i am perpetually waiting for it, whether it is the day prior to pa-day or the day past pay-day, i mean for next paycheck of course!!).
Firstly, I was forced to think of the origin of this idea. I mean, why is it that a guy has to be earning more than the girl in a marraige..I think the reasoning to this is pretty deep-seated, coming from several aspects of life, be it social, biological, tempramental, and many others that I probably havent delved into.
Socially of course, our society is in a state of flux and so while the conventional set-up expected only the man to earn, the new developments are a compromised version of the old ones. So the sweet compromise suggests that if the man cannot be the only one earning then atleast he should be the one earning more. Fair enough!!
Now thinking of this biologically...as a woman I see the man as a bigger entity than me, I mean in the physical sense he is gotta be taller, he has to have bigger arms ( that can fit me well & give me the comfort & sense of security), so when we imagine him physically bigger than us, we simply extrapolate the bigness to his pay-packet also...that is a shady bit of analysis...but nevertheless, everything is open to moot, and to tell u a lot of things are so subtly ingrained in us that sometimes we dont like any logics (like this one) explaining it...
Tempramentally, I think a lot has been said by the wise men/women, it has a lot to do with the male ego not being able to accept that his wife is contributing more to the household's financial statement. ( I mean on the income side, of course all women contribute more to the expense side ;))
Having analysed the origin of this, in my plausible capacity, I go back to the hypothesis. Of course, I need more data, as in what is the guy's background, what is his qualification, what he is upto in life. So while, I ask so many questions, I was supplied with a live guy to use as a guinea pig for the sake of understanding this issue. I wont go into the details of this guinea pig, but I will sure tell you what my conclusion was when I thought about him & his earning less than me.
I found that in a vibrant economy & job-market that we see in the current day scenario, one's job & salary is a very volatile measure of the person. Thus, it becomes very important to go back to the person's educational qualification to judge his real worth. Thats where I nailed my conclusion, I said to myself, what they say about cricketers:
Form is temporary, class is permanent!!
A boy's current job, his current salary is only his form. The class that he exhibits has a lot to do with what made him get the job & why he is with a certain pay-packet. What a guy is making on the pay-day is a display of his form; what he once studied at school will all along life exhibit as his class.
While a lot of people may not agree, many may even be offended, I knew my audience last evening knew what I exactly meant. He being from IITK just knows how valuable his base qualification is, immaterial of the job that he is in. And this coming from someone who had spent a couple of years at IITK herself, only added to the veracity of his & my confidence in our education.