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A little while ago, I saw a post on the AITA sub-reddit asking what people thought about his de facto partner telling him that she would have a baby with him, but only if he paid half of the salary she would lose while on maternity leave. The comments I saw ranged from shock that she would try to request money for raising their own child, to agreeing that she should ask for money because, as they weren’t legally married, she wasn’t as financially protected as she might otherwise be.
This range of views on whether and how money and intimacy should be mixed is brilliantly explained by sociologist Viviana Zelizer in her book The purchase of intimacy. Here, Zelizer describes the common view that money and intimacy can’t mix (‘how could she ask for money to have her own children?’) as the ‘separate spheres and hostile worlds’ view. Here, financial matters threaten the intimacy of personal relationships, causing them to become mere economic transactions. Instead, we need clear boundaries to maintain the distinctiveness of personal relationships. Zelizer calls the next most common view, that there is nothing particularly special about these intimate, personal relationships (‘why shouldn’t she be paid for her labour?’), the ‘nothing but’ view: intimate relationships are nothing but economics (or politics, or culture…).
Zelizer argues for a third view: that of connected lives. In this view, social words are full of meaningful ties with other people, and economic activity plays a significant role in most of these relationships (think of managing money in a marriage). Unlike those who believe in the ‘nothing but’ view, she argues that intimate relationships are not the same as other relationships: intimate relationships involve making decisions that assume a future availability of shared resources, and those decisions impact other people (such as children) and the long-term security of those involved.
Because social settings contain a mix of ties, one way that people ensure that intimate relationships are not confused with other relationships is through relational work. This work is achieved through economic transactions, which are acceptable within intimate relationships as long as the relationships, transactions and medium are matched.
And this is the crux of the problem: does payment for time spent raising babies match this intimate relationship? Many of the comments pointed to the de facto nature of the relationship as the reason why the woman wanted payment, with people suggesting if they were married, she would feel more secure — both economically and emotionally. The de facto nature of the relationship make it ambiguous and the request for payment is thus an attempt to renegotiate those intimate ties. At the same time, because it isn’t routine for women to be paid by their spouse for raising their children, this request threatens the intimacy of the relationship – if there is payment, how is it any different to a strictly economic transaction?
Zelizer’s theory of connected lives and the relational work involved in intimate relationships helps us understand why people can have such strong and differing views on mixing economic transactions and intimate relationships. But Zelizer goes beyond this to argue that perpetuating the myth that economic and intimate relations should be kept separate to avoid polluting the other actually underpins a range of unjust policies, such as low pay for caregivers and the lack of pay to women for household work. Instead of agonising about whether money corrupts intimate relationships, she argues we should instead focus on working out what combinations of economic activity and intimate relations produce happier and more just lives. Instead of idealising women’s unpaid care, we should think about how to properly compensate it. Care work and other intimate relationships have always involved economic transactions – the first step to a more just world is to recognise that.
Photo by Alexander Mils on Pexels
