In military aviation (according to Wikipedia), a “wingman” is a pilot who supports another pilot in a potentially dangerous flying environment (the term had originally referred to the plane flying beside and slightly behind the lead plane in an aircraft formation).
We ran across an interesting blog the other day which has adopted a similar metaphor to describe an executive wife who helps her spouse advance: “wingspouse”.
In recent decades, women have had a broader palette of life choices to pick from, but for the sake of simplicity I’ll categorize those choices as “career” (climbing the corporate ladder, the alternative glamorized by most of the feminist rhetoric I’ve seen) or “family” (the traditional role for women of “stay-at-home mom”, the alternative that “women’s liberation” was aiming to liberate women from).
The fact that there are two different paths, one glamorized and the other denigrated to a considerable degree, presents a dilemma to women:
Which path will bring me the most
happiness and personal fulfillment?
Each path offered pluses … and minuses. But many feminists dealt with that dilemma by deciding why not do both?
Why not have it all?
As slogans go, “having it all” is certainly catchy. And it has appeal (much like the other overused slogans we hear so often, such as “get rich quick” or “buy low, sell high”).
Would that life were that simple.
The reality is that there are always compromises in life. And therefore anyone taken in by slogans is sure to be disappointed with the eventual result.
Guys don’t have the same calculus. We’re expected to be the breadwinner. Sure, we may have a wife who brings in a good income as well but it’s not the same. Most wives we’ve met who made really good incomes still expected their hubbies to earn even more than their wives did.
So for nearly all guys,
the career path is a given
… we don’t get a choice. And we’d be the first to point out that work isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
That’d be a whole separate discussion, but I’ll wager that very few guys would keep their current jobs if they were to suddenly win the lottery. And these days, I sense that more women are coming around to that same recognition: work is not the ultimate thrill in life.
It’s just a means to an end.
But suppose that a particular woman has the option not to work (because hubby earns a very good living) and she chooses instead to be a stay-at-home spouse looking after the kids and hubby? Chances are that she may be looked at as something of a traitor to the feminist cause by choosing the “traditional” role.
What I especially like about Kathi’s “Wingspouse” blog is that she adopts a positive outlook and focuses on the pluses of playing a “support” role well … she recognizes (correctly, I believe) that this role probably comes closest to the ideal of “having it all”.
After all, nobody at the end of his or her life is likely to say “I wish I would have spent more time at the office”.
“…
that got me thinking about my own career
…”
At one point, she mentions that: “If we had not married executives, we clearly would have been climbing the corporate ladder somewhere”, and that got me thinking about my own career (having climbed the corporate ladder to the level of Chief Operating Officer of a smallish publicly traded company before tiring of the corporate world and retiring at still quite a young age).
In my first job out of the University, my first boss took me aside one day and explained to me how the business world works. And one specific piece of advice he gave me served me very well for the remainder of my corporate tenure.
What he told me was this…
“No matter what your job description says, your #1 job will always be to ‘make your boss’s job easier’”.
In effect, my role throughout my entire corporate career was “wingman”. Even as the COO (the #2 role), my job was to make the CEO’s job (the #1 role) easier.
He got much higher compensation than I did. He got to play the “good cop” role (to my “bad cop” role). He took the credit for the good ideas I came up with. He took the bows when the company performed well.
But that’s the way life works.
I played my assigned role as wingman and he made sure that I had an above-average income and lifestyle. That was the quid pro quo.
And compared to the alternatives,
I did very well that way
If things weren’t going well and he needed someone to “fall on his sword”, of course, that chore might also have fallen to me (albeit with a nice severance package to cushion the blow). It’s the same concept as a bodyguard being expected to “take a bullet” for the big boss if it ever comes to that.
In a way, it wasn’t all that much different than if I had married a female executive and I was the stay-at-home wingspouse. Either way, it would have been a supporting role for me. I’d be working to ensure her success much the same as I had done for my CEO’s success.
The relationship between the company and me was not “for better or for worse” … it was just “for better”. There were no guarantees. And although my wife and I might have said “for better or for worse” when reciting our wedding vows, that part isn’t really enforceable either. Many marriages turn out to have been only “for better” … there are no guarantees there either.
Truth be told, if I (as a guy) had had the opportunity to be the stay-at-home wingspouse in support of my executive wife and if I thought that she’d actually be okay with that sort of arrangement, I would have been very tempted to take that path.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
