My uncle died in January 2025, shortly after turning sixty. His death did not only mark the loss of a person, but exposed the fragility of a life that had been organised around him. As tragic as his premature death, I think what happened after his death, to his wife, is even more tragic.
During their marriage, my aunt did not work outside the home. My uncle held a full-time job and managed all financial and administrative matters. He paid the bills, handled banking and insurance, and dealt with institutions. She had access to money for daily expenses and they made decisions together, but ultimately the responsibility to ‘handle it’ lay with him. This arrangement was not imposed. It was mutually preferred and rooted in care, trust, and practicality. Within the marriage, it functioned well.
Similar arrangements are frequently presented today as successful forms of role division. On social media, particularly TikTok1), a trend circulates in which women tell their husbands they cannot pay the mortgage that month, followed by the husband’s calm or amused response that this has never been her responsibility. The videos are framed as humorous and affectionate: proof of being taken care of, of security within intimacy.
There is nothing inherently wrong with dividing responsibilities asymmetrically within a relationship. Equality does not require identical roles. Many partnerships rely on specialisation, and many people actively prefer it. The difficulty lies elsewhere. It lies in the concentration of financial knowledge, authority, and agency in the hands of only one partner.
As long as both partners are present, healthy, and alive, this concentration remains largely invisible. The system holds. It is only when something breaks, through illness, separation, or death, that its vulnerability becomes apparent.
Human life is marked by contingency: action unfolds in a world we cannot control, and outcomes we cannot foresee. Systems that function only under conditions of stability are therefore fragile by design2. This insight applies not only to political institutions, but also to intimate arrangements. A relationship structured around uninterrupted presence offers comfort in the present, but little resilience against absence.
After my uncle’s death, my aunt was confronted with the necessity of navigating financial systems, insurance structures, and bureaucratic institutions she had never been required – or encouraged – to understand. Tasks that had once been seamlessly absorbed into married life now demanded immediate mastery. Orientation, rather than money, was the first thing to go. Knowing where to begin. Knowing whom to call. Knowing how decisions are made. My aunt knew who to call, and support arrived quickly. As family, my parents, sister and I stepped in. But something had already been lost: not money, but orientation. The sense of knowing how the world works, and how to move within it. We often tried to take her along with us when decisions had to be made, but sometimes it was too harrowing to impose the nitty gritty details of health insurance on a grieving widow, and other times she was fully uninterested in making decisions, referring to my late uncle and that she just wanted to do what he always did, even if it did not make sense to her situation now.
Care, it turns out, can coexist with unpreparedness. This distinction matters. Care can coexist with vulnerability. Protection can coexist with exposure. A dignified life requires more than being looked after; it requires having real control over one’s material and economic conditions3. Without that control, security remains conditional, dependent on the continued presence of another.
In the months that followed, my aunt often defaulted to the routines he had once managed. She insisted on maintaining insurance arrangements and payment structures that no longer fit her situation, not because they were optimal, but because deviating from them required a form of judgement she had never been asked to develop.
This does not mean that dependency itself is a failure. Dependency is a normal and inevitable part of human life. What matters is how it is organised, and where its risks are placed. When the costs of dependency are deferred and concentrated on one person, often the one already positioned as more vulnerable, they resurface with force once the relationship that sustained them disappears. Historically, these risks have not been evenly distributed. The vulnerability that emerges is therefore not a personal failure, but a predictable outcome of how responsibility has been distributed over time4.
Women have long been protected, maintained, and sheltered in ways that limited their engagement with the world as autonomous agents. What makes contemporary forms of financial dependency difficult to critique is precisely their voluntary and loving character. Yet love does not neutralise structure. Even freely chosen arrangements can reproduce forms of vulnerability that only become visible in retrospect5.
Importantly, this is not a story about blame. No one in this situation acted wrongly. Yet the outcome remains unequal. These are patterns of responsibility that can produce injustice without malice; reasonable at the individual level, but risky in their cumulative effects6.
The problem, then, is not that one partner provides and the other receives. The problem is that provision is mistaken for security. Financial dependence often feels safe precisely because its costs are postponed. Unlike overt inequality, it does not restrict in the present. It comforts. It reassures. It only reveals its price when the future arrives differently than expected.
If love is understood as long-term care, then it must include the possibility of absence. True security does not lie in being shielded from responsibility, but in being equipped to face the world when shielding is no longer possible.
- https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdmjGRah/
↩︎ - See Hannah Arendt on contingency, action, and unpredictability, especially The Human Condition.
↩︎ - This distinction draws on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, particularly her account of material and economic control as a condition of dignity.
↩︎ - This understanding of dependency as ordinary rather than pathological draws on feminist care ethics, particularly Eva Kittay’s work on dependency and responsibility.
↩︎ - This echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s historical confinement to protection and maintenance at the expense of agency.
↩︎ - The distinction between injustice and individual blame is informed by Iris Marion Young’s account of structural injustice and responsibility.
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