The Dark Side of Provider Syndrome
One of my favourite thought experiments goes something like this: you’ve a time machine, you can go back to the eve of your 16th birthday for 10 minutes and you can bestow upon your younger self one piece of knowledge. What do you choose to pass on?
I know exactly how I’d answer this experiment for myself.
While I’m not sure how I’d explain to young-but-oh-so-arrogant-16-year-old-Mike, I know that I’d try to explain the following: 1. he’s a giver, 2. there are many takers in the world, and 3. making sure those takers don’t exploit his nature is 🔑.
I’d resist trying to educate him to the fact that society is programming him and his nature as a giver is leading him down a dark, stress-filled alley that society now calls Provider Syndrome. 35-year-old me is only just starting to understand the challenges it creates, and how I struggle to delineate between the good and bad in it.
Social programming to provide
I’m no anthropologist or sociologist, however in my lived experience as a man and talking with male friends, I’ve noticed that my culture places a burden on me to provide. It’s simply part of our social programming, whether we want it or not. We are to be the breadwinner, to make sure that our family (whether that’s two people or many people) are safe and comfortable, and that our future is set by setting aside enough savings.
Combine this social programming with being a giver and you have a situation ripe for Provider Syndrome. In all of my relationships, and especially romantic ones, I feel a responsibility to act if I can help them.
Symptoms of provider syndrome
If there’s one symptom I can pinpoint, it’s stress, especially with finances. I was raised to believe that responsible adults don’t spend all of their money. Instead, they save some of it, invest some of it, and spend some of it. I had to spend my money wisely, put enough away in savings, and support my partner. This pattern has often led me toward high levels of stress, and ultimately feeling resentment toward those for whom I’m providing.
A few years ago, I was making more than enough to support two people living in San Francisco. I had a good job at a tech startup and shouldn’t have had any trouble supporting myself and a partner. Yet, money was a constant stress in my life. I was living paycheck to paycheck, I wasn’t reaching my savings or investment goals, and it was causing arguments between me and my partner at the time.
Worse still, it was also starting to strain my friendships. When I got together for beers with my mates, the only thing I’d talk about was the toll the stress was taking on my relationship and how terrible it was. No one wants to see their friends unhappy, but they really don’t want to talk ad nauseum about their friend’s terrible relationship where every helpful suggestion is met with a nuanced excuse for keeping the miserable status quo.
Obviously every situation is unique, so if you’re recognizing any of these symptoms in yourself or in your relationship, I don’t mean to suggest it’s definitely a bad thing — it just was for me. However, Provider Syndrome gave me a useful lens through which I could consider these habits, and ultimately helped me reconcile my giving nature.
Tips on how to recognize and amend provider syndrome
I know I’m not alone in feeling the shadow of guilt over me when I feel when I’m not being a good provider. I’ve heard the same words said by my mates, I’ve read stories online, and I see symptoms of provider syndrome in other relationships I witness. Paul Simon even wrote a song making the escape from it seem so easy.
Finding the right balance is the challenge, and while you might never fully shed the burden, or indeed not want to, I’ve established a few checks and balances of my own that could perhaps help you out if you feel Provider Syndrome is straining your relationships.
1. Identify who pays for what
Looking back on my past relationships, the number one thing that sticks out to me is recognizing who paid for what. I’m not trying to kill chivalry or romance, I still like to pay for dinner when I go out with my partner, but I’m also realistic about who spends what overall. If my partner and I only go out to eat when I buy or only go to certain restaurants if I’m willing to pay — that’s a red flag in my book.
For me, this isn’t about individual purchases so much as it is the bigger picture. This is taking a step back and recognizing if you’re financially floating a relationship and assessing the reason behind that decision. There’s no right or wrong way to structure your relationship, you have to do what works for you and your partner, but you shouldn’t feel like you have to financially support someone else’s life or lifestyle without a conscious decision and discussion first.
2. Whose name is on it?
During one of my long term relationships, I decided that I had leveled up (+400XP) in adulthood and that step included buying a house — which I obviously had to leave SF to do. We looked at houses together, we searched online, and yet when it came to signing the paperwork, I felt strongly that only my name should be there.
I thought: If I was the only one backing the decision financially, shouldn’t my name be the only one on the mortgage?
That thought was a wake up call. If I couldn’t share financial responsibility with my partner for large purchases, was there something going on in our relationship to make me feel uncertain? That relationship is no more, and there were issues deeper than finances, but recognizing that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing a big purchase with her was eye-opening for me.
3. Assess your joint financial knowledge
How we think about and use our money are deeply ingrained habits and culture that were taught from a very young age. Some of us are natural savers and others are inclined more towards spending. Neither is wrong or right, but having different opinions on money than your partner can cause a lot of strife.
A consistent thread that has nagged at me through my relationships is that, until my current relationship, I’ve always had a deeper interest, knowledge, and sense of responsibility about finances than my partner. This knowledge resulted in me taking up one of two roles: asshole or coach. Neither of those roles go down well when you’re trying to resolve issues with your partner.
For me, it’s important to share responsibility and have a similar level of interest and knowledge in finances as my partner.
4. Talk to your partner
Another trend I noticed that spanned multiple long-term relationships was that anytime a partner and I tried to discuss money or finances, the discussion ended in a screaming match. I always walked away feeling worse, feeling like an asshole for bringing up the topic, and feeling like an even bigger asshole for getting emotional about it and yelling.
No relationship is perfect, fighting about money doesn’t mean that you’re relationship is unhealthy or that you shouldn’t be together, that’s not what I’m intending to say. What I do want to share is simply that having a conversation with your partner about money is important. If you never have the conversation and never come to an agreement on how to spend money and how much money you can afford to spend, then you maybe need to relook at your relationship.
Not being able to talk to my partner about money was stressful to me. It made it feel that the financial earning and management was entirely on my shoulders.
5. Don’t disenfranchise your partner
Consistently, and reliably throughout relationships, my sense of responsibility led me to shoulder the financial burden. In doing so, I took away the opportunity for my partner to gain a sense of financial responsibility. More often than not, the yelling was born of stress, and the stress was born of a divergent sense of financial reality.
By me handling all household expenses, my partner didn’t share in the month to month stress of making ends meet. I’d have done better to instead share that responsibility, and allow her to run the spreadsheet and grow accustomed to financial responsibility. This is my second largest regret as I ultimately removed her ability to gain this skill with a safety net.
6. Asking for help and feeling emotions makes you human, not a failure
My biggest regret in retrospect is that I felt I couldn’t ask for help. I had a good job. If I was struggling for money, all I had to do was ask for a raise. When I was struggling to pay my rent, all I had to do was share that with a friend and ask for a loan.
However, social programming has equated asking for help with failing at providing, whereas I benefit regularly from reminding myself that it simply makes you human.
In closing
It would have taken much longer than 10 minutes to explain all of this to young-Mike. And were I to choose to cram it all in, I may have led him to believe that being a giver is negative. Perhaps he’d not get to experience the joys of helping people, and supporting them in reaching their goals.
That Mike might have chosen a different path, and perhaps last year, when he’d found out that one of his siblings was strongly considering dropping out of college because she couldn’t afford the tuition, he might not have helped her out. In turn, he wouldn’t have gotten to experience the incredibly deep sense of pride in seeing her start her internship at NASA this semester.
In truth, he might not have become me.
