Some marriage research

I'm not someone who thinks that the only important role that men play in the family is a provider one. Still, it is a significant role as it's part of the way that a man tries to create a protected space for his wife to have children and create a warm home life for the family.

So upending normal arrangements and having the woman instead be the breadwinner is likely to create tensions within at least some marriages. Here are some research findings released back in 2010:

a 25-year study that tracked 2,500 married couples found that female breadwinners were 40 percent more likely to divorce their lower-earning husbands than women who raked in less than their partners. Reporting his findings in the October issue of Journal of Family Issues, sociologist Jay Teachman at Western Washington University noted that the distinction only becomes apparent when women earn 60 percent or more of the family's income. After that marker, couples became 38 percent more likely to divorce over the 25-year period. Researchers were "surprised about the strength of the effect," Teachman said...

Why might the divorce rate have been significantly higher when wives earn 60% or more of the family income? There are no doubt various reasons, but some suggestions were made in research released in 2007. This research found that when women became the primary breadwinner husbands did less "emotion work" in the marriage, and that more traditional arrangements led to more "expressive" forms of marriage in general:

women who are in marriages that are characterized by more traditional gender beliefs and practices are happier with the emotion work they receive and do receive more such emotion work from their husbands.

...adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - surprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ...