With a condescending wink just for me, my husband held his beer bottle high and told twenty of our closest friends that I give him an allowance.
Laughter erupted from his buddies, exactly as he expected.
For years, this was his favorite story: Mark the big-shot provider, and me, his sensible little CFO who managed *his* money. It was a charming, comfortable fiction he loved to tell.
He just didn’t realize my “little computer job” was all about redesigning a terrible user experience, and I was about to use my new salary and one devastating spreadsheet to completely dismantle his.
The First Crack: The Hum of a Saturday
The air in our backyard already smelled of lighter fluid and freshly cut grass, a scent so deeply baked into the concept of a suburban Saturday it felt like a cliché. Mark was at the grill, not cooking, but supervising the charcoal as if it were a team of underperforming sales reps. He poked the briquettes with a long, silver tong, his jaw set.
I was ferrying bowls from the kitchen to the patio table—potato salad, a seven-layer dip that was Lily’s only culinary request, and a quinoa salad no one but me would touch. My daughter, Lily, was supposed to be helping, but she was draped over a lounge chair, phone held inches from her face, thumbs moving in a blur. The low thrum of a podcast leaked from her earbuds.
“You think we’ll have enough ice?” Mark called over, not looking at me. His focus was entirely on the grill.
“There are three bags in the cooler, Mark. The same three bags I told you about this morning.” I set the quinoa salad down with a little more force than necessary. The bowl clinked against the glass tabletop.
He grunted, a sound of acknowledgement that also managed to convey that my contribution was noted but minor. He loved these cookouts. They were his stage. He’d hold court by the grill, a beer in one hand, tongs in the other, telling stories about closing deals and the idiocy of his corporate office. Our friends would laugh, and he’d soak it in, the undisputed king of his manicured quarter-acre kingdom.
“Did you hear back from Rick about the lake house?” he asked, finally turning his head. His eyes squinted against the afternoon sun. “He said he’d have the preliminary paperwork for us to look at by Monday.”
There it was. The looming issue. The Lake House. Capital L, Capital H. It was Mark’s mid-life masterpiece, a vision of himself as a man who owned a second home, a man with a boat and a dock. For the past six months, every conversation had a way of circling back to it, a conversational black hole from which no other topic could escape. He talked about it as if my signature on the mortgage documents was a foregone conclusion, a simple administrative task. He never asked if I wanted it; he asked when we could get it.
“No, I haven’t checked my email since this morning,” I said, wiping a smudge of condensation from the table. “I’ve been a little busy getting ready for the party you wanted to throw.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “It’ll be great. We need to celebrate. Big things are on the horizon, Ellie.”
He called me Ellie when he was in this magnanimous mood, the benevolent provider bestowing joy upon his family. I’m a User Experience Architect. My entire career is built on understanding nuance, on seeing how small, seemingly insignificant design choices create a person’s entire reality. And in my own home, the user experience was starting to suck.
Glass Taps and a Sinking Feeling
By five o’clock, the backyard was full. The low hum of a Saturday had been replaced by the loud, overlapping chatter of our friends. Dave and Karen were debating the merits of air fryers near the citronella torches, and Paul was already telling a long, rambling story about his golf game that had everyone nodding with glazed-over eyes.
Mark was in his element. He flipped burgers with a theatrical flair, a corona sweating in his hand, his laughter the loudest sound in the yard. I circulated, making sure everyone had a drink, asking about their kids, their jobs, their vacations. I played the role of the gracious hostess, the smiling, supportive wife. It was a well-rehearsed performance.
I felt a familiar knot tighten in my stomach. It wasn’t a sharp pain, just a dull, constant pressure I’d learned to live with. It was the tension of holding up my half of this life while being treated like a silent partner. My job at the tech firm was demanding, complex, and—as of last week—incredibly well-compensated. I managed a team of designers and researchers shaping the digital experiences for millions of users. It was work I was proud of, work that challenged me.
To Mark, it was my “little computer job.” He’d say things like, “Eliza makes the buttons look nice,” a description so reductive it was borderline insulting. He didn’t understand it, and what Mark didn’t understand, he dismissed. His world was concrete: sales quotas, commission checks, client dinners. My world of wireframes, user journeys, and accessibility standards was abstract and, in his view, less real.
“Hey, Eliza! Killer dip!” Dave shouted from across the patio, holding up a chip slathered in the seven-layer concoction.
I gave him a thumbs-up and a smile. “Lily’s specialty!” I caught Lily’s eye and she gave me a small, almost imperceptible smile before her gaze flickered back to her phone. For a sixteen-year-old, that was practically a standing ovation.
Mark came over and slung an arm around my shoulder, pulling me into his side. He smelled of smoke and beer and the overbearing confidence of a man completely at ease. “Everything going okay, babe?” he murmured into my hair.
“Perfect,” I said, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. The pressure in my gut tightened. I could feel the performance starting, the familiar build-up to one of his casual, cutting remarks disguised as a joke. It was only a matter of when.
About the Author
