When the memoirist Belle Burden, author of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, told Drew Barrymore in April that no woman should give up complete control of her finances, my breath caught in my throat.

Sure, in reading her book I felt fairly sure that how Burden was going to pay the electric bill or put food on the table was not among her concerns. (Recent reporting by The New Yorker illustrated that Burden’s inherited assets at the time of her divorce landed well into the multimillions.) Still, her words were like a warning shot heard across the country—and they reminded me of a key piece of wisdom my father impressed upon my sister and me early on.

From the time I was a little girl, my father would preach about the importance of independence—about following your dreams, establishing your own path, and never relying on a man, under any circumstances.

I grew up in the 1980s, a time when it wasn’t unusual to be surrounded by single-earner households headed by men. And even if his advice painted a pretty grim and sordid picture of the opposite sex in general, I did eventually understand what my father was talking about.

Over time, I saw the women in my family—all “traditional” wives of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, long before #tradwives became a trendy Instagram business model—reap the consequences of relying on their husbands financially, and those women always ended up far worse off than the men ever did. My dad’s own mother was tricked by her husband into signing a will that she didn’t understand. According to the will, if her husband were to die first, she would be left with nothing to hold her over—not even the home they shared. Every dime was going to his multimillionaire adult children from his previous marriage.

My grandmother had a middle-school education. There was no way she could have known what she was signing away, and her husband—and, I presume, his lawyer—were aware of that. So it was a blessing that she happened to go first.

My grandmother’s story—like Burden’s—fits into a well-established pattern. According to the University of Michigan Retirement and Disability Research Center, elderly divorced women are five times more likely to live below the poverty line than elderly married women, and one-third more likely to than widows. Other research indicates that a man’s risk of entering poverty after divorce actually decreases, while a woman’s goes up—especially if she has children.

My mother was no exception. I can still remember how, after her separation from my father, she scrambled to find full-time work (her income until then had been “supplemental,” filling part-time positions after my sister and I started school) and racked up credit card debt just to put me into pants that fit. My parents lived paycheck to paycheck before they split; afterward, our working-class family suddenly had two sets of bills to pay, from rent to utilities. And I know my mother worked hard to keep the most devastating financial details hidden from her children.

As a result of what I’d seen happen to the women around me, at 39 I married my husband with a nest egg and a major decision in place: We would be keeping most of our finances separate.

Five years before I said “I do,” I graduated with an advanced degree and a net worth of negative sixty thousand dollars. Over the next six years, I paid down my debt and opened my first retirement account. My sister and I are the first women in our family in a position to build generational wealth. Merging my finances with someone else’s, to my mind, would eliminate all traces of my efforts to achieve financial independence. That wasn’t just a nauseating prospect—it was a nonstarter.

My husband Matt has always been the higher earner, and as a professional writer and author for children, my own income is highly variable—there are months where I don’t have money coming in at all. Because of this, he takes care of the lion’s share of our living expenses, while I save and invest what I earn into our emergency savings and retirement funds. (We do not have children, so daycare and child-related expenses aren’t part of the picture.) We are the beneficiaries to each other’s accounts, but we keep all of them separate, with the exception of a shared credit card that we use for household needs and entertainment. It’s always been important to both of us that we have our own cushions to fall back on, should the worst happen.

But while my husband and I have always been on the same page about money and how to take care of each other, I still received pushback from my family, as though I were doing it wrong. When I told my elderly aunt about my separate finances, she said to me, “You’re either in or you’re out.” On the other hand, I don’t know of anyone who pestered my husband about handing me the keys to his various bank accounts.

Matt and I love each other, but we have very different backgrounds. In his world, women inherit—and pass down—money with an eye toward taking care of the next generation. He hasn’t seen what I’ve seen, and I love that for him. But I did not build my life into what it is only to give it away.

In the end, Belle Burden’s message is simple: Women should fall as much in love with our financial independence as we do with the men we’re promising our hearts to—and these are two entirely unrelated projects. Until we are living in a very different world, no one will care about a woman’s financial stability as much as she does.