I admit to the ambivalence most men often feel about women becoming financially and emotionally independent. I admit I often feel ashamed for the feeling threatened or acting chauvinistically. Like most men I have never learned to cope with feelings of envy about women's success. So if men are to survive emotionally and have healthy, productive relationships with the women we work and live with, we will have to adopt new attitudes. On such adaption is in fact the women need control, but men need to be needed.
Most men are upset about losing control over their women.
This stemmed as they grew up watching their fathers act as a permission giver, ordering their mothers around while their mothers subserviently acquiesced. They learned to feel important when they make decisions for a woman. Many men today still define their masculinity by the degree of a woman's dependence and subservience - they equate being loved with being needed. As women need men less, men question their own worth. In, many a man's mind, when a woman makes her own decision, earns her own living, he has lost control.