He critiques small private practice like it’s selfish: but he’s never worked outside institutional power

My partner comes from what in Sweden is very clearly the upper class. A wealthy suburb known for old money, elite schools, and people with strong ties to corporate and institutional power. His mother is a very senior executive in a multinational company (his father isn’t alive). This isn’t just privilege, it’s structural influence.

I also grew up in a well-off area, but that one is more academic, artistic, and culturally focused and background is upper-middle-class. My family has done well, so I’m not saying that I’m disadvantaged, but in a completely different way. They run small businesses. A private dental clinic with long term clinics that you almost know personally. A boutique law firm. A tiny tourism business in the north. A small-scale family company selling home products. My mom works at a private rehab center focused on stress and exhaustion.

We both work in healthcare, but in very different corners of it. I work in smaller, often private settings where patient interaction and human connection matter. In my world, long-term trust is the core of the work. His interests, meanwhile, always seem to lead toward roles high up in the hierarchy in large, public institutions like university hospitals. He wouldn’t say he wants to climb the hierarchy, but somehow the work he finds most “interesting” always happens to be at the top.

What frustrates me is the way he talks about private enterprise, even small-scale private work, like it’s morally suspect. As if just because something is private, it must be part of some selfish, capitalist system. He wouldn’t say it outright, but the subtext is always there: that I’m closer to being an “exploitative capitalist” than he is. Meanwhile, he’s literally trying to rise to the top of massive public institutions.

And what I can’t stop thinking is: his mother is in a powerful multinational corporation. He works in a massive public-sector institution. He sees himself as part of the solution – because he’s in the public sector – but to me, the difference isn’t as big as he thinks. Both spaces involve power, hierarchy, decision-making that affects other people. Both require detachment from everyday lives. And when you’re at the top – whether it’s public or private – you’re still in a position of control, and you’re still very far from what most people experience every day.

So when he talks about being ethical or values-driven, it feels unfair. My family has never had the kind of resources or access he’s had and always perceived client relationships as the centre of their/our work, and yet we’re the ones who are made to feel like we’re doing something morally questionable.

And then he says things like: “those public school trips mostly benefit the privileged.” I don’t think he understands how that sounds. Those trips were the only reason I ever got to travel as a kid. Every school has the chance to apply for public funding for those experiences. His childhood included the kind of luxury trips most kids could never dream of – and yet he’s the one questioning whether I should have benefited from publicly funded travel.

I think public healthcare, education, and cultural access should serve a broad population, including the middle class. But somehow, in his eyes, when public institutions offer me or other people in the middle class something, it becomes a problem. So what kind of public sector is he actually advocating for? One that serves only the very worst-off, while still granting him the right to climb its highest ranks?

And what gets to me the most is how his position makes it so easy for him to criticize people like me. He grew up in one of the most powerful, protected environments in the country and somehow, it’s my family, the people who’ve never held any real institutional power, who are painted as the problem. People who’ve spent their lives working directly with others, building things that are small, human, and built on care, they’re the ones who end up being framed as ethically questionable or evil capitalists.

He’s allowed to have whatever opinions he wants. Of course he is. We all are. But there’s a difference between having opinions and using them to assign blame, especially when you’ve never had to live outside the systems that protect you. What gets to me is that somehow my family are the ones framed as “the capitalists” in his version of the world. Meanwhile, his path goes straight from a childhood shaped by multinational corporate leadership to a future in powerful public institutions: and somehow, that’s the moral high ground?