Marrying for Money

Marrying For Money

First impressions.

Who are we talking about here?

Are the ethics of such a decision irrelevant?

Is it a taboo?

Reading the Sunday Times Style magazine (I like the shiny pages), there was an article about a new book Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream — and How They’re Paying for It whose title is so long it means I am unlikely to learn anything more by purchasing the book than what they have already learnt by reading the cover.

Then that’s not going to stop me from having an argument with this book cover.  An argument based upon certain presumptions I’ll make.

The first thing that struck me is the idea that women have been duped into the Romantic Dream.  Contrary to all other pop/chick/relationship literature, the writers of this book seem to think that it is men who are the romantic ones, not women.  But at first glance, this book seems to suggest that women have been tricked into wanting to be romantic, which is surprising to say the least.  So have they been duped?

Women haven’t been duped into this, unless they’ve duped themselves.  Marrying for love is a result of a whole plethora of circumstances made available in the last century, not men tricking them.  The fact that women have a choice whether to marry a man for love or money stems from the women’s liberation movement and the fact that they can (or must) work for a living.  Nobody’s duped them.  Women came by this of their own accord.

Truth is, a relationship based on love is, relatively speaking, a luxury.

Shit, look at the rest of the world.  ‘Primitive’ cultures the world over practice arranged marriages.  Do you think that’s just about control?  No way – they do it because they have to.  That’s why it’s always “Oh, he’s a doctor/architect/lawyer” and not “meet Bob, he’s a bum.  Enjoy.”

But before I needlessly explain how the women’s lib movement paved the way for giving women the choice between marrying for love or money, or working at a job or staying at home (a choice that is incidentally still unavailable to the majority of men), let me just interject with this little piece of words:

This is only an issue for Middle Class women.

It’s true.

See, the working classes have always been more oppressed than women, as a demographic.  Today is very much the same as it was five-hundred years ago.  Both the husband and the wife work.  The men were the miners, the soldiers, the blacksmiths and the criminals.  But the women were the maids, the flower sellers, the shop keepers and barmaids.  Not only that, but their children were chimney-sweeps, mud-larkers, thieves, page-boys, stable hands and street urchins.

For these people, marrying for money was never an option.  For a long time, romantic love resulting in marriage and children was the only privilege the working classes enjoyed.  Hell, if money wasn’t involved, you could marry who you bally well pleased.

Not so with the Middle Classes.  A hundred years ago, the women stayed at home.  Well, the middle class women did.  Everyone else went to work (I’m deliberately excluding the upper classes from this as their world is so different from the lower classes, there really isn’t any points for comparison in this).  But they didn’t need to work because their husband earned enough to keep her comfortable as well as care for and raise children (see Mad Men).

Then the middle class women got bored with staying at home, especially after seeing how much fun working in a factory was during the wars.  So they decided they wanted to work.  But they didn’t want to work in any nasty, working class job where gender wasn’t an issue, they wanted to do what their husbands were doing.  And waddya know – they found that every single one of these industries was weighted heavily in favour of men.  Gradually, over the years, men shifted further along the bench giving more and more room to the women until we get where we are approximately today – that a woman has as much chance of getting a place on the bench as a man and rightly so.

Oh happy equilibrium!  Now that everyone is earning the same, these middle class women no longer need to choose their husbands based upon the size of his bank account, they can choose him for his dashing personality, his sense of humour, his gorgeous good looks and the size of his hands.  The one piece of human fulfilment that had evaded them for so long, but had instead found favour with the working classes – Love – was now for everyone.  In celebration, the middle-classes everywhere expressed this new feeling of solidarity with the working classes by attempting to dress like them – they bought brand new pairs of torn jeans, wore ugly white sports shoes and made rich men of poor artists by buying and pretending to like their aggressive sounding music.

So what’s gone wrong?  Who’s getting upset?  Well, I guess I have to refer back to the article in Style magazine if I am going to make a genuine attempt at understanding this.

Well the first thing they do it admit that women duped themselves into the romantic dream.  Elizabeth Ford, one of the two writers and a successful TV producer said “It is not a how-to guide… It is simply two educated and well-meaning women who are just going, ‘What the hell did we do?’”

Well apparently the idea that women ‘can’t have it all’ seems to be subverting the post-feminist movement.  But that’s everyone’s fault really.  It seems stupid now that a group of people were told they could have it all, when even the people they were competing against didn’t have it all, but that’s what was being sold.  Loving marriage?  Check.  Kids?  Check.  Rewarding job?  Check.  Happy family life?  Check.  Active social life?  Check.

Who the hell was pedaling this bullshit?  Everyone.  I mean sure, it would be so much more fun to blame this entirely on women themselves, but as with any paradigm shift, there are an annoying variety of factors to consider.  I am not going to try and address them all now because, well, I don’t know them all and I don’t have the space.  Although it’s enough to say that the idea was sold.  By all sorts of parties.  Just like any broad-jacketed, smooth talking salesman, the sales patter managed to seriously oversell a product – that working hard at a job somehow made life worth living – whereas in actuality all that happened was that there were more people making, and therefore spending money.

So now, because women realize they are not able to have it all (Oh hi, nice to see you back on Terra Firma) they have to make a choice between love and money (still, the fact that a choice is available is a sign of progress).  Personally, I think this is fine.  If you marry a man for his money, he’ll marry you for your looks – a trade off that many an aging millionaire has appreciated.

But some women have achieved the perfect life, as is described in the article:  Farah is a 42 year old married woman with three kids, an active social life and is a self-employed internet entrepreneur.  They are wealthy, happy and in love.  Proof, if any were needed that What Women Want can be achieved.  But once again I return to the class issue.

Of course she has achieved happiness – she’s made a lifestyle choice by opting to first become a journalist, then to develop a social networking site based around Jazz and Classical music.  The fact that she admits she doesn’t have to work is the crux here, just like Kowal, another woman mentioned in the article who is married with a job as a horticulturalist at Kew.  But how many women have that choice?  Screw that, how many men have that choice?  Not many.  Most people work because they have to, not because they want to.  Working class women work at working class jobs because they have to.  Working class men work at working class job because they have to.  Hell, middle class men work at middle class jobs because they have to (admit it, who dreams of being a hedge-fund manager?).   The only people with a choice here are middle class women.  Not bad!

I am somewhat confident that I haven’t offended anyone in this hastily written diatribe – why?  Because it indicts the middle class.  The working class dislike the middle class, the upper class are indifferent towards the middle class and no self-respecting member of the middle class would dream of labeling themselves as such.