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"I married beneath me," Lady Nancy Astor once said. "All women do."
It's been a century since the viscountess ditched her first husband, and by all indications, she was right. According to a Pew Research Center report, the number of married women making more money than their husbands has gone up to 22 percent from four percent in 1970.
Intrigued by the figures, I brought up the topic with my girlfriends last night over dinner at Boa.
"It matters," said my friend Katerina, 28. "It's not really about me – I don't want a man's money. I have my money. It's a power thing. Money makes men feel powerful. If he already feels powerful, I don't have to worry about making him feel like he's The Man. He's making a killing, pulling his weight and then some – he already knows he's The Man, so I don't have to cater to his ego and can go around doing whatever I want."
Kiki, in her mid-30s, had similar ideas about it: "If he's not determined, goal-oriented and working his ass off so his situation is temporary, it's emasculating."
Is the male ego so fragile? I threw the question to Twitter, a dozen men immediately responded, saying they didn't see a problem with being involved with a woman who made substantially more money than they did.
Then I decided to try something else: look back on my experience and analyze some of the relationships I'd had since college, and see if I seemed to have any preference, or if I could make any correlation between income and the level of fulfillment I'd experienced with each individual.
(I will take any excuse I can get to play with spreadsheets, it's true.)
My sample varied widely, but I discovered that of the seven most satisfying relationships, three were with men who had little money, three were with men who had just enough, and one, with a man whose family had money.
Those focused, self-made men raking in the serious cash and those focused on trying to get there had consistently led to underwhelming love affairs.
I had rated the relationships on a scale from one to five – and on gut alone. As I looked over the data again, I tried to think of the reasons why I'd given these top seven such high ratings.
Image by MaterialsAart via Flickr
The answer was simple and almost stereotypically feminine: it's the little things, silly.
What made these men stand out was not stuff or the idea of security – it was time and effort. None of them filled my house and office with all the roses in the city. None of them decked me in diamonds or furs. They took me on strolls in gardens and deserted beaches, strange cities, took me cruising on back roads in the dead of night, they read me to sleep, they wrote songs and poems, they made me art, sculptures, even furniture with their own hands.
This isn't to say that well-established, self-made men don't do any of these things, of course. But time and time again, I think about the top candidates in that category and recall something one of them used to always say: “It costs me more money to stop and pick up a hundred dollar bill than it does to just keep on walking.”
The man who has earned a substantial piece of the pie on his own knows the value of time. With those I'd dated, this notion carried into our relationship. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking the opportunity to turn an average conference trip into a sexy vacation – but if those are the only getaways a man can handle, I'm not that into it.
My ex-husband Richard and I used to fight about this all the time.
I recalled a trip to my native Peru in 2007. Exhausted from lunches, dinners and other social calls, I was more than thrilled by the notion of staying in bed late and doing very little all day. Richard wouldn't hear of it. Delighted with sudden “down time”, he packed up his laptop and went off to a cabina to see whether he could find something work-related with which to occupy himself.
"Most of us were taught that leisure equals sloth, laziness, idleness or shiftlessness," Paula Fontaine had written in an editorial for IN magazine, which I'd picked up on the plane on the way to Peru from Los Angeles, "'Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,' or so the saying goes."
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