Wow, go away for a while and this thread doubles in size!
To those of you who think most women marry for money, you scare me actually. It smacks a bit of “that’s the way it is in my relationship and it’s OK because most relationships are that way also.” Well, you must have surrounded yourself with a different type of females than I have.
If people want to marry a spouse for money, that’s their prerogative and I’m fine with that. But it’s not a quality I would want in a spouse, not what I would want my spouse looking for, not a quality that the folks I choose to surround myself with have, and not a quality I believe most men and women have. Thus my perspective that it is not common – backed up by Pew and company.
It’s nice to have and I’m glad I have some now, but I could live a perfectly content life if it all went away tomorrow. Maybe that is why stock market plunges don’t frighten me. As long as I have my wife by my side I’m a happy man.
BTW – I have always been a equality-minded male. We raised the kids equally and her friends were usually shocked by all the chores I took on with the kids. And I maintained myself pre-kid, during-kid, and post-kid, thank you. Not once has my wife done my laundry or ironed my shirt ever – I do my own upkeep. Slowly things gravitated towards her doing house cleaning and me doing outdoor maintenance, but she hated mowing grass and replacing brake pads and I wasn’t keen on scrubbing floors. We got a maid to do her chores for her about a decade before we got a gardener to replace some of mine. Maybe that “equality” mindset is why neither of us chose a spouse based on how much we thought they could earn…neither of us expected to be kept and were dead set on developing marketable skills to ensure we could survive without the other.
I guess I’m quite disheartened by what some folks on here feel most spousal motivation is. Scary really…it really is.
I’m gonna stay over here on my side of the fence where the air is pure, the motivations innocent, data is trusted above hearsay and prejudice, and the adults prefer to be self-sufficient.
