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svelteParticipantThinking about it a bit more, I’m wondering:
– Is it a city/country thing? Most of my friends and I grew up in small towns. Maybe folks from the sticks – like where I and most of my friends grew up – didn’t grow up caring a whole lot about money.
– Maybe it’s a rich upbringing thing. Most of my friends and I had very little growing up and had no expectations of ever having anything. It was – and is – much more important to find someone who wants the same thing out of life as I do…regardless of their ability to earn gobs of money. We could live on crackers and water if we had too – and did for a bit there in the beginning. And we were perfectly happy.
– Maybe it’s a control thing. I want someone I can control, I want someone to have control over me.
I don’t know. Intentionally seeking out someone to support me or someone to support is at odds with my very basic values. It is very distasteful to me.
Why I’m absolutely certain my wife is not that way:
I was broke, living at home, jobless and bumming around from community college course to cc course (ladies there!) when my wife started dating me. I can tell you without a doubt she was *not* dating me for current or potential future earnings. Hell, she was doing better in school than I was! She married me because I could hold a decent conversation, I treated her right, I knew how to have fun, and I had a dangerous edge without being too dangerous.
Another piece of evidence I have from that time period: When I was dating my future wife, an ex-gf from across the country sent me a letter unaware that I was in another relationship. It was OK because it wasn’t a “let’s get back together” letter, just a “I thought of you today” letter. At one point in the letter, my former gf said that she’d decided the best thing is to marry for money. My future wife was just fine with all the former-lover stuff – until that sentence. She got angry when she read that sentence – very angry. I was glad there was a continent between the two. 🙂
Most of my male friends likewise met their wives when they were in similar unassuming situations. They can be sure their wives weren’t after their money because they didn’t have any at the time, and I sense that in their relationship too.
Out.
svelteParticipantWow, 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.
svelteParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]Um. Facts?
Just cause someone answers a question a certain way don’t make it a fact.In fact I would say it is a fact that women say they want things other than what they claim or even think they want.
Hypothetically $ not important in my fantasy cosmopolitan questionnaire.
But what is reality on the ground?
Special snowflake white women seem less forthcoming than black respondents.[/quote]
Fact: something that truly exists or happens : something that has actual existence
Opinion: a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something : what someone things about a particular thing
It is a *fact* that women answered the survey the way they did.
It is your *opinion* that they are lying.
Not hard to understand.
svelteParticipant[quote=njtosd][quote=svelte][quote=CA renter][quote=svelte][quote=flyer]Not all beautiful women are vacuous gold diggers, just as not all handsome men are shallow trophy wife collectors, and I have to agree, to each his/her own when choosing a partner for all of the right
reasons–love, happiness, achieving life goals, etc., etc.The wedding, the ring, the fabulous honeymoon, the great house, and all of the “stuff” are nice, and we’ve all been there, but, IMO, what makes the relationship lasting and beautiful is the deeper bond that’s been forged by things that money can’t buy.[/quote]
Agree with every word.
That’s why alarm bells would go off if I even caught a whiff of a potential spouse that was marrying me for the money. To those who are together for the $$, that’s A-OK with me as long as it works for them. But that’s not what I want my relationships built upon.[/quote]
Should alarm bells go off when a woman catches a whiff of a potential suitor/spouse wanting her for her beauty? (I would say yes.)
It goes both ways.[/quote]
Hmmm – that’s a sexist thought!
By using the pronoun “she” and the phrase “it goes both ways”, you’re implying that my response was for women marrying men for money and not men marrying women for money. It was not – my sentences were gender neutral on purpose.
If your sentence was rephrased “should alarm bells go off when someone catches a whiff of a potential spouse wanting them for their beauty? (I would say yes)”, then I would agree that one should run if a suitor was after them only for their beauty. Keyword “only”.
The beauty thing is a slippery slope. You have to be physically attracted to your spouse for it to work – so yeah I partly married for beauty. But beauty alone would not have been enough for me to marry her. Not even close.
She had a nice dowry too.
(j/k)[/quote]
Wait, your sentence was talking about someone marrying you for your money. Unless you were open to marrying a man or a woman, you weren’t being gender neutral.
What if someone said they married their spouse partly for the money?[/quote]
Yes, ntojd, all of my statements where gender neutral. I can only have one spouse at a time in the US until we adopt more Mormonesque rules, and I would make the same statement whether the spouse I pick(ed) was male or female. So all of my statements are indeed gender neutral! Nice try at spin, though.
svelteParticipant[quote=CA renter][quote=svelte]CAR, I’m gonna guess that you are a stay at home mom.
I think that would explain your skewed perspective. Stay-at-home moms tend to cling to older traditional concepts as you’ve described. But that doesn’t match reality.
Either that or you’re black – and I’ll explain why I say that below, where I’ll back up my position with factual data not generalizations and stereotypes.
[quote=CA renter]… most women would argue that having a husband who makes a decent living is necessary for a good marriage, as well. There are always exceptions, of course, but that doesn’t change the rule.
[/quote]This is simply not true. Most women would NOT argue that a hubby who makes a good living is necessary for a good marriage. See attached data.
Your statement is only true of the subset of women who are black. It is not true of American women in general, and is especially not true of white American women.
[img_assist|nid=19270|title=Pew Data A|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=335|height=554]
[img_assist|nid=19271|title=Pew Data B|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=612|height=494][/quote]Scaredy addressed where you’re wrong on this (thanks, scaredy). Even when looking at your own graphs, it clearly shows that having a husband who earns a decent income is very important to most women. It’s also interesting to note that they apparently didn’t include physical attractiveness in the study you’ve linked. You can see from what they *did* include that the spouse’s income is more highly valued by women than by men (women value it at least twice as much as men in the white population). If they had included physical attractiveness, I’m sure that men would have rated that very highly, while women would have rated it at a much lower level (relative to men).
Here is the quote that scaredy was referring to:
“Changing Spousal Roles. In the past 50 years, women have reached near parity with men as a share of the workforce and have begun to outpace men in educational attainment. About six-in-ten wives work today, nearly double the share in 1960. There’s an unresolved tension in the public’s response to these changes. More than six-in-ten (62%) survey respondents endorse the modern marriage in which the husband and wife both work and both take care of the household and children; this is up from 48% in 1977. Even so, the public hasn’t entirely discarded the traditional male breadwinner template for marriage. Some 67% of survey respondents say that in order to be ready for marriage, it’s very important for a man to be able to support his family financially; just 33% say the same about a woman.“
[/quote]
Well obviously that’s not true because people lie…isn’t that the argument you and scaredy used to shoot down the stats I found? 🙂
And I don’t think you two really understand how to read stats. The stats I provide broke it down by male and female….yours lumped male and female together.
Therefore, the stats you provided are invalid: We were discussing what women looked for in a husband, not what a male thought he needed to provide.
svelteParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]I just don’t believe that money isn’t critical to women.
They may not answer the question yes that money makes a good husband.
I think it would just be perceived as necessary …
Social norms make it difficult to say money makes a good husband. Sounds grubby.
People lie.
Women want a good earning husband.
Sorry. I’m old. Not gonna change my mind.[/quote]
lol. Yeah, don’t let facts get in the way of your opinion. 🙂
svelteParticipant[quote=CA renter]So, while intelligent men will want a wife for things other than ONLY beauty; and intelligent women will want a husband for things other than ONLY money, both of these things are very highly prized by the respective sexes. It’s been this way throughout human history…again, whether we like it or not.[/quote]
I showed you were wrong in the prior post…now I’m also going to show you that household norms are changing and rapidly, so what may have been true in the past may no longer be true. There has been an ENORMOUS shift in marriage expectations in just the last 30 years.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/11/18/iii-marriage/#what-makes-a-good-partner
[img_assist|nid=19272|title=Pew Data C|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=335|height=392]
svelteParticipantCAR, I’m gonna guess that you are a stay at home mom.
I think that would explain your skewed perspective. Stay-at-home moms tend to cling to older traditional concepts as you’ve described. But that doesn’t match reality.
Either that or you’re black – and I’ll explain why I say that below, where I’ll back up my position with factual data not generalizations and stereotypes.
[quote=CA renter]… most women would argue that having a husband who makes a decent living is necessary for a good marriage, as well. There are always exceptions, of course, but that doesn’t change the rule.
[/quote]This is simply not true. Most women would NOT argue that a hubby who makes a good living is necessary for a good marriage. See attached data.
Your statement is only true of the subset of women who are black. It is not true of American women in general, and is especially not true of white American women.
[img_assist|nid=19270|title=Pew Data A|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=335|height=554]
[img_assist|nid=19271|title=Pew Data B|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=612|height=494]svelteParticipant[quote=CA renter][quote=svelte][quote=flyer]Not all beautiful women are vacuous gold diggers, just as not all handsome men are shallow trophy wife collectors, and I have to agree, to each his/her own when choosing a partner for all of the right
reasons–love, happiness, achieving life goals, etc., etc.The wedding, the ring, the fabulous honeymoon, the great house, and all of the “stuff” are nice, and we’ve all been there, but, IMO, what makes the relationship lasting and beautiful is the deeper bond that’s been forged by things that money can’t buy.[/quote]
Agree with every word.
That’s why alarm bells would go off if I even caught a whiff of a potential spouse that was marrying me for the money. To those who are together for the $$, that’s A-OK with me as long as it works for them. But that’s not what I want my relationships built upon.[/quote]
Should alarm bells go off when a woman catches a whiff of a potential suitor/spouse wanting her for her beauty? (I would say yes.)
It goes both ways.[/quote]
Hmmm – that’s a sexist thought!
By using the pronoun “she” and the phrase “it goes both ways”, you’re implying that my response was for women marrying men for money and not men marrying women for money. It was not – my sentences were gender neutral on purpose.
If your sentence was rephrased “should alarm bells go off when someone catches a whiff of a potential spouse wanting them for their beauty? (I would say yes)”, then I would agree that one should run if a suitor was after them only for their beauty. Keyword “only”.
The beauty thing is a slippery slope. You have to be physically attracted to your spouse for it to work – so yeah I partly married for beauty. But beauty alone would not have been enough for me to marry her. Not even close.
She had a nice dowry too.
(j/k)
svelteParticipant[quote=CA renter]
They make front-loaders, too. And their machines don’t stink of mold/mildew like the other ones do, according to those who’ve had both.[/quote]
Front loaders don’t stink if you leave the door open to allow them to dry out. That’s what we do with our 7 year old GE front loader and it has never had an odor issue.
svelteParticipant[quote=flyer]Not all beautiful women are vacuous gold diggers, just as not all handsome men are shallow trophy wife collectors, and I have to agree, to each his/her own when choosing a partner for all of the right
reasons–love, happiness, achieving life goals, etc., etc.The wedding, the ring, the fabulous honeymoon, the great house, and all of the “stuff” are nice, and we’ve all been there, but, IMO, what makes the relationship lasting and beautiful is the deeper bond that’s been forged by things that money can’t buy.[/quote]
Agree with every word.
That’s why alarm bells would go off if I even caught a whiff of a potential spouse that was marrying me for the money. To those who are together for the $$, that’s A-OK with me as long as it works for them. But that’s not what I want my relationships built upon.
svelteParticipant[quote=livinincali][quote=svelte]If you have no appetite for rollercoasters, you should park your money on the side during October.
It is a notoriously volatile month.[/quote]
As is the case in every major market decline we go ahead an ignore the fact that we probably topped and are looking at a 50% decline over the next 18 months. [/quote]
I’m going to remind you of this statement in 18 months. 🙂
svelteParticipant[quote=zk][quote=FlyerInHi]
I understand that a sought after woman expects at least 2 carats. [/quote]If a woman “expects” at least 2 carats, she’s only sought after by idiots, in my opinion.[/quote]
Agreed. If I was dating a woman and she let it be known that the wedding ring would have to be 2 carats or more, I would head for the hills.
Utter nonsense.
svelteParticipantIf you have no appetite for rollercoasters, you should park your money on the side during October.
It is a notoriously volatile month.
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