EXPLODING THE ROMANCE MYTH

By Kate Spicer

A woman with two daughters, a stepson, a large mortgage, a big job and no time was rifling in a tidying — not a nosy — way through some of her new husband’s papers recently and found a wish list he had made. And there, with a star next to it, was the line: “Make enough money so that [she] doesn’t have to do a job she hates.”

“That meant so much to me,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons this relationship works and my last one didn’t.” Her first marriage was to a “creative” type, a fascinating and wild man who rarely met his half of the mortgage; a man who had such an exciting schedule he was never awake for sex when she was, or able to pick up the kids from school when she or the au pair couldn’t. She could be a case study for the book Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream — and How They’re Paying for It. It was written by two fortysomething professionals who want to tell younger women some home truths about the postfeminist dream. One is a doctor with an MBA, Daniela Drake, the other an Emmy-winning television producer, Elizabeth Ford.

“It is not a how-to guide,” Ford says. “It is simply two educated and well-meaning women who are just going, ‘What the hell did we do?’” The marry-money thesis is the latest in a list of many that have appeared in the past 10 years — the idea that women can’t have it all and need to revert to more traditional female role play with men has been swilling around controversially in the homespun-philosophy section of the self-help genre. A steady flow of modern marital philosophers are urging women to return to prefeminist states of reliance and supplication (The Surrendered Wife, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands) and manipulative feminine wiles (The Rules, The Princessa, Why Men Marry Bitches). Before that, an awful lot of mothers were saying the same things to their daughters.

Smart Girls Marry Money comes off as a big-sisterly catalogue of things they wish their mother had told them. The title contains their two main arguments. First, that money and the marrying of it is essential for women, because, given the current working culture, women are rarely able to earn as much as men — especially after children. And should their marriage end — as nearly half do — in divorce, it’s a fact that women rarely bounce back, either professionally or financially, as easily as men. The female divorcée, they cruelly add, is unlikely to spring back romantically either, unless she is some kind of a Liz Hurley version of a fortysomething. It’s a satirical book, full of puns and wisecracks. Less gag-laden but similar reading is found in recent research by Professor Stephen Jenkins, director of the Institute for Social & Economic Research, who found that five years after divorce, men were 25% richer, whereas women still had less money than they did pre-split; and that 31% of mothers receive no payment for children. His conclusion is that until true equality exists in the labour market, in the division of labour at home, and in the way people come out of divorce, women remain at a disadvantage.

Ford is a single parent, whose husband, after 13 happy years of marriage, “traded up for a younger model”, as she puts it. She swears she is not bitter, but “being a single mom is really hard. It’s just that if I knew [then] what I know now... There’s a lot of great and essential things you can get from a man — financial things like being able to own a house and pay for great childcare”.

Their second big tub-thump is more singular: that romantic love is a stupid thing to base a marriage on. Drake split from her first husband because she felt the passion (ergo, love) had gone from their relationship, and regrets it. “Things might have been different if I’d known then that love is transient, that it doesn’t exist, that [a lack of it] is not a reason to get out of your marriage.” Gallingly, her first husband “has now gone on to be quite rich”.

“There is a corrective purpose to this work,” Drake says. “In the late 1800s, when parents began allowing their children to marry for romantic love, social commentators guessed, rather presciently, that the divorce rate would rise to 50%. Their reasoning: if being in love is a reason to marry, then being out of love is a reason for divorce.”

The book contains a lot of other advice that the average mother wouldn’t care, or dare, to hand down: that sexual fulfilment is dependent on discovering yourself through masturbation; that it is imperative to marry young, while you have the seductive powers of the sexually attractive and fecund; to be aware that men are prone to trading up, “once you no longer have great skin or look great in jeans”. They even advise sleeping with your boss if you calculate that you can do so without harming your feelings or prospects. They advise that men don’t want high-earning women, and not to be too ambitious, while also lambasting the male-driven era of greed that has brought down the global economy. It’s a far-reaching book, backed up with a lot of research and argument, packaged as bouncy self-help for the chick-lit market. But do we have to look backwards for the answer to our modern woes? Or are there changes we can make to our lives that do not involve falling into regressive roles?

“Even really smart women are victims of the Cinderella syndrome — it’s a cultural thing,” says the really smart woman Merryn Somerset Webb, editor in chief of MoneyWeek. “Still, when women envisage their future, there’s always this implicit assumption someone else will pay for it.” Somerset Webb has a history in banking, yet she wrote Love Is Not Enough: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Money after her husband asked her: “How do you intend to keep yourself in old age?” “I said, ‘I’ll share your money.’ To which he replied, ‘No. Sort your own finances out.’”

Somerset Webb says women, including herself, are good at saving for short-term things such as holidays, but less so when it comes to more mature financial arrangements. She dismisses the marry-money argument: “It’s all very well, as long as the money you marry doesn’t leave you on your own in a poor financial position. Marrying money isn’t a solution; it is not emotionally satisfying. Marriage is exhausting enough with someone you love — imagine doing it with someone you don’t. I don’t think many people would marry purely for romantic love: most good marriages are based on friendship, tolerance and respect.” Our freedom to love who we want is one of the strongest indicators that we live in a free society. Your own money and a partner of your choosing have liberated women from lives of servitude and drudgery that make the nightmares of “having it all” and “juggling” look like small potatoes.

Times recommends

• Live fashion advice: how to dress for party season
• The A-Z of winter style rules
• Could safe havens prevent teenage stabbings?