A recent NY Times article highlighted the impact of the financial crisis on Ireland, a country which had previously been riding high on a property boom (and also low tax rates and generally sound economic policies).
There is a photo of a property tycoon and his lovely wife (recently married), 20 years his junior, above. From the article:
The Celtic Tiger my be dead and if the banking crisis continues I could be considered insolvent. but the one thing that I have is my wife and children – and they can’t take that away from me
No, Mr. Tycoon, THEY can’t take her away from you, but your real risk is that she’ll leave on her own.
The picture of an older executive and his hot young wife, 20 years his junior (presumably wife 1.0 was paid off and is out of the picture) is everywhere in the high finance pages. A lot of these guys, for all their tales (they tell) of how they started off humbly, have immense egos and probably actually believe that the reason that an attractive, far younger woman is with them is due to their intrinsic worth.
But it isn’t their intrinsic worth, it is often their wealth. His new, shiny wife is a gossip columnist, and apparently likes expensive things, like a 2 week cruise in a giant yacht with 20 of their closest friends.
It will be interesting to see what the social order looks like when these formerly VERY wealthy men can’t provide all the luxuries, nannies, houses, and other requirements of their high maintenance, younger wives. Will the wives stand by their (grey) men, or go in search of more age-appropriate mates (or a different, older, rich one).
There have been articles about the impact of the financial crash on families, and it is in poor taste to laugh at the misfortune of others. I did have a little chuckle, I admit, when I read an article about the reaction of a laid-off Lehman employee’s wife that “This wasn’t the Plan!” when they had to downsize out of their McMansion and start living within their reduced means. I could see that she traded her biggest asset, her looks, with the expectation of receiving economic gravy in return, and she was calculating that she had received the short end of the deal. Unfortunately, he isn’t getting any richer, and you aren’t getting those years back, baby.
Cross posted at LITGM
And so Wife 1.0 laughs, looking at Wife 2.0…
“…it is in poor taste to laugh at the misfortune of others.”
Go ahead and do it anyway.
I do.
This lady’s looks are a wasting asset. She’d better move fast.
Wow. Harsh.
And, also, the plot to every Faye Weldon novel ever written. Remember She-Devil? Not the terrible movie, the book.
*I’m rediscovering Weldon, and appreciating her! When a feminist writer bothers to have a sense of humor, a biting humor at that, directed at the foibles of *both* men and women equally, well, it’s refreshing.
If I may be excused a somewhat cynical observation: I strongly believe that the opposite — a sudden explosion in wealth, or rather the sudden elimination of economic uncertainty — could have at least as severe an effect. Imagine a large portion of the population receiving as gifts 1) cancellation of all non-mortgage debt 2) complete payoff of residence(s) 3) annuity sufficient to cover all remaining basic living expenses. How many marriages would survive?
Okay, I’m an idiot. She-Devil doesn’t have that plot, but, a related one to the comments above: wife #1 is oh so angry.
Agree that Wife 1 comes out ahead here, having liquidated her position before the market reversed. (It’s always easiest to sell a big winning position into strength, never mind that this may have been a forced liquidation.) Wife 2 may come out a winner in the long run, but by the time she got into the trade there was less edge and more risk, and her position is less liquid than it would have been before the financial collapse. Husband appears to be short a complex option, perhaps a knock-out, though it’s impossible to know for sure unless Wife 2 exercises early. To put it more plainly, he is a jamook, as they say in Japan.
Here is the link to the article.
LOL, nice summary Jonathan. He may have hedged his position by buying an offsetting call, i.e. having her sign a prenup. Of course, he would still lose the spread between the two strikes of the hedged position, i.e. the terms of the pre-nup. Better than being naked short the knock-out, limits the downside. But then again, he did leverage up in real estate unhedged, which may indicate his general approach to risk. In which case, sucks to be him all around…
Wife 1 might still be in a not so good position if she had a giant maintenance agreement to be paid monthly and he doesn’t have it anymore. If she got a lump sum on a buy out of some sort she is loving it.
Believe it or not, some of those 20-year-age difference marriages are not just about big money. There is also the issue of women finding a regrettable lack of maturity and nesting instincts in younger men. Sometimes they go for the older man’s sense of family and responsibility. I’m in the 21st year of such a relationship (17 years difference) but, of course, I didn’t have as much to offer as he did in the first place. Women who get to about age 33 with no prospect of settling down with man of her age start to look around.
A secondary phenomenon is the use of fertility treatment by those women once they are married. They want their family quickly and often have them all at once by using fertility methods intended for other purposes. A woman who wants a home and children at the age of 33 to 35 is making decisions under some stress. Some of us older guys look better in that light.
Mr Kennedy, don’t sell yourself short. I checked on your blog and you are a doctor. Every mom is happy when their daughter ends up with a physician.
Well, obviously (someone has to point at the elephant), as we see on conveniently offered, by himself, example of Dr.Kennedy, older men don’t want to marry their contemporaries.
Regardless of their appreciation of men “with sense of family and responsibility”. Or achievements of reproductive medicine, with its variety of fertility treatments that make children at 50 not only possible but almost routine.
So what women with negative 17 years age difference have that 50 yo women don’t? Looks.
So, please, don’t make it sound like those wives #2 (and 3, and 6) are shallow golddiggers.
Where is a demand, there is a supply.
My father used to tell me that men always depend on women 90 % of our lives, for the first 25 years of our lives we depend on that woman, then we get married to a woman and we will depend on her for the rest of our lives, from the moment we get married to time when we are ready to die, happily loved by that woman, remembering our mothers, our grand-mothers (in my case) and the women in our lives. And if you are lucky enough, you will be blessed with a daughter or two that will also see you and your wife when you get old, boys don’t stick around, they go away, but daughters always do.
I guess we men are what the women of our lives made us be.
A woman will not usually remain loyal to a man who has had a bad career setback. Usually she’ll either leave him or be so angry as to make his life miserable. This isn’t just something that happens with wall street types or when the man is married to a second wife or much younger wife.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Jeff, try to look at it this way: a woman held her side of the bargain. She brought in her looks and her youth – the qualities men value more than anything else, as shown by numbers of single 40+ women who stay single: same woman from the inside (or even improved by mellowing years), but aged from the outside, can not find an appreciative partner.
So, a woman held her side. A man didn’t. Why blame women that they don’t want to participate in the deal anymore?
Besides, what you say is not always true. Many, many women, by their generous and loving nature, give their men a second, and third, and “n”th chance. To be only exchanged for an attractive young thing, once their looks disappear and the man they have supported all these years don’t want the burden of gratitude on his shoulders.
I don’t believe that you know what you are talking about, unless you mean the use of donor eggs. (Which is the same genetic win for the woman as raising the offspring of her husband’s mistress with added drawback of having to go through the pregnancy herself.)
Mark A. Flacy: women, generally, don’t think of their children as “genetic win”. Ask your wife or your mother.
Your objection will be valid if 50yo men who married 20+yo, did it for the purpose of having children. Generally, this comes very on the list of their reasons.
“very low on their list”, sorry for the omission.
I think we need more and better photos of the trophy wife, to help us think more clearly about these issues.
That would still be a sample size of 1. I recommend creating an entire portfolio. Or, to draw an interdisciplinary analogy, “each Mongol took several remounts … to avoid exhausting their horses.”
> *I’m rediscovering Weldon, and appreciating her! When a feminist writer bothers to have a sense of humor, a biting humor at that, directed at the foibles of *both* men and women equally, well, it’s refreshing.
Since that’s not what feminism is any more, I think another term needs to be used. Feminism these days is all about victimizing women and demonizing men.
“Sexism, we have been told, made men powerful and women powerless. The reality is somewhat different. For centuries, neither sex had power. Both sexes had roles: She raised the children, He raised the crops/money. Neither sex had options, both sexes had obligations. If both sexes had traditional obligations, it is more accurate to call it sex roles than sexism.
Men’s roles didn’t serve thier interests any more than women’s roles served women’s interests. Instead, both roles served the interests of survival.”
– Warren Farrell –
“The political genius of the feminist movement was its sense that it could appeal to all women only by emphasizing expansion of rights and opportunities and avoiding expansion of responsibilities. Had the National Organization for Women fought to register 18 year old girls for the draft, it might have lost members. Had feminism emphasized women’s responsibilities for taking sexual initiatives, or paying for men’s dinners, or choosing careers they liked less in order to support adult men better, its impact would have been more egalitarian but less politically successful.”
– Warren Farrell –
“Essentially, women’s liberation and men’s mid-life crises were the same search for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, and love. But while women’s liberation was thought of as promoting identity, men’s mid-life crises were thought of as identity crises.
Women’s liberation was called insight, self-discovery, and self-improvement, akin to maturity. Men’s mid-life crises were discounted as irresponsibility, self-gratification, and selfishness, akin to immaturity. Women’s crises got sympathy, men’s crises got a bad rap.”
– Warren Farrell –
Women also marry older men because they perceive in them greater wisdom, character, experience, stability. Often they are wrong – a man who is interested in the kind of appreciation that comes from a woman with limited experience is usually not as wise, virtuous, experienced and stable as a naive and youthful woman thinks. He can fake the appearance of them more easily to her than a woman his own age. But, then again, sometimes he is all these and a woman can only appreciate them to a greater degree as they face adversity together.
The guilty pleasures of women I knew who married much older and very well (tenured professors or surgeons or businessmen) seemed more often to be romance novels while those in more egalitarian relationships tended toward mysteries or science fiction. At one time I thought a study of that would be interesting, though I was never sure what it would show (or if, of course, I was right and this wasn’t a sampling error). Of course, romance novels like power can be aphrodesiacs (someone did do a study of that).
There’s a lot of snark in some of these comments; as a first wife I often indulge in that and besides I really detest those guys who date their students or secretaries, etc. Still and all, relationships are a lot more complex than some imply here. Middlemarch’s Doroethea and Isabel Archer of Portrait of a Lady demonstrate the complicated reasons a woman chooses an older man. They chose very poorly. The reader could easily see the men for what they were; neither woman married for money or even for power. Both characterizations always seemed quite psychologically acute.
My brother married at 18 and I at 29. He needed marriage and chose (given his youth he was probably just extrordinarily lucky) a woman who gave his life ballast. I was not ready at 18 or even at 21 – I shiver when I think of how wrong my choices would have been during those years. Chronological age isn’t that closely aligned with readiness for marriage. (Except, I suppose, to the kind of people whose marriages aren’t built on very firm ground anyway.) Child-bearing is important, but my brother became a father at 18 and I a mother at 43. Of course, reverse the sexes and the margins can become larger, although 25 is quite a bit.
Oh, Tatanya, I suspect child-bearing is somewhere in there, rolling around in their hormones if not their minds.
Ginny, my name is Tatyana.
Oh, I think there are plenty of interesting feminists around (I hope I’m one of them!) – I see no reason for the term to be appropriated by the MS magazine crowd, or by any ‘crowd’ in general, and I think it’s a mistake for conservatives to let that happen. It’s a form of intellectual marginalization. A pro-life activist is, to my mind, an interesting sort of feminist, or could be, and it’s too bad she/he is not included in the mind of the general public as one of that group. I understand that mileage varies a lot with people.
Ginny – I love to look to literature when thinking about current events! I was reading Cranford recently, and Miss Matty’s remarks about her late sister not wanting to remove assets from a bank because ‘who would give up 8%?’ caught my eye, especially as the dodgy bank failed.
Men tend to expect women to retain their looks. Women tend to expect men to retain their incomes. Both sexes tend to be disappointed to the extent they don’t soften their expectations in the face of life’s vicissitudes.
“Men tend to expect women to retain their looks.”
Really? No one who can see would think this. Everyone knows youth and beauty are wasting assets. It is a universal biological inevitability. I think it is more like “many men are more unhappy than they think they will be when their wives (inevitably) lose their youth and beauty.” The well known “midlife crisis” is mixed up with this. If the man has been very materially successful, he can get another young and attractive female without extraordinary effort assuming, as is common these days, that he has no religious or moral qualms about discarding the initial female. There is no meaningful social check on this behavior. To the contrary, discarding an older female for a young and attractive one is generally respected, admired and envied, except by other older females or by the diminishing minority who object on religious or moral grounds.
“Women tend to expect men to retain their incomes.” This is probably reasonable. Many men make increasing amounts over their lives. It is a matter of skill, drive, intelligence and luck. A younger woman betting on a guy who has a track record of financial success, i.e. an older guy who is looking to cash out part of his winnings on a trophy wife, may well be making a reasonable trade off of her youth and beauty for whatever benefits the wealthy man may offer, not least his wealth. If luck turns against her, and the guy turns out not to be able to meet his part of this bargain, for reasons beyond his control or not, she has squandered an irreplaceable asset on the wrong guy. Of course, if the financial failure happens quickly enough, the woman may still have time to exit and find another guy. I have seen several very short marriages in which the female apparently perceived that the guy’s drive, ambition, or other factors were not going to take him as far professionally as she expected, in particular, not as far as she was likely to go without him.
So, the men have nothing to complain about if their wives get old. They either knew what they were getting into or should have. Women may have something to complain about if their husbands fail to provide materially for them as they expected.
I might be an oddity here, but as I have aged, and I am now 40, my eyes have certainly turned toward older women as much more attractive then they used to seem.
When I was a young man I wouldn’t give an older woman or a woman with kid(s) a second glance – now older women seem so much more interesting. I don’t know if it is a subconscious thing or not – maybe in my minds eye I can see that this wife or mom might be a good provider and that makes her more attractive – in otherwords, my subconscious brain might be looking at different things now. I dunno. I absolutely couldn’t stand for one second to date a 20 something woman (I am 40) – no real life experience, and more than likely I would have nothing to talk to her about.
My wife, perhaps, seems more and more attractive to me by the day because of the above. Not necessarily as good looking as when she was 25 (don’t we all get a wrinkle here and there?), but certainly more attractive.
Youth and beauty are wasting assets, but some women take better care of their looks than do others and most men probably expect (or at least hope) that their wives will not let themselves go. Similarly, while men tend to earn more with age, most women probably expect (or at least hope) that their husbands won’t suffer major career setbacks.
Also, “discarding an older female” implies that mid-life divorce is the fault of the husband. I don’t think you can generalize. Sometimes it is the fault of the husband, sometimes of the wife, and sometimes it’s simply a bad marriage and the partners waited until the children were grown or for other reasons. Not all divorces are bad. Not all marriages of older men and younger women are ill-conceived.
“Also, “discarding an older female” implies that mid-life divorce is the fault of the husband.”
I was focusing on the case this post is about. Also, I would not refer to fault since I am being empirical not judgmental, for purposes of my comment. If I want to talk about moral judgments, I would be opening up a wholly different conversation.
Further, you can make some generalizations. Younger or more attractive women have more options. Materially successful men have more options. They bring the relevant assets to the “market” to command a supply of desirable potential partners. A materially successful man married to an aging woman, barring moral or religious qualms, is that much more likely to remove the aging female and replace her with a younger and more attractive one, because he can. Similarly, a young and attractive female who is married to a man who is not experiencing material success to the degree expected has the option of replacing him with a more successful man. I don’t have to speculate about this. These are commonly observed phenomena.
Of course, within the general trends there all kinds of particular details, as you note, noise around the signal.
Dan is an oddity.
’nuff said.
haha
I agree with Dan. I find that as I get older, the young women are as attractive as ever, at some pretty basic level, but a range of older women look good too. I think this is a very common phenomenon.
This is all academic. Married. Not looking for a girlfriend. Just talking about impressions, not actions. To be absolutely clear.
After a very sour first marriage that left me unconvinced I could ever reasonably choose another wife (or ever would want to), I spent 18 years as a bachelor. I dated women from Y + 10 to Y – 28 years. A point not yet made in this discussion is that many of the older women are embittered; dating them means hearing that men are just such BASTARDS but you’re different (of course you aren’t, you’re just a generic guy); or hearing endless tales of what an asshole the first and second husbands were (if you listened between the lines they really sounded OK, if a little uxorious); and hearing all this stated right in front of the woman’s children: a little more than a little is by much too much.
An advantage to younger women not stated above is that, while statistically they are likely to let themselves physically degenerate at the same rate the older ones have, it hasn’t happened yet. There is every probabability they will be blown 28 years from now, but for the moment, they can still keep up. If you like to do 40-mile mountain-bike rides near Moab, or hunt moose and carry them out on your back, or climb 14ers, or go in for some heavy duty whitewater boating (say, Cataract Canyon at more than 60,000 cfs), you’re more likely to get cheery fitness from one of the 25-year-old set than from a 60-year-old.
Tatyana obviously has no idea what she’s talking about. 40+ women had plenty of opportunities to get hitched but couldn’t get over their hypergamy to do so.
Ever heard the story of the princess and the toad, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Niko: your proposition to women is to lower their expectations, to pay attention to men they’d never looked at 20 years ago – while the deal with men after 50 is exactly the opposite? Why, that’s a bit unfair, don’t you think?
We are talking marriage here, not bar romance, so theoretically the qualities you look for in your spouse lie deeper than the skin. Women after 40 are more suited for marriage; they look for a partner and prepared to be one, they know what it takes – unlike 25yo barely-out-of-college-princess. They should be the ones positioned to pick and choose: they are better candidates for the job. Instead men look for a an eye candy in a bright wrapping – and when discover the sour taste inside, like this here Simon Kenton above, they hop from young to younger, in hopes to avoid more bitterness.
Simon Kenton, ever occurred to you that women are bitter thanks to guys like you? You bet they should talk about their bastard ex-husbands in front of their children: their responsibility as a parent is to instill in kids the sense of right and wrong. On examples that’s close, personal, and easy to understand. They have nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to hide their ex-husbands’ behavior, unlike their former spouses.
Forgot to say: Niko, entre nous, cheri: I have plenty of qualifications for discussion. 22 years of close association with a toad, for starters.
At times like this I am glad for my little ethnic subculture here in the US. I don’t think rich guy-young woman is, how shall I say it, quite the ‘thing’, but I could be wrong, I am notoriously non-observant and ignore most things as a rule (like most of the vulgarity popular culture today. Andrew Brietbart would argue that’s a problem….)
*I don’t actually find these alpha male ‘marry young trophy wives’ types very attractive, do you Tatyana? They don’t do anything for me and I suspect I don’t do anything for them. So, things work out, as they should, but then, I was married fairly youngish to a very handsome and troubled man. Beauty does not bring happiness, as I learned the hard way.
**The older I get, the more I appreciate social conservatives, too bad they get made fun of in larger society. How nice that someone wants to live by some sense of decency (I’m off the reservation on gay marriage and immigration, conservatively speaking, but the rest I still like, pretty much).
MD,
oh I think it’s a universal thing, only the proportion varies due to cultural norms. Just look at Sir Salman and his [former] trophy.
On the other hand, when I vacationed in Portugal, it was pointed out to me, upon walking on the street, how popular is the reverse situation: older woman, sometimes almost double of her husband’s age, and a young guy. Surrounded by 3-5 kids. My friend, not a Portuguese by origin, felt absolutely no social stigma (quite the opposite, actually), being a ripe woman of 34 who married a 26yo man, after 2 years of courtship.
To live by a sense of decency, one not necessarily should be a social conservative, just…decent person.
Beauty does not bring happiness, as I learned the hard way Toads don’t bring happiness, either. You either have it inside yourself, or you don’t.
Oh, I forgot about Salman Rushdie….but he is a cultural aristo, I was talking about the dull middle class. Also, he was made fun of for that, at least, I made fun of him. What a potato he looked next to that young thing. I suppose she left him because she wanted to be with someone younger.
No, I’m not equating social conservatism with decency, I’m just saying that’s it nice to have someone stick up for certain traditional values. We should continue this conversation over at your cyber place or something…
You’re always welcome to my slice of the cyber space. As well as off-cyber space.
> So, the men have nothing to complain about if their wives get old. They either knew what they were getting into or should have. Women may have something to complain about if their husbands fail to provide materially for them as they expected.
So, it’s your position that women are all whores?
LOL.
> Niko: your proposition to women is to lower their expectations, to pay attention to men they’d never looked at 20 years ago – while the deal with men after 50 is exactly the opposite? Why, that’s a bit unfair, don’t you think?
Well, that flows as eminently reasonable from Lexington’s proposition… (snicker)
In reality, though, the fact is that women should and do have a window of greatest opportunity which occurs at a younger age than that of men. They need to make their choices sooner, or they will wind up having to “settle for less”. The counterweighting advantage of this is that, for women, their lives are much less stressful early on… the stress occurs when they are older and more experienced and knowledgeable about how to handle it. They are “more worldly”, and, if they have a mature attitude (and some don’t) they recognize its inevitability and take it in stride, as much as anyone can…
I’d argue that this is one chief reason why males are far more likely to successfully commit suicide than women, esp. young males. Far more pressure is placed on them to perform from an early age, and not to ask for help — for a man, the pressure is to succeed on your own merits entirely.
If they decide they can’t handle the pressure involved, they “opt out”. When a young girl attempts suicide, it’s far more likely a cry for help (“un”serious*, and hence more likely to be unsuccessful) that males aren’t allowed to make by the social pressures.
More simply, “it sucks to be young, but it sucks a lot more to be a young male”. Even mediocre looking girls have avenues to attain ego-reaffirming attention and interest from the opposite sex. Most guys have to learn to play the game that women entirely control when young (losing some measure of control as they age and males gain some measure of control, too — both from losing the impatience of youth and from the increasing collection of assets to offer). This is why there are a lot more male nerds than female nerds. Social ineptitude is easy if you’re a guy, it’s a lot less automatic for girls.
Similarly, no one would think twice about a 24yo girl living with her parents, but if a guy hasn’t moved away from home by then, and doesn’t have some sort of “parental caregiver” excuse, most women won’t give him the time of day. “Moving back in with your parents” isn’t a big deal for a woman, but it’s a pretty big social stigma for guy.
OTOH, I was out with a girlfriend and her younger sister and their homegirls one time, and she was being protective of her younger sister (both mid-20s, mind you). She didn’t trust her sisters’ GFs to watch out for her, because she knew she was getting a bit tipsy. She literally was afraid that the GFs would essentially abandon her sister.
Guys are a lot more trustworthy that way, I think — if guys are out with their friends and one is bordering on potential irresponsibility, the other guys will keep an eye on him and tend to make sure he gets home ok. They’re likely to let him make some stupid errors (that independence thing, again), but they’ll still keep an eye on him in case he needs help.
My point is, in general, there’s a lot of give and take to the sex roles males and females have developed over human history. One of the biggest complaints against “capital-F” Feminism is that it has tried to provide all the benefits of being male to women, and remove all the disadvantages of being female, while never addressing the disadvantages of being male, or the advantages of being female. Feminism wants all the goodies, but none of the downsides.
“What Feminism has contributed to women’s options must be supported. But when Feminists suggest that God might be a She without [ever considering] that the Devil might also be female, they must be opposed.”
– Warren Farrell –
======================================
* I use that term very carefully — any suicide attempt is “serious”, but there is a substantial difference in determination to succeed, I think, between the approach of most young males vs. that of most young females.
40+ pre-menopausal, acrid, self righteous entitlement queens have no ‘right’ to pick and choose. Isn’t evolution wonderful how it rewards humility (marriage, family and babies)and punishes selfishness(haggard spinsters still holding out).
Heh, talking of bitterness and venom…
Tatyana – some carry their scars for many years…..
I have a different take on the attractiveness of older, successful people, a number of whom I’ve been fortunate to know. I believe from what I’ve experienced that such people first had whatever it took to “win” big money: people skills, brains, luck, panache. That translates into an interesting, maybe even into a fascinating person who in fact does have high intrinsic value that may be lacking in those who are critical of the young wives. And because of that lack they are jealous and, thus, they exhibit as being cynical and critical. This is just my take in the ‘generalized’ sense. The commenters here, including me, don’t know this man, they don’t know his history or the story behind whatever may have happened between him and “wife 1.0,” either. I sense a lot of transference is taking place here.
This thread is great.
If anyone doesn’t think that the main reason attractive, younger women date older men is primarily due to wealth I think that they are deluding themselves.
Someone should do a study some time and look for instances of attractive, younger women who date poor, older males and see how that goes.
Not that there is anything wrong with that (to quote Seinfeld), but I do get a bit of a chuckle when the wealth goes away along with the love and that is what I wrote about originally.
Sorry if that thesis hits close to home but I think that it is easily statistically supported.
Carl,
I would be interested in looking at your statistical support. I do not doubt that wealth is attractive to women, that younger women are more attractive to men, and that some of what you say here is true. But I am also interested in what variables such statistics take into account, how much they accept the couple’s definition of their motives and how much they attribute to the couple motivations hard to prove but of which the researchers were sure, walking into the study.
I actually do know a variety of people who have fairly large age differentials; these lead to marriages less companiable, perhaps. But all the men are not wealthy – nor were they at the time of the marriage. Your cynicism simplifies human nature and the drives of humans to mate. That these are important factors goes without saying.
Sorry I am watching the statistics on my portfolio too closely now (bad ones) to search for sociology statistics :)
I used to live in a tiny, super wealthy town and so many of the couples fit into this mould – that is where it hit me.
Plus for various reasons I encounter many of these people in my regular life.
To be honest, it is my spouse that pointed this out. She is not a big fan of wife 2.0
Why would a beautiful 30-somthing marry a wealthy 60-something? Because he told her he was a wealthy 80-something!
I was dating a younger woman who was talking about it to her boss, saying, “You don’t suppose this is just a father-fixation, do you?” Her boss said, “Why, Tatyana, NO! Certainly not. ALL the 18-year-old girls are crazy about bald blind middle-aged guys.”
Mr. Kenton,
Pardon me?
Don’t use my name in vain.
From The Navaho Origin Legend (compiled and translated by Washington Matthews)
I The Story of the Emergence:
…
172. First Man was the chief of all these people in the fourth world, except the Kisáni. He was a great hunter, and his wife, First Woman, was very corpulent. One day he brought home from the hunt a fine fat deer. The woman boiled some of it and they had a hearty meal. When they were done the woman wiped her greasy hands on her dress, and made a remark which greatly enraged her husband; they had a quarrel about this, which First Man ended by jumping across the fire and remaining by himself in silence for the rest of the night./32
/32. The quarrel between First Man and First Woman came to pass in this way. When she had finished her meal she wiped her hands in her dress and said: “E’yéhe si-tzod” (Thanks, my vagina.) “What is that you say?” asked First Man. “E’yéhe si-tzod,” she repeated. “Why do you speak thus?” he queried; “Was it not I who killed the deer whose flesh you have eaten? Why do you not thank me? Was it tzod that killed the deer?” “Yes,” she replied; “if it were not for that, you would not have killed the deer. If it were not for that, you lazy men would do nothing. It is that which does all the work.” “Then, perhaps, you women think you can live without the men,” he said. “Certainly we can. It is we women who till the fields and gather food: we can live on the produce of our fields, and the seeds and fruits we collect. We have no need of you men.” Thus they argued. First Man became more and more angry with each reply that his wife made, until at length, in wrath, he jumped across the fire.
/33. During the separation of the sexes, both the men and the women were guilty of shameful practices, which the story-tellers very particularly describe. Through the transgressions of the women the anáye, alien gods or monsters, who afterwards nearly annihilated the human race, came into existence; but no evil consequences followed the transgressions of the men. Thus, as usual, a moral lesson is conveyed to the women, but none to the men.