Interestingly, this is a topic that I've come across a few times recently. The first was my friend telling me that her adult son (previously married with children) was saying that first question women ask when he meets them is what he does for a living. Then recently I read an article about women in China and India being outnumbered men in such large amounts that the men have to have a good job and a house to even have a chance of marrying and even then it's not certain.

When I think of the couples I know who have been together for a long time, financial status didn't come into it. They got together because they fell in love, sometimes despite financial problems. I know of one couple where the husband is constantly racking up debts and the wife has to budget to keep covering them. They keep their income separate purely so she can manage this and he doesn't lose her income too. She won't take control of all the finances because she doesn't want to remove his freedom from him.

I can imagine that some women might break off a relationship with someone they care about to marry someone better off, but they are likely putting security over their happiness. My great, great grandparents fell in love and were going to marry, but his sister suddenly became a widow and on her deathbed, his mother made him promise to take care of his sister and her children. My great, great grandmother's parents didn't want her to wait for him, so they arranged for her to marry someone else and move to the country. She had two sons with that man and they later died, one in the first world war and the other as a young adult, but I'm not sure how. After their deaths she managed to get a divorce from her husband due to him being abusive. She came back to her home town, met my great, great grandfather again and they married and had one child together before she could no longer bear children.

Posted using Partiko Android