Show Me the Money and the Ring

    Forget “richer or poorer” — when Americans marry, they’re decidedly looking for someone to show them the money. A recent survey by the Connecticut firm, Prince & Associates, showed that two-thirds of 1,134 people polled nationwide would marry an average-looking person they liked if they had money — and by money, they meant in the ballpark of $1.5 million. Survey respondents had incomes between $30,000 and $60,000, the national median.

Russ Alan Prince, who studies the wealthy, explains the phenomenon simply: “People want to have the good life.”            

“Most people get upset because it’s politically incorrect — well, so is life,” Prince says. “People want the money, it’s not a big secret. Once again, ‘I’m living on $30,000 a year, if I had a million dollars I don’t have to do this nonsense job anymore’ — that actually can be appealing to a lot of people.”            

But the survey respondents were savvy enough to know that money can’t buy them love: A full 43 percent said they expected they’d probably end up divorced from their dreamed-of money mate. Though gold-digging has a long, storied history, today’s divorced daters aren’t doing it any more than in the past, says Rosalind Sedacca, founder of the Child-Centered Divorce Network and author of “How Do I Tell the Kids about the Divorce?”            

The reality is, many men and women who divorce expect to remarry in a year or two, but are surprised when five to ten years elapse without anything magical happening, she says. The reason, in part, is that they’ve become highly selective about partners. “I have not found that money is the primary criteria – although it’s always a factor for women,” Sedacca says.            

More often, the selectivity revolves around understanding and avoiding the pitfalls of the first marriage. “Many divorced parents found that they originally married for the wrong reasons – including putting money first – and then suffered the consequences of a marriage devoid of intimacy, respect and parental collaboration,” Sedacca says. “These people certainly try to create new relationships with healthier outcomes.”

But the fact that today, more people are getting married later – or for the second or third time – means that there’s an increased astuteness about money and practicality about marriage in general. Family attorney Alexis Martin Neely, who runs a personal money management web site, www.FamilyWealthMatters.com, says the starry-eyed love of young twentysomething newlyweds transforms into something more no-nonsense in subsequent nuptials.  

“They learn from the mistakes made early in life or in first marriages and realize that a marriage is a lot more like a business partnership in which two people are coming together to create a great life together and a lot less like the lifetime romantic love affairs that one too many Danielle Steele novels led us to believe are our destiny,” she says.