Should You Marry for Money?

For generations, it was not only accepted but encouraged

“It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man,” my mother used to tell me.

I suppose she was right but I never cared about money all that much when I was young and I never dated a wealthy man whom I wanted to be with. Now that I’m in my 60s, I realize just how naive I was — about not caring about money, that is. I was clearly heading toward a financially disastrous future despite a 40-year career in journalism.

Still, the thought of marrying someone for their wealth rubs most of us the wrong way. That’s what gold diggers do. The only “right” reason to marry is for love, right?

Well, actually no. Or at least not always.

Marrying mainly for love didn’t really start in earnest until the mid-19th century and as marriage historian Stephanie Coontz observes, once love became the main event, it was seen as a “serious threat to social order.”

In truth, there is no “right” or “wrong” reason to marry, as my coauthor and I detail in our book The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realist and Rebels, and that includes marrying for financial reasons.

Yes, it’s marrying for money or benefits or both that can only be attained through marriage (and why only married people can have those perks and protections is a whole other discussion). We call it a safety marriage and describe it as:

“an agreement between two people, stated or not (but better if stated out loud and even better if stated in a prenup), that says, ‘You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.’ … It can be an exchange of anything the couple agrees on, material or immaterial.”

Note that we indicate that it’s an exchange “the couple agrees on” (my emphasis) because both people must understand and agree to what they are doing and why. If one or both aren’t being honest with the other, well, Houston, we have a problem.

As an example, we share the story of Terri Carlson, a single mom of four who lost her health insurance after divorcing. Because she had a preexisting condition — an autoimmune disease that required pricey meds (this was before the Affordable Care Act) — she couldn’t get health insurance. So she launched a blog with a name that announced her dilemma and suggested a radical solution — “Will Marry for Health Insurance.” Pretty quickly, she got nearly 75,000 responses, including 12,000 marriage proposals from military men—they earn significantly more money if they are married (there’s that marriage privilege).

As Carlson said at the time,

“Is there ever a good reason to get married other than for love? Yeah, life and death. There are people who are literally losing their life. They have no health insurance. They’re going to lose their home. They’re going to lose their life savings. In situations like that, when you’re talking life and death, yeah, you would marry to save your life and get the treatment that you need.”

No one should have to do that.

I have written before than a husband is not a financial plan and that women should never depend on a romantic partner financially (which is why the whole stay-at-home girlfriend fad on TikTok is distressing). I don’t like the idea of marrying for money or being financially dependent on a man just like I have no desire to have a man marry me for whatever money I have or wanting to be financially dependent on me — good luck, guys!

Yet throughout history, Americans have married for numerous practical reasons that have nothing to do with love, writes Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, in her fascinating new book, You’ll Do: a History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love.

While she offers numerous examples of people putting a ring on it as a way to sidestep unfair or discriminatory laws — whether about immigration, access to pensions or even as a way to avoid a rape charge (seriously!)— my focus here is on her exploration about marrying for money.

Believe it or not, historically marrying for money wasn’t seen as anything “bad.” In fact, it was encouraged and supported — if you were a woman, that is.

In early America, Zug writes,

“[M]arriage was women’s primary and preferred financial option. In an exchange known as the marital bargain, women traded domestic services for economic support.”

(Have we truly come all that far from this? No, but, I digress.)

And it was accepted because not only did women have little to no financial options in those days, but also because getting married wasn’t a threat to a husband’s wealth. Once a woman became a Mrs., she had no legal claim to her husband’s money — the best that could happen for her was that her husband was willing to share the wealth (even though there were no requirements that he did).

Interestingly, the first gold diggers were … men. During colonial times, men had a strong incentive to marry wealthy women because of the same coverture laws that prevented a woman from having a legal claim to her husband’s money. Once a man and woman married, however, husbands were entitled to “immediate and total control over their wife’s wealth.”

(As an aside, coverture laws have never been fully abolished, they’ve just been diminished over time. Think about that.)

But the government was not playing and so it passed numerous anti-gold-digging laws to stop “male fortune hunters,” she writes.

OK, maybe the government had women’s backs for a while. But only wealthy women.

Throughout the 1920s, single women just didn’t make enough income from their work to be able to support a husband and children and most couldn’t keep their jobs once they married anyway. So marriage was still a woman’s way to financial security.

It wasn’t until the United States entered World War II that women began to finally earn decent wages, enough to support themselves. As great as that sounds, it didn’t work out well, Zug writes:

“Suddenly, women didn’t need to marry for money. American men should have been thrilled. Tellingly, they were not. Women’s potential economic independence made men fearful. Without a financial need for marriage, many worried that women might no longer choose to marry.”

And, no surprise, women increasingly are no longer choosing to marry, especially financially independent middle-aged and older women. Once women were able to make their own money and not have to rely on a husband to survive, fewer actually had to look at a man’s financial portfolio to see if he can support her and a family.

Still, as Zug notes, that isn’t an option for every woman.

“[G]ender inequality means marrying for money remains many women’s best financial option.”

Although she was talking about how women need to protect themselves in the event of divorce, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest Sallie Krawcheck acknowledges that,

“Women who want money are portrayed in the media as being unattractive and shrewish.”

Why does society want to keep women from money? As Beyoncé famously said, money equals power and if women have money, they also have power. Powerful women can be scary to many men.

Typically when a couple divorces, it’s almost universally assumed that a woman who gave up her career to support her spouse is now somehow “walking away with his money.” That’s exactly how MacKenzie Bezos was talked about when she divorced, forgetting that there’s no way Jeff Bezos would have been as successful as he is without her support and hard work.

Once again, women are damned if they do — choose to marry for some financial security — and damned if they don’t — opt not to wed because they’re financially secure on their own.

Wednesday Martin created a stir when she wrote about wife bonuses given to wealthy women on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side in her book Primates of Park Avenue. The bonuses were:

“distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a ‘good’ school’ — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks.”

Many were horrified by the idea, but as I have written, the real horror is the economic inequality and dependency that occurs in a breadwinner-homemaker marriage. No wonder more women are saying, “I don’t.”

But with more well-educated and financially independent women now than ever, could it be that we’ll see more male gold diggers? A recent study suggests, yes.

Don’t expect to see any anti-gold-digging laws being passed to stop “male fortune hunters” anytime soon, however. Somehow, society will just end up blaming it on women again.

My book on changing the narrative about aging as a woman, “Not Too Old For That: How Women Are Changing the Story of Aging,” was named a “Best Book of 2022” by Take the Lead and my forthcoming book, “LATitude: How to Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work” will be published July 9, 2024. Follow me on Medium, Threads, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you want to support my work and have unlimited access to the writing of all Medium writers, please become a member here.