Quote:
Originally posted by castille,
I would imagine that personality is more important to a marriage than money.
After all, money is an object, but personality is human. Bill Gates marrying Miss Ethiopia can succeed if both of their personalities are compatable.
I know one couple - the husband owns at least 100 investment properties and runs his own oil company, while the wife came from a rural family who were lucky to have food. The husband is the breadwinner, while the wife provided emotional support and looked after the kids.
They are very happy. The oil man gets a source of human companionship in the unemotional world of oil drilling (try spending a month on an oil rig!), the wife gets a secure future for her kids with a rich husband.
On the other hand, if Bill Gates and Martha Stewart had conflicting personalities, they'd still be unhappy. |
You know the functionalist THEORY. Male bread-winnner does this, female nurturer does that, everybody happy - power, economic inequality not an issue.
While the theory sounds nice, the statistical reality shows something different.
For one thing, your oil guy - in the real world - was standing a very low chance to end up with a woman coming from a family where she barely had a roof over her head. That he did anyway - that's another story. But chances for this kind of thing to happen are low in general.
In real life, money begets money. "Good families" live in their own world, with establishments (such as neighborhods, clubs, schools, etc) designed to act as "good breeding" grounds and gate keepers.
No matter how much we like to idealize the "ideal situation" - Succesful Man marries Poor-but-oh-so-Cindarella-woman - things don't work like this in real life.Besides there's no shortage of hot women among the rich families, on the contrary ...you are more likely to find hot women in well-to-do families than in those that come from poverty.
Beauty itsef has a lot to do with economics, with family history etc (and I am not talking about plastic surgery).
And if people still believe that the US is that perfectly "classless" society, impeccable meritocracy... where the smartest and the hardest-working guy simply gets the most beautiful girl...they are naive, to say in the least.