More Men Marrying Wealthier Women

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/us/19marriage.html

by fiaz • 17 years ago

17 13 17 years ago

> “We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group.

My first thought was that's a pretty huge [citation needed], but then I checked out the CCF website.

http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/

Actually, the rotating graphic they had that said "CCF is dedicated to..." struck me as interesting and compelling, it's worth watching for a few seconds if you have the time. It's a mix of very traditional family scenes and very modern scenes in the same graphic. Interestingly composed and put together, I feel a little more informed just having looked at it for a bit.

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

The idea that men "need" marriage more than women is sketchy, IMO.

My suspicion: whoever came up with that conclusion picked a few metrics which women value more than men (e.g., house cleanliness, frequency of doctor visits). They determined that men score higher on these metrics when they are married and concluded men need marriage more.

Considering how many men are avoiding marriage these days, and how much effort women spend on trying to get men to marry them, I suspect that this conclusion is false.

bayleo2• 17 years ago

The usual argument is evolutionary; i.e. men have a biological incentive to embrace monogamy to help prevent the chances of being cuckolded while women do not. I'm not supporting it, as it is an equally untestable hypothesis, just mentioning it for the sake of the discussion.

kingkawn• 17 years ago

Now to tap into this trend successfully...

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Did I land on 'Cosmo' by accident ?

yardie• 17 years ago

To take it to its logical conclusion: Wealthy men are putting off marriage because of the current divorce laws or are marrying women who are equal or wealthier than them. Wealthy women don't face such problems. Ex husbands generally don't file alimony.

tjic• 17 years ago

This all boils down to one things: in a knowledge economy, women can earn more than they can in a brute-force-and-muscle economy.

There are two bell curves: income of men, and income of women. At one point, the men's income bellcurve was way to the right of the women's: it was a rare woman who earned more than ANY man. Thus, marriages of lower earning men to higher earning women were very rare.

Now, the women's bellcurve has moved to the right, so that it 85% overlaps men's.

There are a lot more possible pairings of men and women where the woman earns more.

This NYT article isn't really news - it's the inevitable outcome of the industrial and information revolutions.

lmkg• 17 years ago

Is the trend really "More men marrying wealthier women," or is it simply "More women are wealthy?" A skim of the article would seem to imply the latter at least as much as the former, possibly more.

More Men Marrying Wealthier Women

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