GIVE ME A BREAK:SHOULD I BE telling my daughters to marry rich? To throw away the notion of falling in love and settle for a "fugly" nerd who may be short and hirsute but whose financial planning and career trajectory makes up for his lack of the sexy gene?
Elizabeth Ford and Daniela Drake think I should. Their book, Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream – and How They're Paying for Itis pretty convincing. I've left it lying around in the hope that one of the girls will pick it up and give me their critique, but exams are on at the moment so they're not so easily distracted.
My daughters are putting their all into their talents and education (when they’re not doing their hair – the shampoo bills! Argh!) and sometimes I do wonder if it’s worth it – the study, not the hair. Look at it this way, no matter how high they achieve academically, they will earn less than men and if they divorce, chances are they’ll end up living in poverty if their exes aren’t capable of a good settlement.
As Maureen Dowd has written, in Are Men Necessary?,among corporate executives who earn $100,000 a year or more, 49 per cent of the women do not have children compared with only 10 per cent of men. In other words, it's all fine for women to get an education in order to make themselves worthy consorts, like geishas, but at the end of the day (or the marriage) a woman's wealth will be measured by her husband's earnings, not her own.
Meanwhile, as my daughters struggle to become the independent women I hope I've taught them to be, men will be flocking to them looking for a shag. One Dublin nightclub even has a "score floor", the noughties version of what in the 1980s was called a "meat rack". My girls are too smart to fall for that, but I still would like them to remember Lauren Bacall's statement in How to Marry a Millionaire: "Most women use more brains picking a horse in the third at Belmont than they do picking a husband." Arranged marriage is the way forward: guys think all young women are juicy; juicy young women should ignore the dishy gardener for the accountant and be willing to settle for financial security and compatibility rather than romance. And do it soon, because women have a sell-by date.
Endless love and having it all are fictions, I agree. My daughters call it “the talk”. I haven’t tried to clip their wings, but I have explained as a 25-year-veteran of work and marriage that both conditions are not rosebeds and if they do occasionally bloom, beware of the greenfly. Being in love lasts about two years, and work for most women brings a two-income mortgage but not riches. After that it’s about two people working hard to build a life with children against the sort of odds that you can’t envisage when walking up the aisle.
But even I couldn’t have imagined “the talk” that Ford and Drake (a medical doctor) have given me. I’ve got it all wrong – absolutely utterly. My life would be perfect if I had done just two things: number one: discovered my G-spot and number two: married a financially-sound man with whom I wasn’t in love.
Love is the deal-breaker. Don’t trust your love hormones because they turn your brain to jelly (medical explanation in the Smart Girls book) and you don’t need love to have great sex.Anyway, to have had a happier life I should have been a gold-digger and to ensure my daughters have happy lives, I should educate them to be gold-diggers, too. All that money on school-fees and grinds is being wasted. Bring on the fake tan.
This began to ring true in the shopping centre the other day when I envied the beautiful new shoes, bag, nails, hair and toned bottom of Volvo-driving Superquinn Mother on the escalator above me and realised that she was a full-time rich housewife with plenty of time and money for personal maintenance. In my worn-out smelly runners (I use public transportation) I felt like the maid, to be honest.
As I travelled home, I put my nose back into the book and read Nancy Etcoff PhD's quote from Survival of the Prettiest: "Good looks are a woman's most fungible asset, exchangeable for social position, money and even love." No wonder teenage girls are confused. I've now hidden away the book. I might burn it. My final word: how incredibly depressing. What about my son?
