Loved the financial arguement and the idea of leasing… you know if I were her, I’d go on a date with him just to meet this dude…

Most of the population is NOT rich. So if you’re beautiful, how do you gauge who is “rich enough” for your beauty? :)

These are tough questions women have never had to ask themselves until they wake up at the age of 40, alone, and wishing they had said yes to that guy in high school or college who now has a beautiful family and a solid but not super-rich job.

A marriage is always a business transaction. Any relationship you’ve ever had in your world is a transaction of some sort.

But a transaction doesn’t always mean it involves money. It can involve love or personality as a trade (think: parents, friends)..

A woman who only offers looks and not brains, is not someone (in my opinion) worth having. It’s why I’m so harsh on girls who dress slutty or think that being beautiful and *giggle* slightly dumb to their superior man is a good strategy.

In some cases.. yeah. But in 99.999% of the cases, they end up alone, still hoping at the age of 40 that someone will put a rock on their finger but their main asset (beauty, not their brains), has already deteriorated.

I see SO MANY of these women here in Montreal (no kidding…) and it’s sad to hear how high the divorce rate is among the french-canadians. But they all have the same stupid strategy. Beauty for money.

That being said, I think it’s TOTALLY FINE to trade beauty for money. As long as both sides understand what they’re getting out of the relationship. I’ve seen many relationships where beauty for money, has lasted more than relationships based on love.

So.. to me, as long as they’re both happy then kudos. The CL guy is clearly looking for beauty AND brains, which is what I think we should all try and teach women to obtain. And if I were to pick one of the two, I’d keep my brains and not my beauty.

*shrug* Sorry for the mini rant.

In my case, I am a very primitive provider. I want my wife to be cared for on a needs level. Aside from that, I am extremely despondent. She knows this and has accepted that about me. From a basic level I am just not built for “love.” I am a misanthrope so it makes it hard to forge human relationships.

That aside, I just think some PEOPLE in general look at life differently and place different values on what they think marriage is. I think if two people want it to be a business deal, that is fine. If their 2 neighbors married out of pure love and have a very even 50/50 deal going on, that is also great. I personally believe people are so complex and so different, some people are simply built to do things differently in life than others.

I’d say the CL response was spot on!

My wife has a friend who also thinks her looks should be able to fetch her a “successful” man. She’d routinely thumb her nose at guys with “normal” jobs while holding out for something better.

She is now starting to come back to earth after having been single for a long time. But she is having trouble finding a taker. I find the irony to be quite entertaining. But I keep that to myself.

All that said – would I want it for myself? Heck no! And that is not just because I don’t trust my family’s taste! If I ever chose to marry again, it will be for love. However, I do think that the points you make about being on the same page financially are extremely important. They are a lot more important than I knew when I married. I married a man who offered me practically every material thing I ever wanted… little did I know it was all paid for with huge piles of debt. Never, ever, again.

I have not read Jane Austen but coincidentally, I was doing genealogical research lately and found something about some ancestors of mine who lived during what appears to be the same time period Austen wrote about.

Joshua Belitha Tilghman, born 1762, who fought in the revolutionary war, married Patsy Taylor and the one child produced by that marriage is my great-great (times I forget how many) grandfather. But sadly, Patsy died almost immediately after giving birth and within one year Joshua married Chloe Taylor, Patsy’s sister.

I thought this was strange and wondered if he just happened to love Patsy’s sister and that made a remarriage choice easy. But (correct me if I’m wrong) I suspected that given the social customs of that time (and this is what Austen wrote about, I guess) it might have been more a matter of families making alliances in ways that benefited both of them, more than a matter of who was smitten with whom.

Joshua and Chloe went on to have a huge number of children, by the way… let me look it up… ten more. At least one descendant of whom I have contacted; he’s about my age and wrote something about this on the interwebs and I guess we’re cousins, from way back (six great-grandparents back, I think I counted), through the half-siblings (my ancestor and his ancestor, who was one of the ten.)