Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped Into the Romantic Dream--And How They're Paying For It

235 Pages·2009·1.28 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Ford

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Smart Girls
Marry Money
(cid:2)
Elizabeth Ford
& Daniela Drake, MD
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© 2009 by Elizabeth Ford & Daniela Drake
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and
International Copyright Conventions
Printed in the United States
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known
or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922153
ISBN 978-0-7624-3517-3
Cover and interior design by Jason Kayser
Photo research by Susan Oyama
Edited by Jennifer Kasius
Typography: Mercury and Verlag.
Running Press Book Publishers
2300 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371
Visit us on the web!
www.runningpress.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 First Things First. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2 Fiction: Having it All. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3 Feminasties. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4 Falling in Love: Temporary Insanity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5 The Fluffer Wife. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
6 Farewell: Why We Leave. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
7 Fight the Fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
8 Fragments: X & Y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
9 Faux Pas: Sex at the Workplace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
10 Fooled: The Myth of Meritocracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
11 Fast-Track: Be a Man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
12 Furious: Anger at Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
13 Frustration: Sex and the Successful Woman. . . . . . 95
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14 Flex-Time: The Working Mother. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
15 Fads & Fashion: A Timeline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
16 Fugly or Femilicious? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
17 Fuck Yourself. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
18 Foraging: Gold-Digging in Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
19 Fabulous, but Foolish. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
20 Finding Fidelity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
21 Facelift: Gold-Digging After 40. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
22 411: How to Score a Man with Money. . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
23 Financial Freak-Out. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
24 Fragile: Being Male in a Man’s World. . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
25 The Future of Marriage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
26 Forward Thinking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Endnotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
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Please note that all of our stories are true,
but some characters are composites.
After all, we had to protect the identities of
the guilty and innocent alike.
Smart girls don’t like to be sued.
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7
CHAPTER 1
First Things First
Most women use more brains
picking a horse in the third at Belmont
than they do picking a husband.
LAUREN BACALL, HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE
(cid:2)
Meet the modern woman. Okay, yeah, we’ve already met
her and she prefers to be called “girl.” That’s cool. We dig.
We’re girls too. And as girls, we’ve got some vital info to
report.
After attending a few class reunions we noticed many lady
lawyers, doctors and MBAs were still slaving after forty, while
lots of less brainy gals were taking long vacations from their
day jobs, shopping at Prada and enjoying more than their fair
share of hot-stone massages.
We asked ourselves, “Why do (some) bimbos fare better
than the smart chicks?”
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8 SMART GIRLS
Having taken a whirl or two in the love dance, we found
ourselves wishing that someone had warned usof the pitfalls
of falling in love, marrying the wrong guy or the agony of
divorce. Why didn’t Mom tell us? If your mother didbother
to give you any solid advice on life, like most daughters, you
probably weren’t listening.
Since we think of ourselves as smart girls, we often like to
support our ideas with research. And one of our favorite well-
supported observations is this: People are more likely to take
advice from strangers than from their friends or family.
So listen to us, because we care, we really do. Here’s the
bottom line—whether you’re drop-dead gorgeous, skinny, fat,
or even if you think you’re just plain fugly(cid:2)—we girls have one
big obligation to ourselves and our families:
Find your fortune while you’re young and
marry a man with money.
Buttressed by experience, we use cold hard facts, real sci-
ence and true stories that back up the case for what we call:
The Gold-Digging Imperative—“The GDI”
(cid:2)fug(cid:129)ly [fuhg-lee] Slang: Vulgar. As defined by UrbanDictionary.com, “fugly” is a term used
when someone is “morethan just ugly.”
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MARRY MONEY 9
We don’t think “gold-digging” should be frowned upon.
Why, we wonder, does society applaud a girl who falls for a
guy’s “big blue eyes,” yet denounces one who chooses a man
with a “big green bankroll”?
What’s the difference? Earning power is, after all, a reflec-
tion of his values and character. Big blue eyes? Not so much.
The average guy believes most gals are only looking for
money, but the truth is too few of us are interested in their
income at all. The modern gal is earning her own cash and is
looking for emotional security.
Too bad it doesn’t exist.
What’s worse, national statistics1show women suffer far
more economically than men when marriages fail. With this
in mind, we have some advice, and please take it in the gen-
tlest possible way: Girl, get your head out of your ass. Instead
of looking for love, let’s look out for our own security, the kind
you can count in dollars and cents.
Now we’re not saying that money equals happiness. Every-
one knows even the very wealthy can be downright, even bit-
terly, miserable. This is not about “happily ever after.” It’s
about being smart and avoiding economic disaster by clinging
to old paradigms about love and marriage.
Marrying for money isn’t new. In fact, throughout history
spousal arrangements have rarely taken any other form. In the
past, marriage was primarily a system to promote the financial,