From Tierney's column:
A woman's earning power, while hardly the first thing that men look for, has become a bigger draw, as shown in surveys of college students over the decades. In 1996, for the first time, college men rated a potential mate's financial prospects as more important than her skills as a cook or a housekeeper.
Wow. Interestingly, I've always hoped my mate would have far greater earning power than me. The profession I've chosen isn't exactly lucrative, a reality that hasn't fully extinguished my desire to eat at restaurants and eventually ascend out of apartment living, and marrying a breadwinner able to bring home lovingly-crafted, artisanal loaves would be an excellent method of bridging my chosen occupation and my ideal lifestyle. That some folks would find such an arrangement humiliating and/or unacceptable is just unaccountable bizarre to me. Unfortunately, there may be a kink in my plan:
The women surveyed were less willing to marry down - marry someone with much lower earnings or less education - than the men were to marry up. And, in line with Jane Austen, the women were also more determined to marry up than the men were.
You may think that women's attitudes are changing as they get more college degrees and financial independence. A women who's an executive can afford to marry a struggling musician. But that doesn't necessarily mean she wants to. Studies by David Buss of the University of Texas and others have shown that women with higher incomes, far from relaxing their standards, put more emphasis on a mate's financial resources.
Nuts. Oh, and I can't let this column go by without quoting this bit:
"Of course, some women marry for love and find a man's resources irrelevant," Buss says. "It's just that the men women tend to fall in love with, on average, happen to have more resources."
Ouch.