When Should You Marry For Money?


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Most people are appalled at this question. Marry for money?!! I can just hear the tsk tsk remarks. And yet, this isn’t a foreign concept to us. Americans marry for money all the time. I live in LA. I think more people here marry for money than any other reason. Well, power and influence are big ones too.

Marrying for money is frowned upon. It’s materialistic. It’s shallow. What about love? What about happiness? But as much as you want to shake your head and “tsk”, you should know that money and wealth has been the basis for marriage throughout most of history.

Americans marry for LOVE. Well, most of them do anyway. This may seem like a normal statement to make, but when placed in a historical context, the idea of marrying for love is unusual.

Even in modern times, when there is more freedom in the world overall, America has more people marrying for love than anywhere else in the world. “Prior to the mid 1800s, a majority of people married for social, economic, or political reasons. Marriage partners were generally chosen by family members, not the individuals getting married. After the Industrial Revolution, the basis of marriage began shifting toward love and personal fulfillment. ” So what was it about the Industrial Revolution and freedom that changed marriage from a financial deal to emotional love?

The Industrial Revolution was not a political, social, or cultural revolution, although it led to many such implications later in its existence. It was an economic revolution, which means it changed our ability to build more wealth for our society, by changing the way the world produced its goods. It also changed our societies from being mainly agricultural to ones in which industry and manufacturing were in control.

The American Revolution occurred in the beginning part of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution at the turn of the 19th century, which resulted in newly found democratic rights and freedoms that spread through Europe and North America, although America was to experience the most liberties of anyone.

The fact that we got freedom at the same time that we were able to advance the way we made goods was the stars aligning for us. With freedom came great leaps of technology and economic prosperity during the industrial revolution. Our government was small (back then) and citizens had the freedom to innovate, create, and make money without a cumbersome government controlling their property, over-regulating them, and taxing them to death. (We no longer have this system today) Americans could actually build wealth and create value. They could prosper without having to be an elite or a royal (like in other countries) – they just had to be a smart and hard worker. And so they prospered.

And the Constitution protected their property rights so they felt safe, because what good is it to work for things if a government or other thieves can take it away at will (taxes). With prosperity and safety came comfort. And with comfort came the luxury to choose a partner based on something other than their status or their economic means…..Love.

I admit that this is an incredibly simplistic explanation. But you get the general gist of it. I encourage you to read further into it. It’s fascinating. Freedom in America has granted us many luxuries, marrying for love being just one of them.

We are starting to see more women marry for money again (It’s true. Google it. There are many articles on it) and it’s safe to assume that part of the reason is because the free America we had has disappeared, swallowed by the massive government we see growing out of Washington D.C. daily. They have created an unstable, unprosperous economy in their attempts to control that which is uncontrollable – our economy!

And so the human part of us that wants safety is driving many people to, again, pick their partner based on economic or social status, rather than love. Gold diggers make their decisions based on trying to find stability and safety for themselves. If you hate gold diggers, and most of us do, just know that when you’re not living in a free world, people are nothing but gold diggers and status seekers because survival can depend on it.

Our current government is too big, too expensive, and tramples on our freedoms and Consitutional rights. If they continue to grow bigger with more programs and more power under their belts, they will weaken our economy, which will lose us our prosperity. That means they are affecting our love lives and we’ll find ourselves neck deep in gold-diggers – men and women!

When you vote, do not vote for government peeps who want to expand their own power by “giving” us more programs. They will only put us in more debt. In the end, we want true love and only freedom gives us that.

 

1. http://csusb.academia.edu/KellyCampbell/Papers/260695

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