Wealthy Marriages: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Money may not buy happiness, but it does seem to go along with a lower likelihood of divorce.

A research article published in Demography in 2023 found that wealth was associated with lower divorce risk, even after accounting for numerous other factors.

The biggest differences appeared at modest positive levels of wealth. The findings didn’t suggest that every additional million made a marriage more secure.

A separate study by Jeffrey Dew, published in 2009, explored what might explain the connection between assets and divorce. Two factors statistically accounted for that relationship:

1. How satisfied wives were with their marriages.
2. What wives thought their standard of living would be if they divorced.

Interestingly, husbands’ characteristics didn’t explain the connection in the same way.

That raises a prickly question: How much does preserving a lifestyle figure into preserving a marriage?

The findings of a single study don’t prove that women stayed for the money. But they do suggest that the marriage itself and the financial future that would likely exist if it were dissolved both belong in the conversation.

But the bigger question, and the one these studies don’t address is whether staying married produced a happier life than leaving would have.

How Do You Measure Happiness?

Happiness, by its very nature, is personal. What makes one person happy may have no effect on another.

The opposite is also true.

What makes one person unhappy won’t even faze someone else.

That makes happiness difficult to measure.

It’s even more difficult to define.

And, what’s most difficult of all, is determining what causes marital happiness and isolating those factors that lie at the root of marital happiness from those that have more to do with life happiness.

For example:

You might love your children, your neighborhood, your work, and your financial security. At the same time, you might also dread spending an uninterrupted weekend alone with your spouse.

Or you might have a marriage that’s light on romance but rich in friendship, trust, and shared purpose … and you might feel perfectly content with that arrangement.

So trying to figure out whether wealthy married couples are more or less happy than their less wealthy counterparts, is tricky.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Imagine two couples.

The first takes separate vacations, sleeps in separate bedrooms, and rarely spends an evening together. Both genuinely like their independence. Neither feels deprived.

The second has exactly the same arrangement. One spouse feels desperately lonely. The other assumes everything is fine because nobody is arguing.

From the outside, those marriages might look identical.

From the inside, they’re different worlds.

Research developing the Positive–Negative Relationship Quality scale offers another useful distinction.

Ambivalence, or having both strong positive and negative feelings about a relationship, isn’t the same as indifference, i.e. having no strong feelings about the relationship at all.

For someone deciding whether to stay married, that distinction matters.

“I love you, but our fights are exhausting” presents a different problem from “We get along, but I don’t feel connected to you anymore.”

Neither problem can be understood by looking at the couple’s balance sheet.

Money Can Fund More Than One Kind of Marriage

Money can support connection or it can make disconnection easier to accommodate.

It can pay for childcare so you spend time together. It can also pay for enough space that you rarely have to interact.

It can fund a vacation that brings you closer together. It can fund separate trips that spare you from having to deal with each other on vacation at all.

The number in your bank account doesn’t tell you which kind of marriage is happening.

Neither does the fact that you’re still married.

If you’ve found a way of living that genuinely works for both of you, you don’t need to manufacture a problem because someone else expects more romance.

But if you’re using comfort to quiet a persistent sense that something important is missing, that deserves your attention.

There’s a difference between enjoying your marriage and repeatedly retreating from it.

Is Staying Married to Keep Your Lifestyle Wrong?

Can you acknowledge what this marriage gives you and what it doesn’t?

Does your spouse understand the arrangement the same way?

Are you accepting its limits, or waiting for changes neither of you is working toward to magically happen?

You can consciously choose a marriage that doesn’t meet every need.

You can also decide that the price of maintaining your lifestyle has become too high.

More Money, Longer Marriages—but Happier Ones?

So, are wealthier couples less likely to divorce? The research seems to say yes.

Are they happier? That’s a different question … and these findings don’t settle it either way.

Financial security can give a couple fewer things to worry about and more opportunities to enjoy each other. It can also give two disconnected people enough space, independence, and comfort to maintain a marriage that neither feels particularly excited about.

The same money can support either arrangement.

Just because the divorce rate among the wealthy is lower, that doesn’t automatically mean wealthy couples have better marriages. It just means their marriages last longer. (… which can actually be a BAD thing if you’re locked in a miserable marriage.)

At the same time staying married for financial reasons doesn’t automatically mean someone is unhappy, either.

Someone can genuinely value the security, companionship, and shared life their marriage provides without expecting it to be a great love story.

So … What’s love got to do with wealthy couples’ marriages?

Possibly everything. Probably less than we assume.

A marriage can survive because two people love being together.

Or it can survive because they love the life that staying together allows them to keep.