EDITOR'S TAKE: A gold-digging spouse may be best for your career
Romantics would have it that selecting a spouse whose principal interest is your wallet rather than your inner beauty, is a bad move. After all, the City is allegedly littered with hard working men struggling to fulfil high maintenance women (or vice versa).
However, a recent profile in the New York Observer of $12bn hedge fund manager Steve Cohen and his deeply dysfunctional first marriage, suggests marrying entirely for love could be a bad move if you work in financial services.
For anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of Cohen's private life, the summarised version is that (from Cohen's perspective), his first wife - Patricia - is proving a bit of a nightmare.
Avoid anyone with artistic leanings
Before she opted to marry an uber trader, we're told that Patricia Cohen usually dated writers and, 'held fervent opinions about literature and theatre.'
Having married Cohen rather than a writer, she she would allegedly issue, 'evangelical speeches urging him to remember the simpler, family-centered pleasures, like trips to Disneyland or splashing in the pool with his children,' meet him from work with the children, 'as if to say, Okay, your fun time is over,' and generally complain that he was spending too much time working and too little time with her.
Patricia is currently pursuing Cohen through the courts and appears to have become the bane of his life.
By comparison, Cohen's second wife, whom he met through a dating agency and who the Observer says 'always wanted to marry a millionaire,' is portrayed as a paragon of domestic bliss:
... she takes care of her man. She doesn't complain that he works too much; she lauds his devotion to their kids. If he has a bad day at work, she cooks his favorite meal, pasta with anchovies.
When marrying for love is a bad move
The interesting takeaways from Cohen's tempestuous love life appear to be that his first wife, who pre-dated his enormous wealth and married him (we conclude) entirely because she was partial to his inner-self, couldn't cope with his devotion to his work. Cohen's career was a rival for his attention.
However, for wife number two, who married Cohen when he was already exorbitantly rich, making him happy and thereby perpetuating the production of further riches appear to be what she does best.
Cohen's case may be unique. For all we know, there may be many extremely successful financial services professionals married to people with 'fervently held artistic opinions' for whom money is secondary to simple pleasures. However, it's notable that Jim Rogers, another successful investor and self-professed workaholic also alludes frequently to a failed first marriage.
When it comes to simple wealth accumulation, any marriage is better than none. According to 'The Millionaire Mind', published in 2001, 92% of 'millionaire households' in the US are comprised of married couples; and those couples have a divorce rate that's a third of the norm.
However, when it comes to generating wealth through an extremely demanding and extraordinarily time-consuming job in financial services, it's possible that a particular kind of marriage is best.
This may be a marriage in which rather than complaining about their lot, the non-working spouse accepts the time constraints and pressures on the partner, and accepts that the money he or she earns is compensation for that. At least gold-diggers acknowledge this upfront.
