Has the recession affected your dating?

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Because there are a lot of women who expect their boyfriends to have jobs and be making a decent income. Well, if you lost your job or can't find work during the recession, you can no longer afford to date.

Why would the recession affect dating?

Because there are a lot of women who expect their boyfriends to have jobs and be making a decent income. Well, if you lost your job or can't find work during the recession, you can no longer afford to date.

Will The Recession End Gold Digging?
Elisabeth Eaves, 02.06.09, 12:01 AM EST
Now it's an even worse idea to marry for money.

It looks like the economic downturn is producing a dating downturn too. At least this is true in financial centers like New York, where an unhealthily intimate bond between mating and money has persisted down the decades, from Edith Wharton through Candace Bushnell.

Maybe, finally, this recession will cut that bond, or at any rate do it some damage.

Yahoo! BuzzAnecdotal news has been trickling in: Female friends have related a sudden downturn in men making contact on Match.com, the dating Web site; another who was dating three investment bankers said she never heard from any of them again as soon as Lehman Brothers collapsed last September.

Then there are the DABA Girls--DABA stands for "dating a banker anonymous"--the blogging girlfriends of laid-off financial drones, who, Greek chorus-like, lament to the heavens that their gold-digging ways have come to a premature end. The writing is polished parody, but there are in fact actual banker-dating women behind the site. (The New York Times tracked them down.) In the same vein, the romance novel Hedge Fund Wives by Tatiana Boncompagni, to be published in May, tackles the recession via a protagonist whose husband leaves her for his mistress as his Wall Street career tanks. It's fiction, but the cultural moment it reflects is real.

Sane people of average incomes and healthy libidos may now be asking, who would stop coupling just because of a li'l old downturn? Don't we all now have more time for romance on our hands? The answer is, your ilk do not dominate New York social life. The dating downturn is affecting men and women for whom money, self-image and mating are inextricable from one another.

That's a bigger group than may at first be apparent, because the social values of money-chasing men and men-with-money-chasing women have an insidious way of creeping into society at large. For denizens of a city with a long bohemian tradition, middle and upper class New Yorkers are bizarrely regimented and old-fashioned in their approach to mating.

Countless times I've been asked to explain "dating" to friends from Europe or the West Coast: the scrutinizing rounds of drinks and dinners, the game-playing, the jockeying for some sort of advantage. There's something deeply unappealing about the way New York women adopt the language of contracts when it comes to romance, wanting "commitment" instead of love. One friend, a financial adviser with plenty of cash, told me it showed "respect" for her when a man paid for dinner. Which I've never quite understood: If charging for the pleasure of one's company begets respect, why don't prostitutes get more of it?

Just as that friend didn't need the money but felt her tab should be covered anyway, a male New York friend of middling income, an academic, told me that he gave up on online dating because it just got too expensive. On every first date, he offered to pay, as he felt was expected of him; usually, he was taken up on his offer. That adds up quickly.

In other words, at least until the fall of 2008 when banks started their disappearing act, the belief that mating requires a man to shake his wallet like so many peacock tail feathers was alive and well in New York.

Will that change now? As life strategies go, putting all of one's eggs in the "marry rich" basket has long been a bad idea. But now that male-dominated professions like finance are so widely in jeopardy, it's an even worse one. (More men have been laid off in the last six months than women.) This is not an ideological position so much as a practical one. Women's lifetime earnings are lower than men's on average because they leave the work force for long stretches. But we can't make an assumption that either (a) a marriage, or (b) a spouse's earning potential, are permanent. To do so is just bad planning, for oneself and one's children. The solution: Don't leave the workforce.

Moreover, who wants to go through life scheming over how to get someone else to support you, when it's much less stressful to figure out how to support yourself? Marry for money, and you'll earn every penny of it, as some wise woman once said. Men whose identity is tied up in having lots and lots of cash--as it tends to be, when someone works slavish hours at boring tasks for no reason other than extra zeros at the end of his paycheck--are tedious company. Loss of income then causes them to have identity crises, which can make them even less pleasant. Just as pretty women sometimes fail to develop much character, because they can get attention and advantage without it, so, too, do wealthy men.

Modern would-be gold diggers would do well to note that since women entered the workforce in large numbers, Americans have been returning to what sociologists call "assortive mating," that is, marrying within their own careers and income levels; doctors have the highest in-mating rate of any profession. In other words, the best way to mate with someone in job X is to also get that job yourself. And by the time you've done that, selling your charms to the highest bidder becomes a lot less attractive. You can bet that if William Makepeace Thackeray were writing Vanity Fair today, Becky Sharp would have set her sights on investment banking, not an investment banker.

For victims of the dating downturn, I'd like to end by recommending men who have not made a big income their life's goal--artists, writers, journalists, academics, musicians, coaches, teachers, etc. They can't take you to restaurants run by brand-name chefs or set you up with a clothing allowance, but they're not having identity crises. A starving artist last year is a starving artist today, only more confident, having been reassured that he made the right choice when he ignored parental urgings to go into some "secure" profession. These men have developed charm, domestic skills, empathy, maybe even some moral fiber. You just might find them so pleasant that you can walk away from dinner without feeling like you should have been paid for your time.