“Wealth Report” reporter Robert Frank of The Wall Street Journal writes, mostly predictably, about marriage for love (the shockingly modern idea nicely charted by Stephanie Coontz in Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage) vs marriage for financial gain (the real, ancient tradition behind “traditional marriage.”)

The survey polled 1,134 people nationwide with incomes ranging between $30,000 to $60,000 (squarely in the median range for nationwide incomes). The survey asked: “How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?”

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Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were “very” or “extremely” willing to marry for money. The answers varied by age: Women in their 30s were the most likely to say they would marry for money (74%) while men in their 20s were the least likely (41%).

There’s more here.

Now I could just jerk my knee a couple of times and say something predictable. Instead I’m wondering how, exactly, this is news. Sort of by definition the average person marries an “average-looking person that you lik[e], period.”

And inside the tradition of “traditional marriage” that was usually the best one could hope for: that your parents, or up through early 20th Century Amercia, the woman’s parents, would select a parter who wasn’t just “suitable” according to their interests but also suitable to yours. Love was expected to follow, if at all, out of a sort of mutual, necessity-based version of the Stockholm Syndrome.

At any rate, in this case one would probably expect traditional-marriage advocates to really, really applaud the story since, for them, to the extent women marry for pecuniary, even predatory, reasons their view of the world is preserved (as is, of course, the no-brainer “no-sex” class side effect.) Because otherwise why on earth would they get their stomach staples in such a twist over women earning the same as men? And, perhaps perversely, one might expect traditionalists to equally applaud the fact that a number of men appear willing to marry into money since, given the way traditionalists despise and mistrust men and insist that women’s role is to… chelate men’s worst impulses, a man married into money would be even more beholden to the “civilizing” influences of his partner.

But that’s all philosophizing. While the purpose of the story may be to perform maintenance on the dominant memes of women as gold-diggers and men as wallets. The real story, however, is that average men and women, earning average incomes, would marry other average people if they had higher-than-average incomes. Which, since by definition average people marry average people anyway, isn’t exactly earth-shattering news.

Update: In comments Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones astutely notices there the “damned if you don’t” angle of the question:

I’d want to repudiate the whole question; it has no good answer. If I say, no, I wouldn’t marry an average looking person that I liked who had money, that sounds as if I wouldn’t marry even someone I liked unless that person also has movie star looks (even though I don’t have movie star looks myself. But if I say, yes, I would marry an average looking person that I liked who had money, that sounds as if I would marry a person that I merely like, and don’t really love, just because the person has lots of money. So the one answer sounds shallow and vain, while the other answer sounds callous and mercenary.

And while we’re at it…

Finaly, a third way to be “damned” of it would be to selfishly insist that one’s partner could never bring in more money than you, as in that wretched men’s top ten secrets list from Redbook wherein “...we’re shallow, competitive egomaniacs. You don’t think it gets under our skin if our woman’s bringing home more bacon than we are — and frying it up in a pan?”

Great family values in that equation by the way: “Oh no, my self-esteem, or maybe my gender prejudices, are more important than the possibility of better household circumstances.” A.k.a. “tell you what, honey, you stay home and I’ll work twice as hard so you and the children never see me… because we’ll be closer and have a better child-raising environment that way.” Sheah, right.

Great set of expectations in one little question… which we should all answer right after the one about whether we’ve stopped neglecting our partners.