Role Reversal and Esteem
In relationships in which affluent women marry nonaffluent men, the economic role each partner plays is the reverse of society’s norm, which may lead to self-esteem issues on both sides. Jon Gallo, of the Gallo Institute, explains, “The woman worries whether it is OK to be more powerful economically than her husband, and the husband is suddenly no longer the breadwinner, and so he asks, ‘Who am I in this relationship?’”

The affluent spouse
Many women inheritors are under severe pressure in relationships with fiscal unequals because of their own expectations about who should support whom. James E. Hughes Jr. notes that a growing number of psychologists subscribe to the belief that at least some of these expectations are predetermined. He points to work by John Marshall Townsend, who, in his 1998 book, What Women Want—What Men Want: Why the Sexes Still See Love and Commitment So Differently, describes a survey of young women in medical school who admitted that, despite their potentially high social and financial status, they still wanted their spouses to support them.

Hughes notes that the revolution in property distribution, in which the control of wealth and assets has begun to shift from the hands of men into the hands of women, will have serious repercussions for marriages. “The men they form relationships with are very likely not to be held by society in the same esteem.”