Should You Marry a Rich Person?

What can an 84-year-old novel tell us about income inequality’s effect on marriage?

Two books with two extremely different marriages. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

People tend to think it’s better to marry someone with a similar background, while also believing it’s a great coup to marry up.

Not long ago, a friend brought over several sacks of old books from her mom’s house, which she is helping declutter. In the sack were many old gems, and I’ve been gorging myself on yellowed paperbacks ever since.

One of them was Pearl S. Buck’s Portrait of a Marriage, which I picked up with hesitation. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, The Good Earth, is among the best books I’ve ever read, but I thought a collection of her short stories was amateurish.

I’m glad I gave this book a chance

It’s not up to the level of her story of how a Chinese peasant’s marriage to another poor woman transformed his life (just one possible way to describe that novel) but it’s excellent.

William is the son of a wealthy railroad industrialist. He meets Ruth by chance while he’s out painting landscapes. She is a poor, uneducated farmer’s daughter. He decides to paint her portrait, then returns to his life of wealth for a while before deciding to marry her.

I guessed the novel would be about Ruth trying and failing to fit in with William’s people, but it wasn’t. When he had an encounter with Elise, a woman from his own background whom he considered marrying, I assumed he’d wed her and always pine for Ruth. That didn’t happen, either.

When he and Ruth declared their love for each other and pre-consummated their planned marriage, I feared a Tess of the d’Urbervilles outcome, but no, he goes through with the marriage and it’s long and happy.

I did not see that coming!

But as anyone who has ever been married knows, marriage is about much more than love. Much of the richness of the novel comes from a deep examination of what each of them gave up for the other.

Each makes sacrifices

William’s family isn’t cruel to Ruth, but they don’t warm up to her, either. There’s no My Fair Lady-like attempt to teach her what she would need to know to fit in with society. She isn’t happy living in the city, although that’s a better place for an ambitious artist. They eventually end up living on Ruth’s family farm, and each accepts the other’s inability to really understand the other’s world.

Ruth routinely leans on the neighboring farmer, a fellow who had hoped to marry her, for help. William seems utterly unaware of the physical work involved in running a farm. At one point, Ruth tries to handle breeding one of her cows to the neighbor’s bull by herself, and is gored.

She didn’t want to delay the breeding until she had assistance because the day before, William had complained about the cow, obviously in heat, “bellowing.” It didn’t occur to him that he could lend a hand to the dangerous business.

In the wake of her nearly fatal goring, the neighboring farmer harshly criticizes William for expecting his wife to do everything. William merely explains he wasn’t taught to milk cows at college. When the farmer gives up and says he’ll send his oldest son to take care of the farm work while Ruth recovers, William accepts the offer as if that is the natural order of things. (I had hoped this near-tragedy would open William’s eyes, but it didn’t. I wanted to slap William and tell him to man up!)

William cannot bear to involve himself in butchering and other unpleasant parts of farm life, so Ruth takes on all such work, taking care to do it out of William’s sight to avoid upsetting him. He seems not to notice how hard she works, doing all the heavy farm tasks while also raising the children and caring for the house. Making soap, kneading bread, killing chickens and disciplining the children all fall to her.

William? He just paints.

If Ruth gives up having a partner to share the workload, William gives up not only the comforts of wealth and society, but his potential as a truly great artist. His father is a serious art collector and William yearns for his respect. His father advises him to go away and concentrate on his painting for a season before it’s too late, but William doesn’t, and understands this means he’ll never be more than a provincial artist.

The book suggests that Ruth would have been better suited with marriage to the neighboring farmer and William’s better match would have been Elise – and it seems both of them also realize that, but neither regret their marriage.

My initial conclusion was that this marriage causes a lot of suffering that could have been avoided, but then I realized the problem was not so much the difference in social class.

It was a lack of money

William’s family seemingly feels no responsibility to help their son. This is despite the fact that early on, they appear to financially assist their new son-in-law through a rough patch. William’s sister and her husband eventually became immensely wealthy.

Meanwhile, Ruth’s family shares all they have. They provide William with a place to live and cover all his needs, freeing him to do nothing more than paint pictures that don’t earn enough money to support the family. William’s family provides nothing, and nobody in the novel seems to find that unjust.

Their daughter Mary takes after Ruth and happily marries a farmer. Their daughter Jill, who takes after William, goes off to live with Elise after both Elise’s sons are killed in the war. Jill learns to fit into the world of wealth and society and becomes a lauded singer.

Their son, Harold, goes off to fight in France and stays there, marrying a French woman and fathering two daughters. When the young French granddaughters are orphaned, Ruth feels nothing for them. Fortunately, Jill is now wealthy and speaks French. She takes over their care and plans to transform their lives.

You can’t say William was an incompetent farmer

He wasn’t a farmer at all. He merely lived in the farmhouse. He didn’t take a hand in raising the children; all three adopted their mother’s country speech patterns instead of William’s educated ones (although Jill eventually moved into her father’s world).

I think we have all seen this tendency for the wealthy to feel that only other wealthy people are fit to inherit money; William’s mother leaves her personal fortune to her only financially successful granddaughter — the one who doesn’t need it. Nothing goes to her son or to her poor grandchildren. His father leaves most of his money for an art museum and only a token amount to William.

I was left thinking how much better and easier everyone’s lives could have been had William’s family shared some of their wealth with their son instead of only with their daughter. What if they’d settled a sum on William that would at least have paid for a farm hand? Such a possibility never seems to occur to anyone involved, even though it would have been an inconsequential amount for William’s parents.

Ruth never benefits in any way by marrying ‘up’

In fact, it’s very clear she’d have had a much easier life if she had not. By marrying a rich man’s son who doesn’t know how to run a farm and refuses to learn, she has to do everything herself.

William sacrifices his life’s work as an artist. By settling for a country life, he never reaches the heights he believed he was capable of.

Ruth’s preference for remaining on the farm is her own, but it’s clear she never would have been accepted by William’s family even if she’d tried. Each time he goes off to visit his parents, he goes alone.

I was left wondering if they really ought to have married each other. Would they have said their sacrifices were worth their love?

I was by turns annoyed with each of them. First, with William for not simply helping with the farm work. If you can get through college, you can learn to milk a cow. He just didn’t want to.

Secondly, with Ruth, for not being able to adjust to living in the city or to freeing William to go forth and pursue his art.

Then with William’s family, for making zero efforts to appreciate Ruth. They only saw their son when he came alone to visit them.

The country folk accepted William far more than William’s people accepted Ruth.

Social classes are less rigid now, but when I think about people I know who have married a much wealthier person, I cannot name one that worked out half as well as in this fictional story.

Can you really have a meeting of the minds if you come from vastly different worlds? Only if you’re both willing to actually take part in the other’s world.

I know many people who married outside their culture, and few of those marriages lasted.

My own marriage to a European works even though we have different first languages, different cultures, different education levels and different interests. What we do have is a shared world view. Importantly, neither of us came from money. A shared financial background helps.

Whether you and your spouse come from similar or diverse backgrounds, I don’t think it’s enough to merely tolerate each other’s differences, but to celebrate them.

That’s the one point where the book fails, I think. William lived in Ruth’s culture but never became a part of it. Ruth couldn’t even bear to live in William’s culture, let alone to immerse herself in it.

In real life, I am not sure even the deepest love would have overcome that.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My latest novel is The Trailer Park Rules. Tips accepted at Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.