The New Trophy Wife

Alpha women are highly sought-after partners, but men may be more intimidated than they admit.

By Deborah Siegel, published on January 01, 2004 - last reviewed on June 27, 2007

Many of today's grooms believe that through positive or negative example, their own moms set the stage for a high-octane wife. After his parents separated when he was 12, Jim Pak watched his mother raise three kids while pursuing an advanced degree in art history. "That kind of role model helps you not be intimidated by highly motivated, successful women," he says. Others view their mothers' lives as cautionary tales. "My mom was very unhappy that she had little energy for anything other than raising her four kids," says a former newlywed groom who married a woman who works in finance. "I wouldn't want to marry someone who felt that unfulfilled."

"Our generation is highly cognizant of the divorce rate," adds Pak. "We learned from our parents' mistakes."

But it's not always easy. Charting a marital course markedly different from that of one's parents means there's no role model to consult. And an alpha woman expects more of a domestic partnership—and an emotional connection—than her husband may have seen growing up. "Women are demanding more emotionally because logistically they don't have to get married," says Real. "They want guys to be articulate and open about their feelings." The trouble, finds Real, is that "most men are not trained to do those things."

A solution to this impasse, says Barry McCarthy, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., who works with many high-achieving couples, is for spouses to communicate their expectations from the get-go: "It's great that men are no longer the success object and women are no longer the sex object. But when people organize their lives differently from their cultures or families of origin, they have to make it work practically and emotionally. You have to negotiate before [marriage] how you're going to deal with the core issues of sex, money and kids."

The Unromantic Bottom Line

There's another pragmatic reason men prize new high-earning brides. Our romantic ideals are always grounded in economic realities, from the Victorian marriage model to the 1980s masters of the universe for whom a standard-issue trophy wife was a badge of honor. The bearish market calls for couples to act as an economic unit. Families with two breadwinners have been in the majority since 1998, and single twentysomethings' and thirtysomethings' desire for a two-income merger has intensified in the shadow of the recession. Women earn less than men (78 cents to the male dollar) and seriously lag in the highest-paying sectors, like engineering, investment banking and high tech. But wives have been catching up to and surpassing their husbands since the 1980s, particularly among the well-off. (Of wives who earn more than $100,000, one in three is married to a husband earning less.)

"It used to be that men were a good catch because they were high earners. It now looks like this applies to women, too," says University of Wisconsin economist Maria Cancian, who teamed up with Megan Sweeney, a University of California, Los Angeles sociologist, to study the increased importance of wives' wages.

How openly embraced is the prospect of a female breadwinner? According to Pak, a 30-year-old is much less likely than his father to correlate his self-worth with his ability to provide for a family. Pak's wife, Ketner, believes that men who are comfortable with themselves will factor a potential bride's income into the marital calculus, as women have long done. Says Page Fortna, "Men think, 'If we combined our two incomes, how would we do?' But I wouldn't say it's flipped [to the point where] men say, 'I won't have to work, I'll just live off her.'"

Real is more emphatic: "Men aren't just OK with it. They're relieved." Men have long considered traditional marital roles "anemic and constricting," according to Real, and no longer being the sole breadwinner is a loosening of the straitjacket. Not to mention the improved standard of living. "These guys aren't worried about their male ego in relation to their wife's income," says Real. "They just want to plan a nice vacation together."

If financial straits make alpha women hot commodities for younger men, then financial and social status make these same women desirable to older men seeking a mistress or second wife. "Men have always chosen women who make them feel heroic," states Pittman. "It used to be sufficient to be the hero in your wife's and children's eyes. But when narcissistic men feel they've undermarried and their kids are grown, the real audience becomes your peers, the guys who are eating their hearts out because you've just married a former stripper turned circuit court judge."

Powerful men seek powerful wives, and in an era in which power is increasingly equated with intellectual capital, that translates into wives who match or perhaps even exceed their husbands in educational and professional status. (Think Candace Carpenter, founder of iVillage and second wife of Random House president and CEO Peter Olson.)