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"  I&amp;#039;ve recently been indulging in a little fantasy when I&amp;#039;m home nights supping on Annie&amp;#039;s Macaroni &amp;amp;amp; Cheese. In the reverie, I put on a nice dress and go to a nice restaurant with nice tablecloths and a nice wine list. Across the table is a nice guy. We talk a little bit about his job as a lawyer or a banker, but he&amp;#039;s so taken with my toned limbs, flawless complexion, and latest New Yorker piece (hey, it&amp;#039;s my dream) that he says he&amp;#039;d really rather talk about me. The climax comes when the waiter brings the bill. In the dream, it&amp;#039;s all very simple: My date just pays. I recounted the scenario to my friend Valerie, a film producer whose glassblower boyfriend spends his days making jewelry out of melted beer bottles. Last week, she discovered that he was hoarding Domino sugar packets from coffee shops because he was planning to bake cookies and didn&amp;#039;t want to invest in a box of sugar. She decided to chalk it up as a charming idiosyncrasy. &amp;quot;So basically,&amp;quot; she told me, &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re fantasizing about dating a man with money.&amp;quot; Only she said it like it was a bad thing. Call me selfish, but I want good things for myself\u2014and last I checked, money is good. It can help me do good things, like give to disaster victims, get a gym membership, and splurge on organic cleaning products. It feels wrong to admit it, but I think that more money actually could make me a happier and healthier person. I&amp;#039;m an independent career woman and all that. But I&amp;#039;m also self-employed, and we&amp;#039;re staring down a recession. Is it so awful to want to couple with someone who can pick up the slack now and then? Apparently, yes. A few months ago, my former roommate Melissa\u2014a writer who tends to date couch-surfing grad students\u2014started seeing Ben, an IT guy who has a boat, an Audi convertible, a Vespa, and an unending desire to take her on lingerie shopping sprees. So what if this guy&amp;#039;s work in the bowels of tech companies didn&amp;#039;t scintillate dinner guests in quite the same way as my then-beau&amp;#039;s tales of living as a Buddhist monk or coaching basketball at a high school for the deaf? Ben could easily pay for anything he and Melissa did together, and the result\u2014at least from afar\u2014looked like an idyllic romance unsullied by any of the financial worries that might preoccupy her during the hours of the day not set aside for cuddling. After she fractured her arm during a recent bout of unemployment, he suggested she move into his spacious two-bedroom, with its flat-screen TVs, wine closet, and non-pirated wireless. I was all high fives and smiley emoticons when she shared the news, but Melissa asked me to keep the whole situation on the down low. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m worried it makes me look like a gold digger,&amp;quot; she said. Did it? Actually, I was thinking that it made her look like every guy I&amp;#039;ve ever dated. I was about 10 when my mom first sketched out what my adult love life would look like. We were watching New York Stories on our wood-paneled TV. In Martin Scorsese&amp;#039;s segment, Nick Nolte plays a genius but shaggy painter who is trying to bed his assistant, Rosanna Arquette. He lives in an impoverished loft where &amp;quot;A Whiter Shade of Pale&amp;quot; plays on loop and the floor is a mosaic of half-used paint tubes and cigarette butts. My mom looked up from her Weight Watchers meal and patted down my hair. &amp;quot;I hope you never date a man like that,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;But you will.&amp;quot; I assured her that she was mistaken. She was raising me to be self-sufficient and responsible; why would she assume that I&amp;#039;d go for a man who wasn&amp;#039;t all those things too? She may have fallen for my dad\u2014a charming, scruffy artist with massive hands and nicotine-stained walls\u2014but I had other plans. My future husband would be a Mike Brady type with Cliff Huxtable humor, Robert Preston looks, and Fred Astaire charm. He&amp;#039;d carry a briefcase. He&amp;#039;d change his clothes daily. Recently, however, it occurred to me that she was right. My last boyfriend was a captivating author who had glasses held together with tape and a credit score lower than his IQ. He&amp;#039;d proposed to his ex-wife with a ring made from a paper clip. The boyfriend before that was an artist who lived in an unfinished loft and defined the bourgeoisie as anyone who would spring for non--generic peanut butter. I wasn&amp;#039;t his muse. I was, if anything, his patron\u2014an entirely less sexy role. I&amp;#039;ve spent my twenties building a career and trying to put money into an IRA, yet I have invariably been drawn to guys who have inverse earning potential. Forget the briefcase\u2014I&amp;#039;ve never had more than a fling with someone who had an office job. The arrangement has its advantages\u2014a sense of control, the kick that only comes with treating yourself to something you know that you alone earned\u2014but sometimes I fear I&amp;#039;m as guilty as anyone in encouraging a sea of men who are benefiting from a gender-equality pendulum that has swung too far in the other direction. There&amp;#039;s that Nora Ephron quote that the surviving legacy of the women&amp;#039;s movement is the Dutch treat. Cynical in itself, but for many of us, it&amp;#039;s even more dire than Dutch. Somehow equality has come to mean buying both of our dinners. Now that we&amp;#039;re decades past the idea of relying on a man&amp;#039;s paycheck for our own security, we&amp;#039;re overcompensating. The truth is, we&amp;#039;ve started to equate financially responsible, suit-wearing men with boring men, and seeing only artsy, broke men as attractive romantic prospects\u2014somehow superior, smarter, more interesting. My friends and I grew up believing that we shouldn&amp;#039;t rely on a partner for our own fulfillment, financial or otherwise, though no one told us not to want romantic relationships. So we end up looking for mates who can provide love and excitement and not much else. All around me, I see women flapping their wings frantically while men coast in their wakes. (And hey, why don&amp;#039;t you ever hear a man referred to as a gold digger?) My friend Rebecca, a nurse, pays her DJ boyfriend&amp;#039;s cell phone bill; Sarah, who works as a copywriter by day and a translator by night, emptied out her savings account to send her screenwriter husband to rehab. I&amp;#039;m beginning to worry that I&amp;#039;ll wake up at 40 with 18 years of 12-hour workdays under my belt, several little mouths to feed, a husband with a gift for macram\u00E9, and a briefcase of my very own\u2014the only one in the household. So, a couple months ago, when I threw out my back after sleeping at a guy&amp;#039;s studio where the bed lived inside the sofa, I decided I&amp;#039;d had enough. As soon as I got home, I logged onto Match.com and clicked the button that summons all men with incomes over $150,000\u2014the highest bracket offered. Yes, at first I felt like it was a shallow thing to do, but I&amp;#039;d selected by age and height before\u2014and those are things that people can&amp;#039;t change about themselves. Is selecting romance by those criteria any more noble? I haven&amp;#039;t gone on any dates with the Match.com money men yet, but I have looked at their profiles and been impressed. Mostly, it&amp;#039;s been a reminder that there are people who work day jobs and manage to cram the rest of their hours with pretty non-boring hobbies, like playing guitar and going to the theater and reading Hemingway. Also, a disproportionate number of these guys run marathons or bike crazy distances every weekend. They&amp;#039;re driven! They&amp;#039;re healthy! They can afford titanium bikes! Or, then again, as one friend interpreted it, &amp;quot;People like that have a high boredom threshold.&amp;quot; Then, recently, I met a guy the real-world way, at a restaurant where my friend tends bar. When I saw him tip 20 bucks on a six-dollar drink, I thought he&amp;#039;d made a mistake. But my friend set me straight. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s trying to impress you,&amp;quot; she said. Imagine that! I hung in there long enough to find, on his first-generation MacBook Air when I couldn&amp;#039;t sleep at 3 A.M., that he had a desktop folder called &amp;quot;my net worth.&amp;quot; I clicked. Inside was a number so big that I had to use my finger to count the zeros on the screen. There was no spark between us, so when he called me a few days later, I didn&amp;#039;t respond. I tried to tell myself it wasn&amp;#039;t just because he admitted he&amp;#039;d never heard of Leonard Cohen. But it seemed like a good step toward meeting a man who didn&amp;#039;t have to let his health insurance lapse each June in order to afford air-conditioning. Truth is, if I won the romantic equivalent of Deal or No Deal, my life wouldn&amp;#039;t be so different from how it is now. I&amp;#039;d still spend my days writing and researching stories, if only because I can&amp;#039;t think of much else I&amp;#039;d rather be doing. I might sleep a little easier knowing I could pay all my bills. I&amp;#039;d shop at stores other than H&amp;amp;amp;M. I&amp;#039;ve seen that I can do everything for myself, but I&amp;#039;m ready to find someone who can maybe help me do everything a little better. So does that make me a gold digger\u2014or a capable woman who is tired of overcompensating? For the consummate answer, I turned to a formerly struggling artist I know: my dad. &amp;quot;If you loved a banker and he loved you, I wouldn&amp;#039;t mind at all,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;And really, would it be so awful to have someone in the family with ready cash?&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a9532/if-he-were-a-rich-man-in-defense-of-gold-digging-263798/>