Having your steak and eating it too: Would it taste as good if you know it was bought with--gasp--ladymoney?The most heartening part of this weekend’s New York Times Style section article on women who make more money than their boyfriends and the low-earners who love them:

Michael R. Cunningham, a psychologist who teaches in the communication department at the University of Louisville, conducted a survey of college women to see if, upon graduation, they would prefer to settle down with a high school teacher who has short workdays, summers off and spare energy to help raise children, or with a surgeon who earns eight times as much but works brutal hours. Three-quarters of the women said they would choose the teacher.

The point, Professor Cunningham said, was that young professionally oriented women have no problem dating down if the man is secure, motivated in his own field and emotionally supportive.

This is good news! This is the kind of thing that should get headlines! It looks like our nation’s female college students, the ones people like Laura Sessions Stepp are always fretting over, actually have pretty decent priorities when it comes to long-term mates. They’d rather shack up with someone who likes his job and contributes to the household than a frantic, tooth-grinding success-whore. It’s almost as if the same people who want to have drunken hook-ups at the age of 19 realize that in the long run Mr. Budweiser McSixpack will not make a suitable life-partner. Almost as if an entire generation is ultimately looking for a healthy, equitable relationship with someone who likes them more than he likes his bank account.

The Times, however, saw this differently:

At least, that’s what their responses are in surveys. Talk about the subject with women a bit older — those who have been out of college long enough to be more hardened — and what you hear is ambivalence, if not downright hostility, about the income disparity.

Jade Wannell, 25, a producer at a Chicago ad agency who lives in a high-rise apartment building, started dating a 29-year-old administrator at a trucking company last year. “He was really sweet,” she said. But “he didn’t work many hours and ended up hanging out at home a lot. I was bored and didn’t feel challenged. He would finish work at 3 and want to go to the bar. The college way of life is still in them at that age. All they want to do is drink with the boys on Saturday. I was like ‘Let’s go to an art gallery’ and all he wanted to do was go to the bars.”

Nothing about these complaints necessarily indicates the level of Wannell's ex’s income. “All they want to do is drink with the boys on Saturday” certainly describes half of Wall Street, Saturday being the brief sliver of time when bankers don’t have to be at the office. What she’s saying, instead, is that she didn’t like her ex’s lack of ambition and thought he was boring. In fact, based entirely on this quote, one might assume that Wannell would be better off dating a museum assistant who worked 14 hours a day and spent his free time at openings, or (heavens) a painter who spent 14 hours a day perfecting his craft—and you know that guy wouldn’t be able to match her ad agent earnings.

It's a little scary, from my lefty Quaker standpoint, that this article completely refuses to acknowledge that there's a difference between working hard and making money, as if any guy who's passionate about what he does will surely be healthily compensated for, you know, pursuing his dreams (and thereby that any guy who's unsuitably broke is clearly a slacker who just isn't trying hard enough.) It's especially disturbing when you realize that Wannell literally told the writer: “It wasn’t the job, it was the passion.” But ultimately the forced conclusions of this kind of trend piece don’t really matter. Women’s salaries are going to continue increasing relative to men’s, and everyone is going to have to deal with it. Better to accept the horrible misfortune of making a lot of money—or having to let your woman buy you dinner—and be an early adopter as well as a rich—or well-fed—bastard.