A marriage therapist has warned high-earning women to think carefully about tying the knot - and reveals why he wouldn't advise his own daughter to get hitched. Relationship expert Dr David Perl, 63, runs a practice with his wife, Ruth, 57, and the pair advise their clients on how to understand their relationships. The couple - who have been together since 1987 and have two daughters, Hannah-Mae, 31, and Isobel, 28 - help couples to work through challenges involving communication, conflict and sex.
David has warned high-earning women to think carefully about getting married because if they get divorced they may lose money. And he has said he "would encourage his daughters think very carefully about marriage" - unless they are having children, because of the potential for a spouse to receive half their money in divorce. Dr David Perl said: "People change a lot and if you get married in your early 20s or 30s and it's taking vows for life, you have to ask yourself how do we know what we or our partner will be like?
“To make that unconditional commitment of undying love I think is unrealistic. I once heard someone say there should be an opt-out clause and we should renew vows every five to seven years - and if it’s not working you simply don’t renew."
David encourages people to think very hard before deciding to get married. He said: “It’s true that women bear the bigger burden of marriage as far as marriage and having children but all that is starting to change. In the past, until recently the family law system in the West does seem to take a more female-sensitive view and women have come off better in divorce as well.
"If you are in this position, you should think carefully about why you would want to invite the state into your own relationship and about why you would want to get married. If equality is starting to change within society then we need to recognise that. In some cases, our female clients are very successful in their own right.
“If they've dated down in a heterosexual relationship, if a client has married down to a man with less earning power, then the man will be better off in a divorce settlement. I have two daughters and they're both working hard - one with her own business, one on the corporate ladder.
“One is married already, one may be in the future. If they were to get divorced then it would be a concern that they would lose money in the settlement. I would say if you are in this position you should think carefully about why you would want to invite the state into your own relationship and about why you would want to get married.”
Ruth agrees changes in gender equality mean "high-asset women" should take time to think carefully about marriage before tying the knot. She said: “Women are often looking for someone who is safe, who has their back and can provide for them. That is evolutionary science, there is a drive within the feminine for safety.
“Men are looking for beauty, symmetry and having a good breeding partner. When a woman is earning a lot more than a man it changes the dynamic - as the woman is forced to go back to work after childbirth. That's why we see very few men who are stay at home dads. So I think it's a difficult one.
"If you're earning the same it’s not the problem, but we do see issues where the woman earns £50k to £100k more, which we see with clients in the city. That doesn't mean it's not going to work - that's why talking is incredibly important. Would I advise my kids to get married? Of course, we fully support our eldest's marriage.
“As for my youngest I would support her if she wants to - and if she has talked about all these different subjects with her partner. I do feel and this is where we are quite traditional, that it's more healthy for children to have two parents rather than one - or if there is one, there should be a good grandparent system around or family, and friends. However a lot of single women don't have a support network, they struggle and the child struggles as well, because that's who they learn from, their caregivers - we are traditional in that way.
“Though nowadays there are many different families - as long as that child has enough love around them think it's OK. Do they have to be married? Probably not. It's a personal choice." David said he has seen cultural changes taking place across marriage and relationships in his clinic.
“The breakdown of the traditional family is what is happening," he said. "If you look at the data the number of children raised by single mums and divorce rates increasing, things are changing. It's easy to sit here and say it's like the good old days.
“I take a more pragmatic view - the breakdown of the family unit, maybe that's not a bad thing. I think traditional monogamous relationships are being questioned."
David shared the most frequently asked questions most likely to bring couples to relationship counselling. “The top three issues we see are around money and finance, sex and intimacy, and family of origin," he said. “If you are going to get married you should think about money - how you are going to share it, do you have aligned views on spending and saving?
“You should think about views on sexuality. And family of origin, the families that we come from - a lot of our clients are second generation immigrants and the tight knit cultural families they come from have a lot of views that may be difficult to resolve.
“Another important question is children. Do both halves of the couple want children? What would happen if there were infertility issues?" David said evolutionary psychology influences the way he thinks about gender roles and relationships. “We do believe men and women are different, and that they do have different drives in a relationship," he said.
"There is a whole debate over whether it is culture or society. We see it day in day out how men and women are different in many areas. That hard-wiring doesn't get unwired in one or two generations.
“Evolutionary psychology does give us a lot of hints in how we behave in our relationships. In the past women couldn't just go out, they needed men to protect them. The sexual revolution and the pill and white goods has happened in the past 50-70 years and has freed women from their shackles, but they still carry fear in the DNA.
“For women, children are their primary concern. Men have 10-15 times more testosterone, so they are more aggressive, less agreeable, and more overtly competitive. Women are more surreptitious and men generally don't do emotions as well as women.
“Men are more logical and women are more emotional. I would say half of our practice cases are affair recovery - men want to sweep it under the carpet and move on. But a woman has a need to understand and work through the feelings - that's such an innate difference in the way each reacts to this rupture in the home.”
Ruth also said that biology shaped female and male behaviour in relationships. “Now that men can get sex whenever they want, why would they tie themselves into marriage when they can just play the field?" she said. “Women have a biological clock that men don't have, so women are up against this wall of ‘I'm running out of time.’ They don't have this luxury of choice, which plays into the male perception of relationships and dating and they get a lot more choice.”
“You can't get away from biology - that has not changed in millennia. So I think men have a lot more choices than women do.”
David and Ruth also shared why their own marriage has been long-lasting. David said: “We like each other, there is a deep mutual respect. Even though we have gone through difficult stuff in our own relationship we managed it, we went to therapy, often couples can't work stuff out themselves.
“We trained and retrained as therapists during our marriage and having that therapeutic understanding about relationships has made it a lot easier - before we did the training we were clueless." Ruth added: “I think it's important to have the same belief system, the same values and the same morals.
“Research shows if you're coming into a relationship with very similar views around these very important building blocks you're more likely to keep away from choppy waters. “You don't have to have the same backgrounds - but if those family have a similar belief system it helps.
“It's just one less thing that gets in the way."
