INEA Escuela Universitaria de Ingeniería (UP Comillas)

Senior men often tell me that the single women they meet are dishonest about their motives. “They say they want companionship,” complained one, “but they’re really looking for someone to pay the bills.”

This assessment seems unnecessarily harsh, but there is reason not to ignore it at its core. What if women – senior women especially — are looking not merely for love, but for security? What if after decades of shelter in marriages that ended with death or divorce, we are confused and fearful about how to maneuver the financial part of our suddenly-single lives?

SO…HOW MUCH PFIZER HAVE YOU GOT?

Men have told me that it’s common for women to bring up finances before they’ve finished their first date lattes. Some women are not shy about asking brand new acquaintances to enumerate their holdings in stocks and bonds. Others take a more subtle approach – they suggest dinner at an upscale restaurant. If the guy balks, the relationship is doomed before it begins.

I have no sympathy for women whose reason to partner up is entirely financial. On the other hand, I know that money fears can unbalance a senior gal who has lost her partner, especially one who entirely managed the family assets. In such a case, wanting to tie up with someone solvent is predictably in the forefront of her mind.

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If a widow or divorcee has been single long enough to file an income tax return, she’ll have been exposed to the disparity between filing married and filing single. For marrieds, joint returns are the sweet spot. “A single person never pays less than a couple with the same amount of income as the single person,” writes Dr. Bella DePaulo, author of   Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.

Much of the fight against marital status discrimination is led by young or midlife women in the work force, like Dr. DePaulo. Many of them are single by choice, with salaries high enough to cause them serious distress when it comes to paying taxes and managing IRAs and Social Security. According to the website www.Onely.org, a single person earning $80,000 per year could easily spend a million dollars more than his or her married peer over the course of a lifetime – and this is based on only a few of the most discriminatory laws!

SINGLE BY CHOICE? FOR SENIOR GALS, NOT SO MUCH

Sixty-plus women are in a different category. Most of us who were born in the 1940′s and 1950′s, when marriage was an imperative, are not committed singles. For us, being abruptly single is socially startling, like realizing that you don’t have a date for the prom. We chose to be married, and were enveloped in those marriage structures for large chunks of our lives. Some of us are still active in the workforce, and some of us are living on retirement income. Some of us were involved in family finance, but many of us didn’t want to be — or had husbands / partners who held the money reins tightly.

At our age, “single” is the other term for “widowed” and “divorced.” This status will bring us sometimes shocking penalties, but too few of us have yet grasped the extent to which marriage status discrimination has affected our bottom line. We need to pay better attention to the effect of singles penalties.

JUST-LOVE WILL ALWAYS OUTCLASS JUST-MONEY

At our age, if we’re really looking to un-single ourselves, there’s no shame in being curious about a potential partner’s income level. Later-in-life partnerships are about sharing, ideally on an equal basis. What’s shameful is demanding to know a man’s financial worth only hours after you’ve learned each other’s names. Singles penalties are deplorable, but what can be much worse is tying up with a man whose best feature is his stock  portfolio.