The XX Factor: What women really think.

Searching for My Sugar Daddy

Jessica, I fear I am solidly, if not proudly, in Abby Ellin's camp. It's not that I want to be rich, exactly, but I do want those upper-middle-class comforts: separate bedrooms for the kids; occasional family vacations to far-flung countries; the assurance that I'll be able to send my kids to the college that's right for them, even if it's not the cheapest option. And, at least at age 8 or so, I also wanted a second car for my house in the country ... but that's a dream I'm willing to give up.

I remember in college having a long discussion about exactly what kind of sugar daddy would be right for me. I figured an investment banker or corporate lawyer wouldn't really work, since I find those professions fairly dull and have always had high on my List of Traits for My Future Husband that he have a job I enjoy hearing about at the dinner table. The other obvious choice was old money, but that didn't seem right either—I had spent a year of high school at a ritzy Manhattan private school (sandwiched among 12 years of public school in suburban Maryland) and found it tough to relate to the über wealthy there. By the end of that college conversation—still completely unaware of what my starting salary would be after graduation or if I'd even manage to snag a journalism job—I had at least one thing sorted out: I'd need to find an inventor of some kind, a creative thinker entrepreneurial enough to turn his grand idea into an equally grand paycheck. And then I'd need to marry him.

I don't think that any of that fantasizing (creepy as it was) took away from my assumption that taking care of myself would be my responsibility long before I brought a partner on to share the burden. My first priority out of college wasn't finding that inventor; it was getting health insurance. And unlike Karen Karbo, I've never let my boyfriends pick up all the tabs.

But I will say that I get it. I get how someone with a strong working mother can still grow up with this notion that she will be provided for in a vague sense that, when probed, starts to materialize as a man. And although I'm sure part of that stems from growing up in a society that continues to trumpet the notion—although obviously more subtly these days, than in the Mad Men era—of woman being cared for by man, I think another part is just the general tendency for people of both sexes to imagine things they can't have, then make the logical leaps to whatever missing factor might make those things possible. I've known for a long time that I won't have a job that gives me that extra car for my country home. And it seems less dangerous for me to occasionally wonder if a marriage might make that possible than to start hoping something like the lottery will.