Rachel O'Dwyer: It’s no wonder Irish people are approaching love like a mortgage application
The Irish Times · Rachel O'Dwyer ·
A generation raised to believe marriage is a choice is now realising two incomes are the price of admission to a full adult life
When Elizabeth Bennet refuses to marry her boring cousin Mr Collins in the novel Pride and Prejudice, her friend Charlotte Lucas does instead. Jane Austen makes Lucas’s situation clear – she’s a “sensible, intelligent woman, about twenty-seven” (dangerously close to “the wall” by Regency-era standards) with no dowry or looks to speak of (because Austen politely doesn’t mention them). If Elizabeth Bennet makes a noisy case for romantic unions charged by the erotics of a huge country estate, Charlotte Lucas is a pragmatist. Austen’s novels infer the economic realities for women in 18th century England, but Lucas spells them out for us: marriage is an occupational choice. Happiness (in love) is a matter of chance, Lucas says. Mr Collins is socially unbearable – the proto-mansplainer – but he offers security; he has what some today might call “provider energy”. Making her choice, Lucas is sometimes cast as a tragic, timid figure, choosing her small life and sad little compromises. A closer truth is that she, like Austen, understood the financial cost of single life.
Today in Ireland, you might think we were living in an Austen novel. The latest Central Statistics Office data found that 20 per cent of one-adult Irish households under 65 are at risk of poverty, compared to 5.2 per cent of two-adult homes. And according to a recent 2025 study by the online savings platform Raisin, 66 per cent of young Irish adults surveyed said financial considerations get in the way of “true romantic love” today. More than half surveyed sided with Charlotte Lucas and said finances would play a role in their choice of partner. The question “what are your means?” might be once more in fashion.
This makes sense in an Ireland where romantic love is tasked with real material work. Your partner in life is not only a love object but quite literally your financial buffer. In the same study, Raisin estimated that maintaining an “average lifestyle” cost about €2,307 a month for a single-income household in Ireland, versus €2,535 for a couple. That’s some tax.
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