Don’t ditch a potential husband over his income

US marriage rates have hit a 150-year low, and a new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family says the decline is being fueled by a lack of “economically attractive” available men.

Women, if you’re focusing on the man’s numbers, you’re making a big mistake.

What’s interesting about this study is it admits what other studies had danced around: Women don’t want to marry men who make less money than they do.

Previous studies focused on the fact that more women than men now go to college, and so finding college graduates to marry was proving a challenge for women. Yet it was clear even then that it wasn’t the billionaire college dropouts of the world who were having a hard time landing the ladies.

Now we’ve cut to the heart of the matter: Women want men with dough.

“Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” said Daniel T. Lichter, the study’s lead author. “Marriage is still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic transaction.”

There’s some irony that in our “girl power” moment, women still want men who earn more money, and have more education, than they do.

All the articles that focus on how women just want a guy who helps out with the dishes overlook the fact that what women really want is a man who pays (most of) the bills.

There’s nothing wrong with women wanting their spouse to be a provider. A 2017 Pew Poll found that 71 percent of American adults said it’s “very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner.” Dishes aren’t enough.

But women who don’t see a man as marriage material because of his income are seeing it wrong. Marriage is a stabilizing force, and married men are the highest-earning group of adults — more than single men, more than anyone.

With good reason. A married man has something to work for in a way one who’s single does not. Add children to the mix, and guys will find hungry mouths to feed to be a big motivator to earn.

Of course, a man’s potential is harder to see than the number of commas on his bank statement. But smart women should be looking for that, rather than the cash in hand.

Does he work hard? Does he have reasonable plans for how to succeed? That’s worth far more than someone who happens to have some money in the bank right now.

There’s also the obvious truth that it’s easier to focus on making money and succeeding in your job when you have someone at home rooting for you. Having someone who cares about you and who is unequivocally in your corner does wonders for upward mobility.

In a piece in the Washington Post arguing that marriage offers tangible benefits to men, W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, wrote: “Men who get married work harder and more strategically, and earn more money than their single peers from similar backgrounds. Marriage also transforms men’s social worlds; they spend less time with friends and more time with family; they also go to bars less and to church more. In the provocative words of Nobel Laureate George Akerlof, men ‘settle down when they get married; if they fail to get married, they fail to settle down.’”

And it’s not just because high-achieving men are more likely to marry in the first place. Previous studies have shown that “when there is no longer a wife enhancing her husband’s productivity, the man’s on-the-job performance, and hence wages, will decline.”

One last point: The average age of marriage in America is still under 30 years old. If we’re expecting large bank accounts at 30, our expectations might be too high.

So if you’re a woman looking to get married and are (understandably) concerned about finances, stop trying to judge whether the guy is economically attractive today and look instead at which guy is likely to get better-looking economically as he ages. Better yet, marry for love, not coin — and you’ll be happy you did.