The Millionaire Problem

The woman told me her husband was worth about eleven million dollars, and then she told me she had not felt looked after in six years.

She was not complaining about access. She had a card with no limit. The house was large and the children's schools were good. When I asked what she meant, she took a long time to answer, and then described a scene: their daughter had a fever on a Sunday night, the regular doctor was unreachable, and she spent two hours on the phone arranging a home visit while her husband watched football in the next room.

When the doctor arrived, her husband paid. He was gracious about it. He did not ask what it cost.

She said that moment was the clearest picture she had of her marriage. He paid for everything. He arranged nothing.

Two different jobs

I have spoken to enough women in wealthy households now to see a pattern, and the pattern is uncomfortable for everyone. Wealth solves a great many problems. It does not, by itself, solve the problem of who thinks about them.

In some rich households, money replaces attention instead of following it. The husband's role becomes funding: he makes the money, and the money is supposed to be the care. Everything the money then has to be turned into, the doctors, the staff, the schedules, the gifts for his mother, is managed by his wife. She is running a small company whose only shareholder thinks his work ended when the transfer cleared.

Some of these women describe the arrangement as fair, and for them it may be. Others describe a specific loneliness that is hard to say out loud, because complaining about it sounds absurd. You have everything. What are you missing?

What provision is when you take the number away

When I ask women what it would feel like to be provided for, very few mention amounts. They describe a feeling of not having to hold everything. Someone else noticing first. Someone else making the call. A sense that if they put the load down for a week, someone would pick it up without being told where it was.

Measured that way, provision is almost entirely about attention and responsibility. Money is one of its tools, and a powerful one, but it is not the thing itself. A man with a modest salary who notices the fever, makes the call and sits with the child is providing. A man with a fortune who pays for the doctor someone else found is financing.

Both have value. Only one of them is what she means.

Why this is hard to say

The women I interviewed for this piece all asked not to be identified, and not only for the usual reasons. Several said they were ashamed of feeling unhappy in circumstances so many people would envy. One said she had stopped mentioning it even to her sister, because the conversation always ended with the same sentence: At least he's not stingy.

He isn't. That is not the complaint.

The complaint is that money can buy almost every kind of help except the help of being thought about. That still has to come from a person. And in some of the most comfortable houses I have been in, it comes from only one of them.