A (Twisted) Sign of the Times

Rich Cut Back on Payments to Mistresses
You know times are tough when the rich start cutting costs on their mistresses.

According to a new survey by Prince & Assoc., more than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances. Still, only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons.

“Rich people are getting hit, and they’re all expressing the need to curtail unnecessary spending,” said Russ Alan Prince, president of Prince & Assoc., a wealth-research firm based in Connecticut. “Lovers are part of the same calculation.”

Of course, any study of millionaires and their mistresses should be taken with a large grain of salt. The survey–a subset of a larger wealth study–polled 191 individuals with a minimum net worth of $20 million who said they had lovers of at least a year or more (this to screen out the one-night stands, etc.). About two thirds of the respondents were men and one third women. All were married and all had personal control over their finances, meaning the women and men surveyed were the primary wealth holders in their homes.

The most surprising stats in the study relate to gender and what might be termed “length of service.” Fully 82% of men in the study said they planned to lower the allowances to their mistresses, while more than three quarters planned to provide fewer gifts, less expensive gifts and fewer perks, like jet rides, resort vacations and top restaurant meals.

Women were far more generous to their paramours in the face of financial crises. Less than 20% planned to lower allowances, gifts and perks, while more than half planned to raise them.

Susan Shapiro Barash, who teaches gender studies at Marymount Manhattan College and wrote “Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets,” about why women lie, said women value their lovers more than men in a time of economic trouble. “For the women, lovers matter more than ever now because the rest of life is so dreary,” she said. “For the men, they’re just cutting across the board.”

Ms. Barash added that women may value their lovers more today because their husbands are so miserable. “If your husband lost his job on Wall Street and he’s miserable, you need the escape,” she says.

The duration of the relationship also seems to play a role in the economics of high-end cavorting. The study found that more than two thirds of the millionaires who had been with their lovers for three or more years planned to cut back. That compares with less than half for those with a tenure of one to three years.

“What we found in talking to the respondents is that the magic of the relationship with their lover fades after a while, so they’re more willing to let them go,” Mr. Prince says.

The survey doesn’t mean to suggest that all, most or even a large minority of rich men and women have affairs. It simply is a snapshot of a certain sample at a certain time. Yet it suggests that in a time of financial crisis, it is better to be a kept man than a compensated woman.

UPDATE: Since so many readers asked about the survey’s methodology, I called Russ Prince to get the specifics. The mistress questions were added to the end of a much larger survey on wealth and wealth management polling a control group of 518 people. Of the 518 people surveyed as part of the broader study, 191 opted to answer the mistress question. The 518 respondents were all private jet owners — since this was done in conjunction with a private-jet-related business — and all the respondents were paid for their time.

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