It’s no wonder Irish people are approaching love like a mortgage application

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.

Single people no longer face quite the same dire choices that made marrying a giant dose like Mr Collins feel like a decent prospect. But the cost of living and housing are such that economic factors seem to be pushing us in to some fiscal version of happily ever after. In Ireland, where a mortgage is four times your annual income, the difference between one salary and two might be the difference between a forever home and languishing forever in your childhood bedroom. It’s no wonder, then, that the search for a romantic partner has acquired the character of a mortgage application. Do they have a steady job? Savings? Decent credit? And, of course, do you love them?

I think of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, its own 1990s parody of Pride and Prejudice. Like Austen’s novel, its hilarious social commentary rests on the premise that a single woman of a certain age is in dire circumstances. This time, though, it’s not because of economic peril – this is boomtime Britain and Jones is a single 30-something with a secure job (in publishing!) who owns her own flat, something that now feels more remote than most Regency entailment laws.

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and pioneer of second-wave feminism, would have spurned Jones’s search for true love. When viewing the middle-class housewives of the 1950s, she thought these women were choosing a life of servitude their mothers had forged out of economic need. If women once married for the family farm, in other words, or so there was one less mouth to feed, they now entered of their own free will. She called it madness. They called it love.

For most of history, marriage was an economic pact: make offspring, pool labour, merge property and social standing. You partner up to survive, and if you’re happy, well, that’s luck. But it isn’t the point. But around the time Austen was writing, marriage slowly began to shift from an economic pact to what historians call the “companionate” ideal – a union based on love and fulfilment. By the golden age of Bridget Jones, marriage was for intimacy, good sex, care, growth, a newly-minted self-realisation. If premodern love shored up property, modern love secured your identity and, as Bridget Jones put it, insured against your chances of dying alone and being found three weeks later, half-eaten by an Alsatian. Happiness is no longer a matter of chance, as Lucas argued; suddenly, it’s the whole point of the union.

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Of course, Ireland has its own complicated relationship with marriage and money. Until 1973, women in the Civil Service were expected to resign when they got hitched. Divorce only became legal in 1995. Economic independence and the freedom to leave unhappy marriages are recent achievements. Yet today, a generation raised to believe that marriage is a choice finds itself in a housing market in which two incomes might be the price of admission to a full adult life. Love is asked to insure against things that a flagging welfare state, untenable cost of living or a broken housing system leave unresolved.

We spent much of the last century trying to free love from economic necessity, insisting that people should marry for love, not money, and be free to leave when love runs out. In today’s Ireland, those freedoms are only there if you can afford them. Our relationships were already laden with emotional expectations. Now we are asking them to absorb economic risk too. Charlotte Lucas once said happiness in marriage was a matter of chance. Now we not only ask that our relationships make us happy, but that they insure against chance itself.

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