When I am sixty-four

Since the onset of the financial crisis, I have been fascinated by stories involving marital breakups due to falling fortunes. Anecdotally, it seems like an unusual number of these stories come from the UK (indeed, I first learned of this topic from a UK paper that cited the soaring divorce rate among financial industry workers in London last year).

The latest installment comes from a Reuters columnist opining on lessons learned from the marital troubles of Bryan Myerson, a UK fund manager. The columnist notes that, often, these high-flyers of finance didn’t just employ leverage at work; rather, many folks in the financial industry took on quite large personal debts to finance their lifestyles. The essay then suggests that women would have been “wiser to have reined in their husbands’ borrowing.”

That’s pretty rich. After all, for many of these women, the lifestyle itself was the inducement to marry in the first place. To overlay across that fact some kind of Beatlesque version of scrimping and saving (“Every summer we can rent a cottage / In the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear”) is mildly and (one trusts) unintentionally hiliarious.