From Struggle to Luxury: What It’s Really Like Loving Someone Who Hit the Jackpot Overnight
He died last year.
Nothing really changed in our relationship. The extra money absolutely made our lives easier, and helps remove most stressful things in our life. I cant imagine having to deal with some of the s**t we have to deal with without money. Met my wife in undergrad and been with her ever since, she is now a professor of plastic surgery at a university.
While I was in grad school, this happened to me. My (ex) partner and I were both teaching part-time, so we didn’t have a lot of extra money to throw around. He started a tutoring company as a passion project with some grad school friends, and it ended up being quite successful. Not a billion dollar venture, but he did become a millionaire through it.
And yeah, he broke up with me soon after, when he started getting lots of female attention due to the level of income. He mostly dated teenagers for some time after he got successful and dropped out of the grad program, but recently (allegedly) got into quite some trouble with the tax man.
Person i know basically went from “I am dating…” to “we’re seriously dating -> engaged” immediately after he found out she had been gifted a large investment portfolio – locked them down so fast
Things are going well for them but I’ll never look at them the same way. He’s referred to the marriage as a “financial opportunity” multiple times and it’s kind of crass.
My first husband is staggering wealthy. His dad is the ceo of a casino/resort group and he inherited his grandfather’s entire estate and he was a property developer in the west. He cheated on me, so we got divorced. I opted for no alimony, because it was such a short relationship. He has been married another 2 times and is generally unhappy. Always cheats. If I had as much money as him, I would probably have sought therapy. So I often laugh when people say money can buy you happiness. Didn’t buy mine enough to stay with a cheater and he certainly isn’t happy. Although most of his problems are self-caused.
My girlfriend’s family got super rich. When we met they were solid middle class. Her dad got a huge legal settlement for millions. She moved back home and cheated on me a bunch.
I’m 38. When I was 30 I was a barista and had started dating a single mother of 2. Sweet girl, she pushed me to finish school and for the next 3-4 would take classes online and work full time during the day. She was super chill and never expected too much of my time and was happy to just have me over doing homework quietly late into the night. I finished my Software Engineering degree at 34 and got my first industry job making 80k. At the time this was already pretty life changing for the both of us. She was making maybe 25k at the time. Fast forward 4 more years, I jumped into a big tech company and managed to skip a few levels of the bat, got a massive promotion the year later, followed immediately by a corporate acquisition that left me with an enormous tranche of company stock in a major AI player. In 4 years I went from working part time at Starbucks for $15/hour to having a 7 figure net worth.
Life’s the same. I had just bought a 265k house where I live in a LCOL area and she’s moved in, my interest rate is 3.75%. She’s still the sweetest most easy going girl. She doesn’t care too much about the money but it does make life a little easier but we keep almost all of it invested. I did end up buying her a car and paying it off outright. Looking to maybe get hitched in the next couple years. I do get asked sometimes by people who don’t know us why I’m dating a single mother of 2 in my position but I think it’s pretty obvious why.
I was basically gifted the company I work for the day I found out I was pregnant and as a result my husband got to take at least 4 years off work and be a stay at home dad. We met when we were both 18 but I never had more than a summer job til I graduated college and he had been working since he was 15 with no help from his parents so it feels like everything worked out the way it was supposed to.
We started from scratch. Met at university, got married and had kids young. She went back to uni to retrain and ended up in a profession earning up to $400k/year. Combined we earned almost $600k/yr
We built up a multimillion $$ asset base in large part for our retirement, but also for the kids. Fast forward a bit and she developed alcoholism. Four-ish years later we separated, and after that she became a d**g a****t and is no longer working.
