Editor’s Note: Daniela Drake, M.D., is the co-author of Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped Into the Romantic Dream — And How They’re Paying For It. A former McKinsey consultant with degrees from Wellesley College and Stanford University, she is now a full-time primary-care physician, and the happily married mother of two.

At first, the whole idea for our book started as a joke.

While we working moms, dropping off our kids at preschool and dashing to work, we noticed other moms were a bit more leisurely about the whole morning routine.

How did they do it?

We were busy professionals; the moms with their feet on the table nursing hot coffee were not. "We weren’t the smart ones after all," we joked. "The smart ones married money."

But as we joked, others laughed and nodded (not the ones sipping coffee; they assured us they were very busy, what with yoga and Pilates and all). Of course, as serious professionals it never crossed our minds to marry for money. We made our own money and married for love, like we were supposed to.

So why did this joke about marrying for money ring so true? Maybe because we were so tired of the demands of modern life and flat-out just needed a rest. Did other women feel like this, too? In our quest for the answer, we found out what is just hitting the news cycle now: that 40 years after modern feminism, a lot of women are plenty miserable.

It turned out that what was true for us was true for millions of women. Work felt unfair, and research showed it was unfair. In addition, women who divorced were largely the recipients of lopsided divorce agreements that left many in dire economic straits.

So if work is unfair to women and marriage disposable, we reasoned, why not marry for money? Your broken heart may well be soothed by that regular hot-stone massage you get in the divorce settlement. It seemed funny to us.

"Not funny," wrote one wife of a wealthy man who assured me she married for love. "The grass is always greener; we struggle too. We have nannies to coordinate …"

But compare that to a young patient of mine who’d been dumped by the love of her life after giving birth to an autistic child. She struggles with food stamps, special education and loneliness while she cobbles together her life and her future.

Obviously, marrying for love was working out well for some, but not for others. Why should it? In our culture, "being in love" is the only valid, moral reason to marry. But that means that "being out of love" is a valid, if not moral, reason to divorce.

Let’s be real here for a second. Romantic love is not some utopian state of high moral rectitude; it’s an emotion — and therefore fleeting. Science now shows that romantic love lasts, at most, two years. One researcher calls "being in love" a type of madness. Perhaps we shouldn’t be making the decision to marry when we are technically temporarily insane.

So we ask, "Should the decision to marry take into account something else besides our feelings?"

But by spotlighting these issues, we have roused the angry guardians that protect the gates of the status quo. We have been accused of being bitter bitches, crazy feminists, angry divorcees, regressive morons, purveyors of trash, promoters of prostitution, idiots and gold diggers. And that was just the first e-mail.