Wealth & Money Quote by Doris Lilly

Millionaires marrying their secretaries isn’t posed as a romantic subplot; it’s a workplace efficiency report with a punchline. Doris Lilly, a journalist who made a career out of reading the social world as a system of incentives, frames marriage less as destiny than as scheduling. The line works because it treats intimacy like a byproduct of capitalism’s time management: if your life is optimized for profit, love defaults to whoever is closest to the calendar, the phone, the gatekept access.

The intent is barbed social observation. “Secretaries” carries a whole mid-century gendered economy in one word: women positioned as support, proximity, discretion. Lilly isn’t simply snickering at rich men’s tunnel vision; she’s pointing to how power collapses choice. The millionaire is “so busy” that he doesn’t “see” other girls, a verb doing double duty. He literally lacks time to date, and metaphorically doesn’t see women outside his orbit as fully present, because his world is curated through assistants, appointments, and controlled encounters.

The subtext is transactional but not simplistic. This isn’t “gold digger” moralizing; it’s about structural inevitability. When wealth concentrates attention and women’s labor is routed through intimate service roles, romance starts to look like an HR accident. There’s also a quiet cynicism about “other girls”: they’re interchangeable in the millionaire’s view, while the secretary is uniquely situated as the one person he can’t ignore.

Contextually, Lilly’s sentence lands in an era when the secretary was both a cultural archetype and a real pipeline for social mobility. It’s a one-liner that smuggles in a critique: the modern rich don’t just outsource tasks, they outsource their human relationships until the nearest employee becomes the only available love story.