Is it wrong to be financially dependent?

I recently met someone whom I hadn’t seen for almost a decade. When we were catching up and talking about what we had been up to for the past 10 years, she looked very uncomfortable when I asked her what she did for a living. Not wanting to pry, I didn’t really push my point and it was only when I mentioned our chance meeting to a mutual friend of ours that I became enlightened as to why my old friend had been so uncomfortable with telling me what she had been up to because, well, she hadn’t been up to much in the way of gainful employment.
The world is a funny place. Fifty years ago no one would have batted an eyelid about a woman marrying a man 20 years her senior and spending her day strolling from one beauty parlour to the next, but nowadays, the minute someone says that they’re a kept woman (or man for that matter), everyone bays for blood. It’s strange because had she told me that she didn’t work, I personally wouldn’t have thought much of it but my other friend’s reaction told me everything I needed to know about what standards society at large has set for women these days.

It’s a dangerous tightrope that we are walking on because it’s one that allows for very little...