If you thought Sheconomics, the “no-nonsense-easy-to-follow financial guide, written for women by women” that was published this year was annoying, with its assumption that the fairer sex are incapable of understanding money unless the explanation comes between pink covers and is spattered with fluffy analogies comparing interest rate changes to the fashion for skinny jeans, then wait till you read Flirting With Finance: The Modern Woman’s Guide To Financial Freedom.

The Australian title, written by Anneli Knight, a freelance journalist, and Virginia Graham, a qualified financial planner and former model, couldn’t be more patronising if it came stuffed inside a Care Bear.

The inside cover features a picture of make-up. On the few occasions that the authors make an argument more complex than that capable of being understood by a dim six-year-old, they use heart-shaped bullet points to divide it into digestible parts. And there is an entire chapter drawing analogies between finance and fashion, including the assertions that “interest rates are just like hemlines (“they’re always changing — up or down”), that “the sharemarket is a little bit of a tragic fashionista [you know those girls who take all the pages of the fashion mags just a little bit too seriously]”, and that “property is the little black dress of the economy [a timeless fashion classic]”.

Though the main problem with the book is its contention that finance is best understood when compared to lust and romance. Or, as the authors put it: “Reading this book will help you see that finance isn’t the geeky guy in the corner. Finance is the hot gardener with the Diet Coke. It’s time to start flirting with finance.”

As the geeky guy in the corner, I’ll concede that not all the authors’ relationship analogies are idiotic. They are right, for instance, that in both finance and relationships “you have to be in it to win it”. Too many people sit around at home, scoffing M&S ready meals, watching endless editions of Come Dine With Me, expecting romance to knock on their door. But if you want love, you have to make some kind of effort to find it.

The authors are also right to contend that “timing is an essential ingredient” of both finance and relationships. Though I’d go much further and say that timing is the secret to everything, from a good shepherd’s pie to careers and marriage.

Meanwhile, the authors’ analogies between different types of investments and types of men don’t, initially, seem that silly. It is not entirely ridiculous to say, for instance, that a blue-chip share is like a man who is “dependable and will more likely than not continue to bring increasing benefits over your long life together — he is a dentist or a GP . . .” and that more speculative stocks are like men who are “flashy and flaky”.

But these analogies gradually become stretched and overly literal, with biotech shares being compared to the guy who “wears a lab coat and protective eyewear during business hours”, telecoms shares to men who are “always on the phone, the internet” and the enterprise collapses entirely when the authors compare art and other collectable investments to “ahh, the dreamy, mysterious artist. The dark horse. Jane Eyre’s Heathcliff.” There’s a book called Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Brontë. There’s also a book called Wuthering Heights written by Emily Brontë. The latter, when I last read it, featured a character called Heathcliff. But, if memory serves, Jane Eyre and Heathcliff have never featured in the same major literary work.

Before I tripped upon this factual error, I was feeling generous towards the book. If there was a flaw with it, I thought, it was simply that the authors had omitted the best analogies. They don’t, for instance, make the point that people often delude themselves that they understand relationships, just as people delude themselves that they understand finance, when, as the recent economic crisis has shown, they don’t necessarily do so. They also fail to point out that some of the worst torments imaginable accompany both wealth and romance.

But the Heathcliff/Jane Eyre clanger is a symptom of a bigger intellectual problem with Flirting with Finance: ultimately, romance and investment are completely dissimilar. And to compare them (to make another comparison) is like drawing an analogy between Michael Jackson’s discography and the output of a Midlands sponge factory.

The authors suggest, for instance, that relationships are like investments in that “what you’re looking for, who you’re drawn to, and what suits you . . . change over time. The way you approach [investments] at 15 or 21 will probably be completely different to your approach at 34 or 55 or 76.”

This is absolutely not the case with relationships. One of the great agonies of life is that the heart remains a child. One can be floored by love at the age of 32 in exactly the same devastating way that one can be floored by it at the age of 14.

The authors also attempt a comparison between relationships and the importance of “diversification” in investments, saying that “the more shares you have in your portfolio, the lower the overall risk”. This is all very well, except the opposite is true in relationships. The only consequence of multiple partners is self-loathing, stress and sexually transmitted diseases.

I could go on. Unlike relationships, investments don’t require constant concentration and effort: you can forget about your pension most of the time. It’s pretty easy to have a long-distance relationship with financial assets, whereas long-distance relationships with human beings are exercises in existential despair. The only way to survive the psychological and emotional trauma of being dumped is to pretend the other person is dead, whereas you don’t have to pretend your investment ISA doesn’t exist if share values fall.

And while having no or little money can be oddly liberating, having no love is horrendous, terrible, insufferable: a bit like reading Flirting With Finance: The Modern Woman’s Guide To Financial Freedom in fact.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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