What's On Your Tick-list? Men, Money & Hypergamy

Money, Money, Money; Living in a Material World; I ‘aint Saying She’s a Golddigger. When we talk about what women want from their men, we don’t have to look far in music culture to get a hint. Yet, for several reasons, I’ve just personally never got the money memo.

When I met my fiancé, he was a 26-year-old sleeping on an air mattress which required blowing up every night. He lived in a flat with no communal space outside of a hob and a loo. When I enquired as to where we should eat our pasta that one night I stayed over, I was directed to either the sink or the not-quite-a-bed. At the time he was working on a shop floor as a tailor and had little aside from a suitcase full of zips (literally) to his name. I was a 30-year-old soon-to-be-divorcée and to be entirely fair, it’s not like I had much else to call my own. My ex-husband was also a journalist, and we had no assets to divide when it came time to say the final sayonara. But I had been living in a marital home with a dining table and bed frame and had a somewhat established career. Within a year of us dating, that had started to show. At one point during our early years, I was earning about four times his salary, though that was mostly because he was on a low wage rather than me being a crazy high-flyer. Either way, our relationship would have definitely fit into the ‘mixed-collar’ bracket.

At the time, there were a lot of murmurings about our economic disparity from friends (‘but how will it work when it comes to holidays?’, ‘what about when you have kids?’, ‘do you mind paying most of the rent?’, ‘but this is just a fling, right?’) and even members of my (universally of humble origin) family raised an eyebrow. I was somewhat non-plussed as money has never factored in any of my romantic liaisons, which is honestly fortunate as I’ve traditionally repelled wealthy men. But over the years, I have realised that I’m perhaps more of an outlier than I’d realised. The fact I had zero instinct to immediately run for the hills at the dining-over-the-sink suggestion puts me out of step not just from my immediate peers, but apparently from my demographic cohort. Recent research has shown that hypergamy – the cultural desire to ‘marry up’ (based on economic, social or sexual capital) remains far more entrenched than we liberated sisters might like to admit. A recent Swedish paper showed that amongst highly educated women with occupational prestige and social class, there continues to be a strong preference for men who out-earn them. High earning men are 3.5 times more likely to attract women on dating sites and a 2018 study of men and women from China, Europe & the US showed that men’s attractiveness was rated two points higher when their salary increased by a factor of 10. For a woman to achieve the same uplift she’d have to earn 10,000 times more.

Assertive mating (sounds sexy right?) is the term sociologists use to describe the tendency for a partner to seek mates just like themselves. Amongst my circles, an alternative catchy phrase ‘parity or above’ is used to describe the prudent and desirable economic situation of a male suitor (even amongst women who are doing really well). The big problem here is that we have turned the world. Women graduates now outnumber males at a rate of 4 to 3. Education continues to be tied to earning power, so while there is no country where women out-earn men, there are countless regions in advanced economies where they do so (of course, this is before they hit their thirties and perhaps decide to procreate, leading to the worldwide prevalence of the gender pay gap). What’s new for our times is that the number of men at economic and educational equivalence to women has, proportionally speaking, dwindled.  The result of this, as one paper quite logically suggested, is not that ‘he’s just not that into you’, more ‘there just aren’t enough of him.’

One of the most important tenets of feminism for me personally has always been the importance of securing my own financial position so I don’t have to factor in a male partner’s salary when it comes to love. Far better, in my mind, to compromise for a job you’re not 100% enthusiastic about than to choose a borderline iffy mate who happens to have a great bottom line. I was explicitly raised to feel this way and unless I’m literally incapacitated, I’ll never need a housekeeping allowance. My mum savagely learnt the lesson, so I will never have to: no matter how much money a man can have and how financially stable the life they can offer you, they can also - on a heel spin - take it all away. My mum was left holding babies, I too was left overnight. Neither of us saw it coming and we’re emotionally intelligent, confident women. I’m so sorry to say it, but you literally just never know when it comes to romantic unions. Which is why I have always seen financial dependence as a terrifying trap.

I’ve also always - without fail - gone Dutch on first dates and have always paid equally for everything with a partner, or else significantly more. I don’t expect lavish gifts or demand to be spoiled financially, from my perspective that’s something to aim to provide for myself. Aside from my engagement ring, I don’t have any jewels given by lovers to sustain me; I have no financial insurance policies aside from child maintenance. Of course, I always knew there were different messages in society, but they just never permeated. Latterly, I also found that having the financial seesaw weighted in my corner was about the only true counter to traditional gender roles. While I combined being the family breadwinner with being our children’s primary care giver, the fact that I was funding so much of our life meant my work was seen as a priority. It is wild how quickly that can change, because those traditional paradigms are just waiting for us all, like an old comfy chair positioned at an optimum angle for easy recline.

When I look around me, I see wonderful, layered, mature men struggling to find connections because they work in lower paid industries or don’t come from family money. Conversely, I have girlfriends who would love to find a partner but struggle to do so because they can’t find ‘quality guys’. This characterisation is borne out by the data and one of the biggest consequences has been a declining birth rate, for obvious reasons. The older you get, the more front and centre bank balances become, and that has doubled down in these financially strained times. We are a generation which has been so deeply pressured in our journey to financial stability. Even with two good earners, homeownership can feel out of reach, so I definitely see how it was easier for me to choose a partner who earned less when I was 30, because by 40, there is no doubt that the stakes are higher. There are also my privileges to consider in this conversation, as a white, heterosexual women. For women of colour, the pay gap penalty as well as the converse financial implications of hypogamy (marrying a partner below her social, financial or sexual capital) can have more extreme financial consequences simply because of the existence of social biases. Put simply, there are so many women out there with more to lose than me.

And don’t get me wrong. Any partner’s relationship with money is a deeply important factor to be considered when courting. I’ve been in a fucking awful situation living with someone who abused my financial trust and lacked any kind of financial responsibility. Let’s just say if someone you don’t know very well tells you they have a CCJ and can’t get a phone contract, take very slow steps to support them. Even if they say they adore you, they can rinse your bank account and credit score. I absolutely agree that financial recklessness, meanness and total and utter financial illiteracy are all major red flags in a mature relationship. But when it’s simply a case of a wonderful man not having multiple zeros in his checking account, I can’t identify with the impulse to swipe left. As a mother of two sons, I can’t help but worry if my distinct angle on this issue might kneecap them. I’ve always thought I’d teach my boys to follow their passions, but perhaps that’s misguided? What if they want to be actors or artists, might my encouragement undermine their ability to secure a partnership in the future?

No matter how far we have come, the idea of ‘carrying’ a man financially remains deeply undesirable to many women. And dating app culture makes this paradigm even more pronounced, because you can so easily check a potential plus one’s Linkedin profile before you agree to meet IRL. Meeting in the old-fashioned way—as I did—stops you from pre-vetting based on professional or educational attainment, allowing chemistry to get to work before you start trying to guess a partner’s potential equity contribution. I’m (hopefully obviously) no feminism apologist, but I do think that it’s right to check some of the expectations we have germinated. Alongside the girl boss motivation of the past decade, there has also been plenty of discourse around not settling and getting what we deserve and in the matrix of economic instability and the biggest squeeze on our financial security for decades, it’s a bit like the clock has gone back on what that means for a man’s earning prowess in the context of his dating cred.

When you reach the middle of your life, there is a huge amount of pressure to have everything figured out, to have built all the foundations, to have the nest eggs in place. But that just is not the way the cookie crumbles for everyone. As AI swipes knowledge jobs and careers wither before our eyes (I write as a former newspaper journalist), we are increasingly required to pivot and retrain and our professional trajectories just aren’t as stable. Reliable salaries just aren’t that reliable anymore. Those who might have once been riding high off the back of a booming housing market may now be grappling to downsize to dodge mortgage hikes, or even moving back in with family to ride out the turbulent tides. And for plenty of others, things maybe just haven’t worked out. Failure is part of life, and financial difficulties can be part of that, especially if you lack generational wealth to cushion the falls. For educated women to be discounting potential heterosexual mates because they don’t bring as many readies to the table hurts both sides of the coin.

As a parent, I can also see that economic value in a family is not just created through earnings. If I’d had a stay-at-home partner, he could have saved us £25k a year (post tax) scooping up the insane childcare costs. If he’d had the bandwidth to cook, I can’t imagine how much I could have diverted from Deliveroo. But perhaps it’s not even that these men want to stay home—perhaps they are ambitious and dynamic and building something, but they’re just not there yet. I do believe that shared aspirations and dedication to those dreams matters and it’s important that you both feel you are rowing in the same direction. I knew my boyfriend had charisma and a huge amount of ambition, though I’ll admit I wasn’t sure that he had the capacity to work as hard as he now does. He used to be much more relaxed and was always telling me to ‘work smarter, not harder’ (loved that, not). I knew the truth already: nothing comes for free, and money is hard to make no matter which way you cut it.

These days, I live with a different man to the one I met, and that has brought its own challenges. But even if he hadn’t dialled things up, I would have still said yes to any ring he had offered me. We might not be living where we do, but he would make me happy somewhere else. Conversely, I would probably be earning more, as I’ve had to say pass on projects because the overwhelming demands of his business mean I’m plugging more gaps with the kids. I find that a bitter pill to swallow, but I also now know that these things ebb and flow. I guess that’s the real point. What a man earns today, what you earn today sort of doesn’t mean a huge amount, because things are going to change. Sometimes you might be bearing the brunt of the pressure to provide, other times you’ll be in the backseat at the bank. For richer, for poorer, for more bath times or less, fluxing finances will underscore so many elements of your relationship if you’re in it for the long run. It’s naïve to think that there won’t be moments in this economy where one or the other of you hits the skids and that will impact your role within your household and the balance between you. While I don’t think love is all you need, it is most of it. So, when I’m told that my faith in my boy has paid off, I agree. But I don’t see that in financial terms; money can’t buy love, nomatter who brings the bacon home.