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Boys don't like girls, boys like postgrad housewives
What does the man with a lot of romantic options want?
Does he want a beautiful young trophy wife? Does he want a high-earning girlboss?
The answer, according to Lyman Stone, is neither. What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.
With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.
So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age. However, these couples also choose housewifery at the highest rate. My interpretation of this is that the more money a man earns, the more secure in their class position the couple can be. Therefore, they can afford to have the wife give up work without losing their place in the class hierarchy.
The bitter professional woman explanation (men are intimidated by my qualifications and high salary) doesn't seem to work either. Sure, wives of rich men are the least likely to work, but those that do work are also the highest earners among women. A more parsimonious explanation seems to be that high earning women want higher earning men, and they (mostly) get them.
High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.
The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.
Not sure if I can get behind this message hypothesized here. Whilst I can understand that the Anti-Red pill crowd is desperate for something to chew on, this is a stretch.
Sure, the data is there, but it says nothing about what men want, as there is no causal direction implied anywhere outside of editorialized headlines. It does, however, fit the Red Pill box of women 'rejecting' men they see as lesser than them and instead looking for men who make at the very least equal. To that extent it isn't rich men choosing rich women, it's rich women hunting down every single rich man they can. And when they get him they predictably, according to TRP philosophy and this data, stop working and start making a family. 'Because that's what women actually want.' (Italics read in the voice of Nick Fuentes)
To that extent the data fits that red pill 'truth' and the general red pill assertion that dating is a different market for men as they get older.
Right; "Revealed Preference" only counts when the goods are a) equally available, and, more importantly b) have the same effective "cost." This is never the case with marriage.
The first strike against this article is that it's only counting already-married men; we wouldn't rebut the assertion that women, in the main, don't "marry down" by pretending all the women loudly claiming they'd rather be single than marry "a loser" don't exist, and we should do the same for men.
Further, the data only shows men tend to marry within the same general socio-economic status, and just assumes that this must be by choice (women have no agency in the matter, I suppose). It ignores opportunity, propinquity, peer pressure effects (just how many men can truly ignore everyone in their social circle calling them a creep for chasing a girl half their age? This article isn't going to even bother asking the question, let alone tell us the answer).
Hilariously, it acknowledges that men prefer stay-at-home wives, and immediately claims that this is actually proof that men prefer ambitious girlbosses. This is RadFemHitler levels of copium huffing. Trash article is trash.
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They want peers who can fit in with their social and work circle and who will advance alongside them. Younger wives might not be as clued-in, so unless it's a second marriage it's not going to work as well. Her career is in the home supporting his career; making sure the dinner parties are hosted, the right people invited, remembering when to send cards and gifts for special occasions to business contacts, helping him navigate the web of relationships, turning up at the right events looking suitable on his arm, and so forth. His suits are pressed and ready for him, the home looks as it should, the exact balance of good taste and understated wealth on display to help him get promotions and move on up in the world. Everything running smoothly in the support system to his career so he can concentrate on work and not on "are the kids going to piano lessons or horse riding after school today? who is going to pick them up? mom is in the hospital, is everything okay on that end?"
OK, horse riding codes rural in America more than upper class. At least in Texas. And upper class housewives do not iron their husband's suit, they take it to the dry cleaners.
Upper class housewives pay(as in enter the credit card number) for private school, they manage IRA contributions, they maximize tax exemptions, they pay the contractors. They host dinner parties. What they don't do is, uh, housework. There's Mexicans for that, as in the Georgian era there were the lower classes for it. It has always been thus.
Definitely depends on the location, but it makes sense to me that Texas would see it as more rural than wealthy in comparison with say, the North East.
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Don't marry her unless she can secure an alliance with the Burgundians.
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Its a cute picture, but I suspect it was true of old people when you where young, more so than it is now. Im from a relatively well-off family, and the only part of this that seems true to live for them and their friends is the last sentence.
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People fall for specific individual people more than they fall for hypothetical lists of attractive traits. So the women rich men are interested in are often just the ones they happen to have contact with. Statistical differences between groups can't be assumed to reflect the preferences of those groups, they can also reflect who they have contact with in the first place.
Notice how even when they aren't peers they're often stuff like Arnold Schwarzenegger cheating on his wife with his housekeeper, rather than with some beautiful model. That's not "rich celebrities prefer housekeepers", he didn't cheat with some random woman employed as a housekeeper to someone else, he cheated with a woman he was actually in contact with. It reminds me of when people were questioning Jeff Bezos's marriage recently - sure he could theoretically pick between a lot of women, but she was the one he actually met via work.
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Personal antecedent; A friend of mine(who eventually married) confided to me part of the issue with dating he had was potential gold-diggers who were more interested in his and his family's wealth than an honest relationship.
Another personal antecedent; The same friend finally married a nice brain surgeon who's the only one I've seen capable of keeping up with said friend in all areas, and once she got settled into her job, her paycheck meant they could indulge in all their hobbies.
I think there's a hidden factor not accounted for; that rich, successful men don't have options - not really. That if they're trying to build a family, that their options are actually very limited - someone with a similar outlook, ideas for the lifestyle they want to lead, with a pleasant(or at least compatible) personality. So, while the data is interesting(and I'm not disagreeing with it), I think the host of assumptions are off and thus make things skewed when trying to apply it to the real world.
It would seem like the "millionaire next door" approach would work plausibly for rich guys not quite rich enough to be public figures. Maybe that happens often enough (has golden handcuffs from startup acquisition, still drives a Prius), but I've never seen it explicitly called out as a strategy. If you're rich enough and a public figure such that Google knows who you are (doctors, lawyers), that seems harder.
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Uh, does this distinguish between kinds of rich men? I know a master plumber who founded a construction company with some big contracts. Four ex wives.
There's definitely some other studies showing that graduate women are marrying high-earning non-graduate men, like your plumber friend. That explains how graduate women have been able to maintain their high marriage rate despite a lack of graduate men to go around.
How did the wives of your friend compare to him in terms of age and educational credentials?
They were definitely younger. About half of them had worked as teachers(so better educated than a high school dropout who managed to become a master plumber, at minimum), none of them worked again after marrying him. Each got a Carribbean condo as part of the divorce. Only three had kids.
Might one of them have been a grad student who had sex with a fat old plumber for a few years for a condo in Belize and a check? Uh, maybe but they didn't strike me as the type.
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This is interesting. I think this might be very much a US phenomenon. It would be even more interesting to look at how this varies between cultures and between countries.
In the US cultural context, rich men usually got rich by either having upper-class connections or by being workaholics. In the former case, they are beholden to upper-class cultural norms, which condition a certain status and social acceptability with a similar-age bride from a family of similar class. This might make the young bride less attractive even to this subset of the rich.
Among the US nouveau riche, social skill development is stunted by workaholism, and this probably limits their ability to date young upper class woman. The young upper-class American women I have met recently seem to have their creep detector tuned up to 11 and to habitually present an attitude of cynicism. Which is to say that they will probably make an older man really work for it while they are young, go single for a long time, and not marry until they are late in fertility, starting to get desperate, and cannot afford to be so bitchy.
In the US, there is also a lot of financial risk to marrying young women. Younger women are generally more likely to lose interest in their partner after the first few years, and the loss of 50% of assets during no-fault divorce makes their departure really expensive to rich men.
But thinking of other countries I'm familiar with, it seems that even where 50% split of assets during divorce is not common, compensating social dynamics exist which make the rich man/young woman pairing less common than one would expect. Korea completely lacks the financial divorce risk, but makes up for it with increased social pressure and higher standards for social acceptability, which pushes all relationships (and especially marriages) into similar age brackets.
Perhaps a good experimental counterexample for my explanation would be China, which has low divorce risk and fewer social norms. I think women there get very very picky about their partners' finances, which would predict that rich men there will skew toward younger women and middle-class men there go unmarried until later in life.
I suspect China's relationship dynamics are more related to gender asymmetry than divorce laws. Or at least it's a huge confounder that merits consideration.
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Well. That's who they want on their arm when they're seen in public. Certainly selection bias in terms of what we actually see.
My inherent issue with this is its not differentiating between what they chase as sexual partners vs. what they might actually settle in for a long term relationship.
Red Pill would suggest that a wealthy man can and would keep a soft harem of younger women, discarding them as needed, which isn't really refuted by the data here.
Possible. I'll also throw out that younger women are a little less likely to successfully keep up the right appearances and are probably somewhat more likely to do something that is blatantly embarrassing to you either intentionally or unintentionally.
So even if your peers 'approve' of large age gaps, you're still risking reputational damage if the woman you choose is actually immature.
There's the key word. Marry. Leo DiCaprio has gone through 12 younger women in the last 20 years alone (is he an outlier? Probably, but not by much). No wedding in sight.
Broaden the question to more general 'relationships' and I'd imagine age gaps are more prevalent.
So yeah, is there anything in the data to suggest that rich men wouldn't pump and dump as many young women as they can (Elon sure goes that route) and only marry one that actually matches his personal status more closely?
I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian, I'm just put off when I see a claim like this, backed up by a narrowly-defined set of data that purports to refute an idea that is making a substantially different claim.
I’d guess actual billionaires (like Hollywood stars, whose indiscretions are more public) have a higher rate of infidelity than average, but do male investment bankers have a higher rate of infidelity than male bartenders, tattoo artists, taxi drivers or nurses? I doubt it. Polling shows that male infidelity stays pretty similar controlling for education and most non-religious class background.
The idea that every rich man who can afford to is secretly fucking hot teens or young women seems like more of a prurient fantasy than anything else. Some do, just like plenty of married cops and truckers fuck hookers. But most? I doubt it.
If I had to pick high rates of infidelity by profession, I would put bartenders, tattoo artists, and taxi drivers towards the top, and male nurses solidly above average just due to gender ratios in their field.
I would agree that working class men in male dominated but lucrative(by working class standards) professions are much more likely than average to see sex workers of any description, regardless of marital status. I would also say that fucking teens is either weirdo coded or solidly working class(in the not particularly high income sense) in American culture. But bartenders and tattoo artists cheating on their wives is mostly shocking in the sense that they got married in the first place; these are (relatively)high income men surrounded by easy(relatively) women.
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Question is a bit fraught.
I'd absolutely bet that historically and recently, it was more likely that wealthier men had higher infidelity rates simply because it would be relatively easy for them to find attractive affair partners.
If nothing else, they can afford to pick a high-end escort for a night.
Invert it. Consider that young women are actively pursuing the rich men (if you're on dating apps, this is effectively explicit) and are much, much quicker to put out for them.
On balance, what effect would we expect this to have? Rich guys getting laid a lot, and very few of these women getting wifed up by said rich man. He can wait for the 'ideal' match, hopefully one that isn't so naive as to bang the nearest rich dude without much discretion.
I've talked to death about the lack of actual long-term relationships forming among the current crop of young women, I think the point that's relevant to this discussion is that there's a class of men who have their pick of women, and actually DO get to have it both ways. Bang the nubile ones for fun and then eventually find one worth marrying.
So what these men are marrying isn't quite revealing what they're actually pursuing, sexually.
I would imagine rich men getting married (relatively) earlier, as it used to be (and maybe still is) that settling down and getting married was seen as a sign of mature stability that proved you were ready for greater responsibility and promotion up the ladder. So marrying someone of a similar background and age who knows how to navigate the work and social circles where you'll be networking your little heart out is an advantage; you can always have a discreet affair with a hot young thing from the secretarial pool later on once you're established.
I'm not sure that's as true now, marriage rates being lower and median age at first marriage are creeping up.
But maybe. "Early" being early-mid 20's still leaves time to screw around a bit in college, find a girl by Junior year, lock her down, and get married and established early enough to start social climbing.
I'd guess that flings with younger staff are actually less common in the post Me-too era, but its genuinely a target-rich environment to find single women in any corporate environment.
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1% is the general number for American men using escorts or prostitutes in the past year, and the highest estimates are only two and a half percent. It's also negatively correlated with income in general.
Just not a real thing people do at a level where it would impact these numbers.
I don't know, man...
There are only about 2,000 men at Davos, only about 500 of them American. It wouldn't seriously impact the chart drawn above if every single one of them was balls deep in a hooker every night after the conference.
After reading the whole article:
Well, I guess this makes you right about both the rate, and the correlation with income. Though I suppose we'd need to know the native population of Davos prostitutes to know for sure...
Not just the rich guys at Davos, though, is it? It's the support staff around them, and all the journalists reporting on it, etc. Plenty of transient custom to be worth importing some short-term workers for.
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It's more just a data thing, the men are sorted by income percentile. There are around one million men in the top 1% of income, and because it's not weighted by income Elon Musk counts the same as my local Nissan Dealership owner or any law partner at a big firm. If it were the case that Davos type masters of the universe frequent prozzies, there just aren't enough of them to move the needle on what we're looking at, even within the pool of the 1%.
I'd add that everyone I know who has (admitted to) paying for sex was lower or working class, so it lines up with my experience. I'd imagine there are a few marginal cases I'm missing though.
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Yes, we've all recently learned that the multimillionaire CEO of a tech company will risk it all to have an affair with the head of HR at said company.
I'd agree escorts aren't the MODAL case here, for sure.
But for most guys, a night with a decent escort is not likely in the budget, so he's likely to throw money at strippers or somesuch.
Rich guy has that fallback, but is not necessarily going to need it.
I suppose the availability can have an impact on the market even if they aren't used. Like the Marxian theory that the unemployed are the Reserve Army of Labor, driving down wages by fear of competition. And I suppose the same goes for young floozies: my wife sees a 20 year old woman admiring me and knows she has to compete, and chooses to be better? I don't know.
I just don't think it's the case that there's some secret activity that proves that men don't really want the things they are visibly pursuing.
Eh, its the same as how we crave unhealthy junk food but can restrict ourselves to eating the healthier (but still flavorful) options over the long term.
I think guys have their horny brain which will screw almost any living thing, and then the post-coitus clarity brain that knows they need to find someone stable.
Guys have the things they want when they are mostly aiming to get their rocks off, then the things they want when they consider what kind of kids they'll have, who will help raise them, and what type of person would they tolerate sticking around AFTER they've had sex with them.
Rich guys presumably have the same urges, I'm just suggesting they have more options on the table to chase some strange if they can't keep the urges in check.
I don't disagree, but at some level...call me old fashioned, but marrying the rich guy is generally how we define winning for a woman. No one is disputing that rich men can find poor women attractive, but if they aren't marrying them, then it's sort of irrelevant to the outcome of the match.
Saying that rich men are really attracted to something other than what they're marrying is just kind of a misunderstanding of terms in my mind. Like saying that the team that is losing baseball games is better at baseball than the team that is winning baseball games. Or, to mix sports metaphors, it brings to mind the classic Sampaoli quote on possession in soccer:
For a woman trying to net a rich husband, it doesn't really matter if he stares at the big-titted waitress at the bar, it barely matters if he bangs her on occasion. It matters who he marries, who he supports financially, who has the children he raises and supports. Those are the goals, the sex is just passing the ball(s) around.
((That said, when you talk about "soft harems" I think we're mixing up what the data here is about. The granularity on income stops at percentile. The top 1% of income is "only" about $400k/yr. While I suppose, with some cleverness, you could manage to squirrel enough away to spend enough to keep a glamour girl on the side off that, you're not keeping a harem. DiCaprio or Trump, ultra wealthy celebrities, are in another stratosphere from the data on record here.))
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TRP has a tremendously difficult time conceiving of women as individual humans who have their own desires, interests, and other properties that aren't fully exhausted by their status as women, so that can help explain their blind spot in regards to this issue.
The guy I know who's really into TRP is always saying, "I don't care if she's into what I'm into, I don't care if she's good conversation, I don't care about any of that. I have male friends for that. Why would I go to a woman to socialize?"
Obviously you tend to share more in common with people who are of a similar age and education level to you. And, surprise surprise, the majority of men do want to be able to have reasonable social interactions with the person they're going to be spending the rest of their lives with, funny how that works out.
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Princeton Mom strikes again. College is the place to meet your partner.
I read The Original Preppy Handbook from the 1980s recently, my wife loved it and wanted me to read it. The whole book is built around a guide to being part of the preppy, mostly Northeastern, old money upper class. And the majority of the book is built around the social life of educational institutions: you go to this school, not so much to learn as to learn who to talk to. You meet people at your prep school, or your undergrad, or one of the sister/brother institutions to those schools, and those are pretty much your friends for life.
That's a fantasy of a past subculture that maybe never quite existed, but it does reflect the centrality of education to the modern American upper class. A young lawyer who goes K-JD is in full time schooling until they are 25 or 26, and basically that entire time their peer group is age-gated such that they have neither opportunity nor reason to get to know people much older or younger than they are. The median age at first marriage is around 30, and the median couple knows each other for a little over three years before getting engaged, followed by a year long engagement before they get married. So a huge number of our young professionals barely form a peer group or life outside of school before they meet their future mate.
That said, I definitely see some problems with their method.
My own wife had an easier time getting her degree because she was married to me, I helped support her through school. She probably earns more money as a result of the family connections we have in the area. She would have been successful on all those things on her own, but...lots of people don't finish their degrees because they can't afford it. She is very smart and very good at her job, but being Mrs. FiveHour has helped her a bit at times. And in turn, being her husband has started to help me in business, people know her and like her and that helps me get my foot in the door.
A rich man might marry a woman who is on her own a well-educated high earner; but it's also a lot easier to get educated and to become a high earner if you're married to a wealthy man. Connections, support, sinecures. A rich wife can choose to continue her education, and if she wants a job it's easy to secure a highly paid one through her husband.
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Slowly over the last 150 years (the roots predate the Victorian era but it was cemented in it, long before most wealthy women worked much outside the home) the primary purpose of marriage moved from children to romantic companionship. This was to some extent true even when upper class Victorians were having 6 kids each. You can trace in literature, the press and so on the concept of a ‘love match’. And then, in accelerated form since the 1970s, married men and women began spending much more time together. The world of a century ago had fraternal and women’s organizations.
A husband and wife would live together but often sleep in separate beds (if they could afford it) and would spend perhaps every evening of the week doing different things. A married man would be at the pub, at an organization like the Freemasons, at a men’s political meeting, whatever. A married woman would be with the children, often with other women in the community and extended family around her, and in free time (or more regularly if she had money for a governess, maid, nanny) at what were effectively sororal (if often more informal) gatherings, lunches, meetings and so on.
The family might be together at church, but that was it.
As Coming Apart narrates to some extent, the rise of suburbanization, the small nuclear rather than multigenerational extended family and then the slow withering of both male fraternal organizations and extended familial/communal women’s groups of the kind that existed in the Victorian city and town ended much of that.
Today, married couples spend an amount of time together, alone (by which I mean with only each other and possibly children for company) that would have been hard to fathom for most of our ancestors in recent centuries. That means that the personality and interests of a spouse are much more important. Money is more important now that women work too, but it isn’t the only central thing about the enterprise.
It reminds me of (I think @Gaashk) the recent discussion on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Why divorce and remarry to a woman your age when he is surely wealthy enough to enjoy the company of endless 20 year old models? I suspect because he enjoys her company and they have fun together, and in the modern age (when even most billionaires spend a lot of time with their spouses, at dinners, events, other gatherings and so on) that is the most important thing.
I mean, this is true, but also the, say, Georgian, upper crust did not get to marry the most attractive woman catching their eye, either. Part of marrying an upper class man has always been being an upper class woman.
In our society upper class men are marked by high salaries and upper class women by extensive education. They marry each other because they’re expected to marry class peers, not because those things are overwhelmingly important in themselves.
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This sounds very likely.
And it's probably bloody difficult for a billionaire to find someone they feel genuinely comfortable with.
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Rich men do indeed tend to marry same class women, but who do they fuck around with? How many of those marriages are faithful?
I remember that the site AshleyMadisons most frequent occupations of the users was physician, second highest? Lawyer….
A website well known for its users' strong commitment to honesty.
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Like SeekingArrangement, AshleyMadison was low key just a prostitution site on which more expensive ‘escorts’ found clients and vice versa. Most women who desperately want an affair don’t need a dating site to find a partner. Poor johns are of no interest to self-respecting and moderately expensive escorts who do even the most basic background checks.
I presume that poor men who want to cheat do so with women in their social circles, on hookup apps (they’re usually higher time preference and from families with more divorce so care less about the consequences of being found out) and with cheap street walker or truck stop prostitutes.
Ashley Madison was a scam site populated with almost exclusively female bots. Pretty sure there was a data dump that confirmed this, there were no women, not even prostitutes
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