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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.
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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