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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.
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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