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Notes -
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.
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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