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Men generally do not care about the income of their wife, as that's not what they're innately attracted to. Hypergamy is characteristic of women and hence they

• nostrebored 5y ago
  > women are attracted to money and status! Not men!!! Professionals I know in the 20-35 cohort only want to date other professionals. The ones that don’t want some weird stay at home trophy wife dynamic. There’s nothing provably innate about some men preferring trophy wives. There is a lot of availability due to cultural baggage. The phenomenon that you’re talking about is culturally bound. Anecdotally my wife makes ~150k more per year than me. She’s made more than me for like 80% of our relationship. I’ve stayed at home with our son. We’re still top 1%. Neither of us care.
  • itchyouch 5y ago
    My limited observation is that women use HEHI as signal and as a filtering mechanism, otherwise non-HEHI men that could otherwise be candidates end up providing signal circumstantially through introductions, or a common environment that provides opportunities for serendipitous bonding to occur.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Men use it as a filter too, in my cohort (mid 30s, coastal US cities). A second six figure income in the partnership provides a lot of ease of mind, and is almost required if your goal is to live in certain neighborhoods. I would say it is probably true that a smaller proportion of men use it as strong of a signal as women do, but that makes sense to me considering women have a decent risk of not being able to earn income due to childbirth and child rearing.
  • xwdv 5y ago
    It’s not a weird dynamic. There is a threshold where if your partner isn’t making some meaningful amount of money relative to you, it’s better for them to just not work at all than spend 40 hours a week toiling away for a pittance of a paycheck. What is there to gain from having a wife work as a cashier when you make 10x as much as her? You either want to be a power couple or just get the best partner you can and offer them a comfortable life. The relationships that are an exception to this are usually ones where both people started off equally and then one of them suddenly became massively successful but they still remain in love.
    • watwut 5y ago
      Trophy wife is not just about being stay at home. The term expresses lack of respect toward that wife, whose role is to look pretty and is not expected to contribute, to be knowledgeable nor have skills. Second, men who earn a lot don't marry cashiers all that often. They want to marry within the same social class. They marry educated women whose earning potential is better then minimum wage. Third, being stay at home partner comes with price and nowdays people really do it overwhelmingly because of children. The childless stay at home woman is mostly a rarity. Partly because being dependent and fully paid by him comes with resentment and expectations on his side. The "I am working and you are just spending my money" feeling is one argument away. And partly because being bored, lonely and feeling useless most of time causes issues with her. Their interests and needs become different, so they diverge.
      • xwdv 5y ago
        Unfortunately there is no guarantee that a woman with desirable genetic traits is also a high income earner, so in practice men must choose to concede some qualities if they are to have a good chance of finding a wife. Usually, this means choosing beauty over earning potential, as beauty is much harder to find and then the value of money decreases as you earn more of it.
        • bumby 5y ago
          >beauty is much harder to find This thread seems to use a lot of colloquial wisdom without citing where it came from. How are your arriving at this conclusion?
  • dash2 5y ago
    I don’t know whether it is innate, but it is cross-cultural: see Buss, D.M., 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and brain sciences, 12(1), pp.1-14.
  • matheusmoreira 5y ago
    A wife who stays at home, manages the household and takes care of children is a "trophy wife" now? What has happened to society? Since when have traditionally feminine contributions been so devalued? There's nothing wrong with earning money but there's nothing wrong with staying at home either. Some things money just can't buy.
    • nostrebored 5y ago
      These are not traditionally feminine attributes. Having a stay at home parent is a recent historical event starting post ww2 in the U.S.
      • bumby 5y ago
        What is the second claimed drawing from? It would seem like a stay at home parent was more common in the past, considering there were historically more single income families with children. “The percentage of dual-income households with children under age 18 has been on the rise since the 1960s” https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characteristics-and-selected-expenditures-of-dual-and-single-income-households-with-children.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
• deleted 5y ago
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• Gigachad 5y ago
  What are you basing this on? Seems like a large claim to make about what people are innately attracted to.
  • apozem 5y ago
    I’ve only ever seen the word “hypergamy” used by red pill maniacs. If that’s the case, his scientific basis is bitterness and pseudoscience.
  • gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    Based on redpills, obviously.
• fleddr 5y ago
  I'd add that when you're in your 30s or 40s, you're simply too late. The good men are already taken. There may still be plenty of men in the same age group, single and good earners, but almost by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single.
  • mrep 5y ago
    So your definition for good men are only people who have never had a break up in their 30s/40s because there are plenty of people who have?
    • fleddr 5y ago
      No, not at all. I think from this context you'd understand that "good" means most attractive or most desired within the scope of selecting a partner. It doesn't mean you're a good or bad person in general. And of course, some attractive ones are returned to the pool. But most are not, so the bigger issue of low supply remains.
  • bumby 5y ago
    This reminds me of the classical efficient market economists perspective that it’s a waste of time to pick up a $100 bill from the sidewalk. Because if it were a real $100 bill somebody else would have obviously picked it up already. I don’t know that you can make the claim that the mating market is completely efficient.
    • allturtles 5y ago
      The reason that joke is funny is that the economists are ignoring the fact that someone has to be the first person to come across that $100 bill. One is not likely be the first woman to 'come across' a single man in his 30s-40s, who has presumably been 'on the sidewalk' for 10-20+ years.
      • bumby 5y ago
        It's a play on the idea of market efficiency. From the classical economist perspective, there's no point in trying to beat the market because if it were possible, somebody would have already discovered and exploited it, leaving you unable to do so similarly. Just like the dating claim that if somebody was desirable, they would have already been taken. My claim is that both perspectives are wrong because neither market is perfectly efficient. Ironically, taking the approach that they are efficient makes it harder to accomplish either end of beating the market or finding a mate.
• bumby 5y ago
  “Hypergamy” was not a term I was familiar with so I had to look it up. In doing so, there are some references that indicate that it is not actually innate, but a product of culturally reinforced gender roles [1]. For example, if a woman is in a culture that limits her ability to be successful financially, it would follow that she values the ability to make money in a mate to overcome those societal constraints. The cursory look into the research showed that as gender roles in a society became less rigid, the effect of hypergamy was reduced. If it were truly innate, I would expect there to be no reduction in hypergamy as societal norms change. [1] Hadfield, Elaine (1995). Men's and Women's Preferences in Marital Partners in the United States, Russia, and Japan (PDF). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Vol. 26 No. 6, Western Washington University. pp. 728–750.
• bigbillheck 5y ago
  > Men generally do not care about the income of their wife, Right up until it becomes greater than theirs.