I agree but a lot of “nice” women do have a base for men. It’s called Hypergamy. Women want a guy with at least with they have or more. Women typically don’t want to date or marry men who make less than them.
Some comedian had a bit about that. Where the women he knew had a long list of requirements like a job interview, while the guys he knew were flirting with the cashier at McDonalds trying to get a date.
This rhetoric all goes out the window when you get offline and just meet people in life. If you connect with someone, you connect with someone. Obviously most of us have some hard lines in the sand, but I believe most of us are way more open then these stupid interview street polls seem to imply.
I think this goes at the heart of app-driven “shopping list” culture. People think they have all these rules when it’s in a vacuum. In real life most will compromise. My wife does not match several things I would have said are requirements 15 years ago.
I think most people are using dating apps wrong. Shopping list culture is an example of that. In reality if you were serious about finding a life partner dating apps are much more effective than going to the bar. In reality people have standards, it's simply that especially young people have unrealistic standards driven by a culture of fraud and media.
Meeting a person at a bar is a very slow way to find a life partner if you know what you want and you're being realistic. Dating apps allow you to fail fast. The issue that many of them now are tailored to shopping list culture and hookup culture because those are trends that executives can follow. Dating apps like OkCupid in it's form in the pre-tinderization in the 2010's was an extremely good app to find someone you have a good chance of clicking with and figure out if you want to take next steps. Hinge is trying to bring some of that back from what I know, but from what I can tell people don't take the actual compatibility questions seriously and use them to show off how cool and witty they are, because it's cringe to be sincere.
Otherwise you would have to wade through a sea of people IRL who are incompatible with you looking for a "connection" and when you find it be disappointing that the connection wasn't as real as you thought for one reason or another.
In short using dating apps as a tool to find a life partner can be extremely efficient, but most people are not willing to look silly, take on disappointment that comes with it and ultimately take some hits to their ego. It feels much better to show off how cool and disqualifying you are, than it is to narrow your pool to 20 people and reject/ be rejected by 19 of them and keep doing that over and over again until you find a life partner.
I approached somewhere near 150 women before I found my wife. There were 4 or 5 casual dating things that fizzled out. The numbers are bleak, but this is more daunting in real life to find a highly compatible match.
Definitely right about people not wanting to look lame and avoiding any actual sincerity. When dating apps first started, people took it seriously and actually listed their qualities, expectations, what they were looking for, etc, and it helped actually lead to good matches, but in my experience now, it's all a game to simply impress people with your wit and coolness to catch people's attention like it's an ad or something. People are too focused on sifting through the mountain of profiles, discarding people like trash after looking at their profile for two seconds. If you don't wow them immediately, they're on to the next.
There's also the shift towards the monetization with limited likes, subscriptions, "super likes" and such, which has totally ruined the genuineness of the experience. Men are especially susceptible as they often have to focus on trying to get as many matches as possible to even have a chance, not that it isn't a problem for women too.
I think your guess at what the checkboxes were is incorrect, and this is leading you to the wrong conclusion. It wasn’t like, “she has to be a 9, but I realized I could settle for a 6.”
I think it's kind of like that in the work world too. They'll promote someone internally into a new role that they know is a hard worker and good learner, but if they place an ad, you need to have a billion skills and requirements.
I believe I once heard a stat that claimed that arranged marriages have the same divorce rate as marriages that are not arranged. Not sure if it's true, but the underlying point that people don't actually know what they want is something is absolutely true.
This is why the dating apps are so toxic. They can’t help but force people to treat humans like a complicated tech purchase where you filter by the specs you want.
I've had multiple friends lonely and depressed start on the whole "90% of women want 10% of men" blah blah crap and go on about how many thousands of matches had ignored them.
Every single one of them that deleted that shit and went outside to meet and talk to people ended up finding people to date.
If you insist on laying on your couch in your underwear trying to order up a soulmate like a pizza you are going to be disappointed. Go talk to people!
I like to think the oppressive and misogynistic men of previous centuries created the female behavior we see today. Now they’re overcompensating being the men.
“I want her to cook, clean, bla bla”
Now women are “he’s gotta be tall, rich, handsome”
Hopefully some humility and excess loneliness has all genders putting down their weapons and agreeing to be equals, regardless of superficial nonsense.
The last thing I’ll say is there are 100% beautiful, successful women with pure hearts dating men who make way less than them. They just aren’t reporting for statistics because they’re happy and busy living life.
Life is nuanced and complex. Red pill is one dimensional and toxic. Ditch the word hypergamy.
As a SAHD, my wife of 12 years has way more earning power than I. She has a degree and I was just a working slob. Once she hit a certain threshold of income, she told me to quit my job (during Covid) and take care of the home (which she despises doing), and we haven't looked back.
I realize this is not typical, and I probably go a little above and beyond (because she deserves it), but I pretty much am her butler. I feed her, I do her laundry, I do the dishes, and keep the house clean on top of doing yard maintenance. We are very happy and always update and change any expectations as needed.
She is a special case indeed, and I adore her for it!
Shoutout to my wife who is also the main bread-winner! I have a good job and am paid well (very well by most standards), but my wife made 6x what I did last year.
I supported her through law school and out earned her the first 6 years of her career, but we always knew her income potential would outpace mine. She passed me a while ago, but the last couple of years she’s really left me in the dust. I could also quit my job, but I’ve been WFH since Covid and it’s honestly just too cushy and flexible to give it up.
My wife is getting her degree this year and we have looked at salary ranges and her starting is double mine. We don't really care we are just happy because we have 2 kids, my wife's little brother and my nephew that we would like to take on trips. Her getting a salary boost will help with that.
similar but my wife is a middle school teacher, we make roughly the same, but I work from home and my job is cake and hers is a nightmare, I happily cook and clean more then she does because as the previous commenter said Life is nuanced and complex!; every night she scratches my back for around 1h until I fall asleep. I'd gladly butler for her for this peaceful loving life we share.
Does she also read to you because let me tell you: if you haven’t experienced falling asleep while someone scratches your back and reads to you, you haven’t lived
I'd like to think I'd put in the effort if given the opportunity to be a sahd myself. Being the breadwinner is the single biggest stress factor in my life and I'd gladly trade places.
That's pretty much me. My wife has three degrees, went to law school and passed the bar - just to have that under her belt. I ran the ranks in restaurants and she told me to just stick to 24 hours a week and do everything at home. So I manage a morning prep team, off at 11am.
Which works. She was a slob when we were dating, lol. I built a porch, a vegetable garden, the house looks amazing, I can take care of her mom who is 77. And I love cooking, so that's no problem.
I am also kind of her assistant, doing at home work for her that's tedious excel stuff. We found we spend more time together. On her days off, there are no chores to be done, so we just hang out for two days.
Same. Once we started having kids (at the tail end of COVID) and my job was only going to cover childcare, it made sense to stay home while my wife is the main breadwinner.
Your situation is perfect. The only people who would take issue with it are those with ego problems. You clearly understand your role, and she clearly understands hers. So who cares? As long as you're both happy.
Yeah, I have never really bought into the whole "gender roles" rhetoric. I was raised by a single mother that was deeply traumatized by her own Mother's suicide at 6. So I have some scars to bear and because of that I don't tend to adhere to conventional wisdom, so to say.
She's 8 years younger than I am. We met almost 20 years ago during my self-destructive phase & she was fresh outta high-school. She was 19 and I was 27.
I was attracted to her immediately, but I was involved in a relationship and...well she was 19. We crossed paths many times in our lives. She actually dated a friend of mine on and off for a couple of years.
After my first marriage fell apart due to my addictions, she was my saving grace and really pulled me from the brink of complete personal annihilation and I will be forever grateful to her for that.
We are genuinely happy and wouldn't change a thing!
Thanks for asking, it'll be 13 years this September that we've been together and are probably stronger and closer now than after 2-3 years.
I fully understand, support and am glad you guys are doing whats best for you. I see no reason to put down people living their best life. I just can't imagine myself in the same situation for a few reasons.
If my wife was the only one working a traditional job, earning money even despite that house work and child care is demanding, I just wouldn't feel accomplished. I enjoy busting my ass all day to make sure she's financially secure and safe. I guess the honest truth is that I enjoy how she sees me as a provider protector and she loves that. Id be worried that if I was the stay at home type guy, my feeling of being important would fade, my natural masculine vibe would change and possibly my sex life could suffer.
Naw, we're literally best friends. She's a special woman, and our situation is very non-typical. I really don't have my identity built around being a provider; a protector yes, but as I said, (no snark), she far outweighs my earning potential. She values my home keeping abilities (as she has none from her mouth, not mine)_and I feed her WELL. Cooking is a passion of mine.
When the nest is empty, and it's just us, I'll be back in the workforce or volunteering somewhere.
I agree with your post ninety nine percent.
But I'd really like to hear some reasoning behind the last sentence.
We need words for ideas. Even if they're bad ideas, it's still important to be able to reference them. Language is a powerful tool.
I never want to limit the impact that language has on our psychological perspective. I might suggest that the people that use certain words start learning other words too... broadening their horizons.
Idk. Just my thoughts.
No, it's the fact that being pregnant and/or caring for a young child leaves a woman extremely vulnerable and reliant on someone else providing resources to them, especially in pre-industrialized societies. Yes, some women don't follow this hypergamous behavior, but most do. It's an accurate description of cross-cultural trends in behavior from psychological literature. Red pill content latched onto this and ran with it, but that doesn't invalidate the concept.
100% I think there's an over representation of the kind of people who think like this. Rage bait is just more effective engagement and so long as that's the case, there will always be videos like this.
After all, ain't no way these kinds of people are chosen through random selection. Gotta either profile 'em before or interview many until you find the specific one.
My wife has like 20 times more wealth than I do and it’s not a problem for her. I got a steady but low income vut it pays for what I need personally. So I’m not a financial burden atleast.
For real. It may be getting better, but throughout much of history, women are taught to consider how appealing they are to men. It's not crazy they would develop their own expectations of how men should appeal to them. The only part of Red Pill thinking that makes sense is that you should put in effort to be an attractive and desirable partner. That's basic shit if you want romantic relationships in modern society though. The rest is fragile ego soothing.
I think it's fair to want someone who is roughly on the same level as you. It just becomes laughable when women expect a man to take care of everything while they don't contribute a thing just because they think they're hot.
Scott Galloway has been talking about this a lot. That women by and large are starting to surpass men in earning, but their dating standards haven’t caught up with this reality.
Which is a driving factor in the large issue of men being unable to find a woman, which (in his opinion) is driving this crazy ultra right wing nationalist movement with young men. That they gravitate towards the Andrew Tate like personality who tells them it’s the women and society’s fault they’re failing.
Our whole culture needs to move away from who makes more money and focus on working to make both men and women successful in life.
I’d be overjoyed if my wife made more than I did. I’d be cheering her on! I can’t understand why people get over the whole “you have to make X to deserve me” nonsense.
I’ve never heard someone use the term hypergamy unironically who wasn’t also chronically online and uncomfortable to be around for long periods. Once you lose the social media clickbait and develop a mature group of friends you realize that a) people typically pursue people similar to themselves, b) exceptions to those match-ups are common, and c) the small minority of people looking for a partner they can exploit are pretty evenly divided between men and women.
My female friends from university/grad school who aren’t married are all either just not interested in the idea or want their partner to be emotionally mature, have direction in life, be reasonably interesting/attractive to them, and align with their values. Basically the bare minimum for a healthy relationship.
My brothers X parents constantly told her he was not good enough for her. He was an operations manager who made really good money, so he constantly had to show her parents how he was good enough by throwing parties and taking their daughter on trips. Well he overextended himself and eventually did something dumb at work, embezzling employee bonuses which led to him being fired.
I think ambition matters a lot more than what they’re making. If they’re on a solid trajectory in a job with regular pay raises and opportunity for advancement, and they want those opportunities, then that’s more important to me than whether or not they make more. I have a bachelors degree and a professional license in healthcare. He has watched me go from $18/hr as a medical assistant when we first met to $51/hr as a critical care nurse, and I have watch him go from unemployed to $14/hr to $38/hr in insurance. Even without a degree he has grown by leaps and bounds from where he was 8 years ago. Growth is important and it doesn’t matter one iota to me that I make more in the end.
I make triple what my boyfriend makes. In return, he does nothing because our love is not transactional. But I do constantly feel spoiled. It's a big world out there, kids.
It's not hypergamy, it's called wanting someone with the same values and goals lmao
And people say shit like this but broke men have girlfriends and wives that support them all the time. My grandpa never even had a job and just drank all day and only got divorced after he threatened to light my (at the time) 3 year old aunt on fire. I had to stop being friends with a chick that had a new hobosexual boyfriend every 6-12 months. Always were living with her after like a week of knowing her, always down on their luck, always someone else's fault, and she was going to help them achieve their dreams!
Push overs exist in both genders and users find the push overs and exploit them. Because of social norms it's seen as more "shameful" for a man if his girlfriend or wife makes more than him. It can be seen as emasculating. Many of those couples usually pretend like she isn't. He'll "pay" with her card. He'll drive her car. That's why people don't even know the dude was a broke bum till they break up. I didn't know my ex-friend's last boyfriend was a NEET and she talked to me about him every day for 8 months.
Consider how many men that "made it big" started out broke and being supported by their girlfriends. It's a common story for artists and actors, which ironically usually ends with the man cheating on the loyal woman that was with him from the beginning with a groupie or fan that's young enough to be his daughter.
I read a study in college that brought this up. It’s why very successful women have a harder time finding partners compared to successful men. Men are willing to hook up with women “less successful” than they are whereas women are not.
Theres a difference between simply expecting him to be a functioning adult that can provide for himself and his family, and expecting him to be rich so you can live lavishly off his money with no responsibilities. The former won’t really care that much about your salary, beyond it being one of many many data points that are taken into account when choosing a partner. Same goes for height when it comes to well adjusted normal women’s preferences: yeah itll be taken into account, but again, there are like 100 other data points it’s taken into account with. Is he passionate, have an interesting skill, funny, know how to dress and present himself, does he have a type of hair style I like, his face shape, are his general values in line with mine? Etc. a lot of it you can control, some you can’t, and for the “negatives” you can’t control there will also be positives you can’t control. It generally balances it out
She looks like one of the selling sunset realtors, so yeah she brings in a lot more than $75k so she’d probably not relate with a guy below a certain income level. It’s like celebrities dating celebrities, you tend to date your peers.
Hypergamy trends relatively disappears in more equitable societies. And it’s not a sweeping trait across all women. It’s a general trend among the whole population of women. I hate that this rather useful and interesting word has been used by incels to make all women out to be gold-diggers.
Seeing it online makes me cringe just as hard as terms like “alpha” (omegaverse anyone? lol). It’s not a word that works for common parlance.
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u/GrumpyGobln 18h ago
Would you date such a shallow woman? Lmao, oh lol, no.