Straight from Reddit. Very insightful article. Link: Reddit - Dive into anything
Here is a list of the evidence:
Study 1: ‘‘Everything’s There Except Money’’: How Money Shapes Decisions to Marry Among Cohabitors, Journal of Marriage and Family
The study interviewed over 100 cohabiting partners. Money related considerations were given as a reason to marry and not to marry (if there is interest in marriage). A staggering 75.8% of all women surveyed cited money related considerations as the sole or partial reason given as a prerequisite for marriage. The male in the relationship is typically expected to pay money to his female partner:
First, it was more common for women than for men to be concerned about their partner’s jobs. About three times as many women than men reported that they wanted a change in some aspect of their partner’s employment (e.g., get a job or get a better paying job) in order to marry.
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Second, a significant minority of our respondents directly expressed the expectation that men should be able to ‘‘provide for’’ or ‘‘support’’ a family.
This is all based on self-report and probably underestimates the importance of money transfer in marriges. Admitting being a gold digger is not socially acceptable after all. Words like “provide” are used to represent the client/prostitute relationship in an embellishing way.
Stud 2: The Role of Income in Marriage and Divorce Transitions among Young Americans, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Here is a data point not based on self reports. Men with higher incomes are not only more likely to marry but also less likely to divorce. Interestingly, the same does not apply to women.
High earnings potential raises the probability of marriage for men, but decreases it for women; high earnings potential is negatively associated with marital dissolution for men, but has no impact for women.
Stud 3: Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females, Evolution and Human Behavior
How attractive a woman finds a man is directly tied to his income:
Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females.
Take note of this stunningly large effect size. Men also find women with a higher income more “attractive” but to a much much lesser extent:
For female images, there was still a positive relationship, but it was not as strong or as steep as in the male images.
Stud 4: Income attraction: An online dating field experiment, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
The richer the woman, the more income she demands from her potential partner. Women show more interest in dating profiles that earn more than they make themselves. Again, the effect size is big:
We measured gender differences in preferences for mate income ex-ante to interaction (“income attraction”) in a field experiment on one of China’s largest online dating websites. To rule out unobserved factors correlated with income as the basis of attraction, we randomly assigned income levels to 360 artificial profiles and recorded the incomes of nearly 4000 “visits” to full versions of these profiles from search engine results, which displayed abbreviated versions. We found that men of all income levels visited our female profiles of different income levels at roughly equal rates. In contrast, women of all income levels visited our male profiles with higher incomes at higher rates. Surprisingly, these higher rates increased with the women’s own incomes and even jumped discontinuously when the male profiles’ incomes went above that of the women’s own. Our male profiles with the highest level of income received 10 times more visits than the lowest. This gender difference in ex-ante preferences for mate income could help explain marriage and spousal income patterns found in prior empirical studies.
Keep in mind this is based only on profile visits not dating initiation. Also take note that homeless people are not being compared with millionaires here, but rather men with relatively similar incomes and yet there is a big difference between the high income group and the lower income group.
Stud 4: All the Single Ladies: Job Promotions and the Durability of Marriage, American Economic Journal Applied Economics
Wives loyalty is based on her income relative to her husband:
What happens to marriages when wives or husbands make large gains in professional success?
A recent study examining Swedish register data from 1979 to 2012 shows trends in divorce following winning elections for political office or becoming a CEO [25].
The study included women (n = 641) and men (n = 1246) who ran for a parliamentary seat or as mayor. These offices are high in status and offer high incomes in the top 5% of the Swedish earnings distribution.
The left panel of Figure 1 shows that women elected to office experienced a sharper decline in remaining married, whereas the decline in remaining married was less steep for women who ran and were not elected. The right panel of Figure 1 shows that men who won versus lost their bid for election showed no difference in declines in remaining married.
Please see the following picture: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352250X21001299-fx1.jpg
The researchers also examined trends following being hired as a CEO from 2002 to 2012 (n = 105 Women; n = 715 Men). The resarchers were only able to examine data on CEO hires (and not those who applied but were not hired). Nonetheless, the trend is consistent with winning political office. Women hired as CEOs showed a greater decline in remaining in their marriages than men who were hired as CEOs.
Are women who gain positions of high status more tempted to remarry? As women enter male-dominated professions, might there be more temptation due to the number of additional male colleagues these women have? This seems unlikely. Women who were elected or promoted to CEO were no more likely to remarry than the other groups: 22% of women who were elected/promoted and divorced, remarried compared with 27% of men who were elected/promoted and got divorced and 30% for divorces of both men and women who were not elected/promoted.
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Are divorces due to women’s increased financial independence? Women who won elections and positions as CEOs already had high earnings (66% of the household income before winning). Therefore, economic independence alone, which was already high in women in these couples, is unlikely to have driven divorces.
We suggest that a key factor driving divorces in these data is a violation of women’s preference for higher professional status in mates relative to their own, which is underscored by winning these high-status positions
It is often said that the money provided by the male partner is used to raise children and that women’s obsession with money is therefore justified. But reality paints a different picture, in fact the inverse is the case. Both globally and nationally, higher income is associated with lower number of children for families. [1] [2] This means that a middle-class woman will, on average, have more children than an upper-middle-class woman, and so on. The richer the household in which a woman lives, the more likely it is that she has fewer or no children at all.
Furthermore, studies clearly show that the richer a woman herself is, the more money she expects her potential husband to make. If the woman is already rich, why would she need an even richer partner? This is consistent with the client/prostitute relationship model, marrying higher-income men raises the standard of living of the women who enter into such marriages. Western marriage laws allow women to gain control over male resources even after divorce through divorce payments and alomony. There are usually no positive finacal aspects for the higher income man who signs a marriage contract, it is just a unilateral money transfer to the women. So the motive for marrying higher income men is clear.
It is also often claimed that men who are not the breadwinner in the relationship become insecure and that is why divorces happen. But that’s not true. First of all, it must be stated that most divorces are not initiated by the husband but by the wife. Furthermore, studies of dating behavior (including the ones I share here) show that men actually prefer women with higher incomes. The preference for higher-income women is just much, much lower than that comperded to the preference for higher-income men among women. Please read this excerpt of an article [3]:
The downsides of marriages in which women are the bigger breadwinner have been well catalogued in research and by the media. The husbands suffer from bruised egos and feelings of emasculation; the spouses fight more than other couples, have lousy sex lives, and are more prone to divorce.
The problem with these characterizations? They’re not necessarily accurate.
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Take marital satisfaction. Spouses in households where women earn as much as or more than men were as much in love as everyone else (six in 10 gave their relationship a five— “very much in love”—on a scale of one to five). They were a bit happier—83% were very or extremely happy, vs. 77% of families in which the wives earned nothing or less than their husbands.
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What’s more, the most satisfied partners of all were the husbands in egalitarian and female-breadwinner marriages. For example, 56% of men wed to women who make as much as they do characterized their sex lives as “hot” or “very good,” vs. 43% with wives who made less. Men married to women who earn the same or more also expressed the greatest happiness with their relationship.
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Not everything is peachy in marriages where women are the bigger breadwinners. Husbands in these relationships may be happier than most, but the wives? Well, not so much. Higher-earning women are not as likely as other spouses to say they’re very much in love (58% say so—15 percentage points less than men married to higher earners). These wives worry considerably more about finances than men and lower-earning women do, and they are also more apt to identify money as an area of tension in their relationship (one particular sore point cited by nearly a quarter of these wives: their husband’s lack of career ambition).
It is clear that it is not the men who are unhappy not to be the breadwinners, but the women who earn more than their spouses.
Modern marriage tends to be a transactional arrangement in which female attention is traded for male resources. The primary targets for these arrangements are men who could not gain female attention without paying money. The big problem with these arrangements is that their true nature is hidden. Men often don’t understand that they only gain female attention because of the financial means they provide.
There are only 12 women among the 100 wealthiest people on the planet and all of them have made their fortune by inheritance (or divorce) from a wealthy relative or husband. [4] None of the richest women have become rich through their own efforts, they all made their money through male relatives or husbands, showing how successful the parasitic lifestyle of many women is.
Furthermore, the temporary and hormonally created irrational state of love can be exploited through this dishonest arrangement scheme. A quote from dr. Philip Stieg:
How is romantic love like addiction?
Falling in love is an obsession. While you’re wild about someone, your serotonin levels go down — which is the same trend typically found in people with obsessive-compulsive behavior. It’s also true that a brain in love is very similar to a brain in the throes of addiction. Further brain imaging studies show activity in the nucleus accumbens — a region of the brain that lights up when someone is addicted to a substance like cocaine or a behavior like gambling.
Men are pushed (not only by women but also by media and religious institutions and so on) into signing a highly unfavorable contract while in an irrational emotional state.
[1] Birth rate by family income in the U.S. 2019 | Statista
[3] Love and money survey shows big changes in how couples manage finances | Money
[4] Infographic: Most female billionaires inherited wealth - Times of India