Are you and your SO from the same socioeconomic class? Did either of you “marry up”?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Mrs. H and I were both born and raised solidly Lower Middle Class. She in a dirt poor Ozarks mining town, I in a ghetto-adjacent poor neighborhood in Springfield, Illinois (population c. 130,000).

Mrs. H’s father worked for the mines, and at the time, the company took pretty decent care of its employees. Free trips to Six Flags a couple of times per season, membership at a country club with a pool (a VERY low-rent country club, by no means fancy). Think of it all as Upscale Redneck, in a manner of speaking.

In balance, Mrs. H’s family was probably slightly better off than mine, but only just.

How about you and yours?

2

Since you ask… I and my wife are probably from very similar general backgrounds.
My father was for most of his working life a statistician with an insurance company.
While my wife’s father was an engineer with an aerospace company.

3

Nope (My wife’s family - upper middle class. Me, lower middle), so I guess from a purely economic perspective, I “married up”.

4

Happy to share my own:

Both solid middle class but separated by maybe a half a generation in the poor immigrant to middle class saga (her grandparents long time in country on one side and immigrants who made it to upper middle class themselves the other; my grandparents all immigrants poor with my parents being the generation to climb into solid middle class).

That’s boring though. Common place.

I am more interested to read of the experiences of those who have coupled with a partner of very different SES background.

Stories!

5

We’re both from the same socioeconomic class, and even have similar family backgrounds- blue collar great-grandparents and grandparents who were relatively successful, college-educated parents (first in their families), and we’re the first two in our families to get graduate degrees. Slightly different parts of Texas though, so the family experiences were a bit different in the details, but in broad strokes they’re much the same.

I’m with @DSeid - I’m much more interested in how say… the kid from the New England boarding school married the dirt farmer from S. Dakota or something like that.

6

We were each raised in similar circumstances, except I’m the oldest of 5, he’s the oldest of 3, but still, pretty much the same background.

However, when we met, I was a Navy officer and he was a petty officer, so I outranked him and was making more money than he was. In fact, thru most of our marriage, I’ve made more than he has. But it hasn’t mattered - it all goes into the same pot before being disbursed to our creditors.

7

My wife’s father was a civil engineer in China, managed projects with hundreds of workers. Mine was an accounting manager in Pakistan and would probably be called a Controller in the US. Both mothers were intermittently employed but mostly SAHMs.

Neither of our families had any kind of money that could help us when we came to the US. We basically started as penniless, but well educated, immigrants.

We are upper middle class (90ish percentile nationally. 80ish for our state). For a while my daughter was dating someone whose father sold their family business for a nine figure sum and was running a lucrative consultancy. They took private planes to very nice resorts on vacation. We take camping trips in state parks and stay at the Hampton Inn (Homewood Suites if we are feeling spendy).

We worried what it would be like if their relationship carried on into adulthood. But it didn’t.

8

My SO is from the minor nobility, third generation American. My mom’s ancestor was the illegitimate son of somewhat higher nobility. Perhaps that equals out, although as far as “natural nobility” goes, my maternal’s first generation American had fought the losing battle for progress in the failed revolution of 1848, then skipped here where his son fought to fight to end slavery. If he hadn’t been wiped out in the Panic of 1893, I might have amounted to something.

9

My wife is descended from a Mayflower passenger and her family had members of the DAR. Her maternal grandmother taught Latin. Her maternal grandfather was Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives.

My father was a penniless refugee who met my mother while working in a crummy factory and I was raised working class poor.

Fortunately I stumbled into my wife’s family a generation late. Her paternal grandfather knocked a women up and then fled. So her father was raised Depression poor, but got to college on the GI bill where he met my wife’s mother. They became standard 50s middle-class suburbanites. Still a level above me, but definitely no airs.

10

Minor difference. My family was upper middle class; my wife’s was lower middle class.

My first wife was definitely working class.

11

My wife was raised poor but her first marriage was almost stereotypically middle class: was a homemaker and raised a family while her husband worked (this was back when you could actually do that).

My childhood wasn’t quite poor but financially uncertain- widowed mom worked as a schoolteacher but suffered a severe depressive episode at one point. We maybe averaged lower-middle class. I was financially insecure most of my adult life with spotty employment. Flat-out poor really; cheapest rental I could find, food and financial assistance, one mercifully brief instance of actual homelessness. So I definitely married up.

12

My wife and I are from similar backgrounds, but one generation apart in the immigrant-to-professional ladder. All of her grandparents were born in the US, and both her grandfathers were professionals (one an optometrist, the other a doctor/hostpital administrator). Both her parents were college-educated, and her mother worked full time once her younger sibling was in school, so they were a double-income family before it was cool. They had enough money that she didn’t qualify for financial aid in college (where we met 40-something years ago).

Only 3 of my grandparents were born in the US. My grandfathers both had (very) small businesses in the trades–one owned a roofing company, the other a linoleum and window blind business. Neither was educated past high school. My father and his siblings all went to college and are all comfortable financially. Of my mother and her two sisters, only her middle sister went to college on the standard timeline. My mother finally got her BA when she was 50, and her youngest sister got an Associate’s degree in her 60s after finally recovering from lifelong on-and-off drug problems. Mom had a small catering company for a time when my sister and I were in school, but it was never more than maybe 20% of the household income. When I was in college, I qualified for financial aid, but by the time my sister was halfway through (we were 4 years apart in school) she did not. So I’d say my parents moved from middle class to upper middle class around when I reached adulthood.

My wife and I both have graduate degrees and are probably at the low end of upper-middle class, at least compared to a lot of Boulder.

In the sense that her family is overall a little more educated and wealthy than mine, I married up, but not that much.

13

My wife lived in rural Thailand and walked 3 miles to the market every day to sell charcoal to buy enough for her and grandma to eat.

When we met I was an engineer at NASA from a slightly upper middle class background. We met through the personal ads in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the 1990s. Her daughter told her to include, “Professionals only”. Guess it worked. She picked me over some doctors and a couple rich guys.

14

It wasn’t boarding school vs dirt farmer, but my husband and I did not grow up in the same socioeconomic class. His parents owned a business - he knew all his life he was going to college and that he wouldn’t have to worry about paying for it. HIs mother’s family however, had apparently been wealthy before the communists took over in China, That seems to have warped her view of money somehow and after my husband’s father died when he was 8 , everything was up to mom. She acted as though she was poor in some ways , and mostly convinced my idiot husband that he was poor - but she gave us $50K for a down payment on a house and thousands of dollars worth of jewelry when we got married * And I say my “idiot husband” because while I can understand a ten year old not realizing that poor people don’t eat shell steak and don’t get expensive hockey equipment , he really should have figured out he wasn’t actually poor long before he met me.

On the other hand, I grew up working class at best. My father was an unskilled laborer and after the plant closed when I was about 11 or 12 , it took a long time for him to find work and we ended up on food stamps for a while. My parents did not really expect me to go to college - no one in either of their families had and if they had been able to send one of us it would have been my younger brother.

My husband worked for spending money. I worked for spending money and to buy clothes and really, anything I needed other than food. And to pay my college tuition. In some ways , I married up.

* As an example of her strange attitude, that $50K would have paid for an entire two-family house 15 years earlier. She wouldn’t spend it then , and lived the rest of her life in a three room tenement apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall.

15

I married up. I was from lower middle class, and my wife’s family was solid middle class, probably just a little short of the lower rungs of upper middle class.

16

We were from essentially the same class: middle-middle.

My wife’s parents both came from working-class backgrounds (her paternal grandfather was a farmer, her maternal grandfather was a toolmaker). My dad was probably middle-class (his dad was an insurance adjuster), and my mom was lower-middle class (her dad was a maintenance engineer at a power plant).

But, by the time that the two of us were born, her dad was a mechanical engineer, and my dad was a successful salesman; both of our fathers had volunteered for the Army in order to get the GI Bill, and both of them had gotten their college degrees.

By the time when my wife and I started dating, her father had been very successful in his career as an engineer, and my father was a professor with the University Extension.

17

My wife and I are both from upper middle class Jewish families from Toronto, we actually met working at the same summer camp that we both attended as campers.

The only difference is that my family has been here since the 1910s and 20s and both my parents were born here. Her dad moved her as a pre-schooler post WW2 and her mother came as teenager in the mid-60s.

18

No.

I was raised solidly middle-class. Both my parents were college educated and worked white-collar jobs (they were both RNs in large hospitals), they owned a large house on several acres of river-front property, and while they were frugal we never went without anything. Our home had three bedrooms, two large bathrooms, and the master suite was a suite with two walk-in closets, a seperate dressing room, and a balcony overlooking the river. It had a dedicated laundry room and an honest-to-God library off the living room as well as a large family/rec room, what today would probably be called a den. It had a garage and a shop and carport big enough for 2 cars. The kitchen was huge with custom cabinetry and it had a proper dedicated dining room. My mom kept the property beautifully manicured with a particular emphasis on roses. Every spring it looked like the cover an issue of Fine Gardening magazine. When I was in my mid-teens they bought a second property nearby with a small house on it as a home for my aging grandmother to live in. Today my father still owns the house I grew up in – my brother lives there now, although it no longer looks like the house I grew up in. My father lives in grandma’s old (smaller but also riverfront) house. I was the oldest of two sons.

My wife grew up in absolute poverty. Her father was a high school dropout who went to Vietnam, came home with a bad back, stayed in the army until his back wouldn’t let him work as a grease monkey anymore, and then earned a CDL and became a truck driver. Her mother is a housewife who did not, and still does not, drive or work outside the home.

When my wife was growing up the family lived in rental houses; the longest tenancy was 10 years, from when my wife was 7 to 17. That house had no heat – a 3 bed, 1 bath home with no heat! – , the bathroom walls were covered in mold that couldn’t be scrubbed off, and there was only enough hot water for maybe two showers a day which had some unfortunate lasting consequences for my wife. The kitchen had a pantry FWIW but very few cabinets and almost no counter space. There was no dining area let alone dining room, the family usually ate off of TV trays in the living room. The laundry hookups were in a far corner of the cold, uninsulated, leaky-roofed garage. At least it had laundry hookups, I guess.

The family had almost not discretionary money. They often had to get food from food pantries and my FIL didn’t let the girls listen to music or have more than one light on because it would raise the power bill too much. Space heaters or electric blankets were absolutely forbidden. Since her mom did not drive my wife and her sisters had to walk everywhere. My wife was the youngest of 3 daughters. My FIL scraped together enough cash to get my wife a very basic car when she turned 16 so then she became the DD for the family, running errands for everyone and taking my MIL shopping.

When my wife was 17 they received an eviction notice and my FIL bought a double-wide in 55+ trailer park, even though he was several years shy of being 55. The house was was brand new and by far the nicest house they had ever lived in. It had a furnace! Two clean bathrooms! An actual laundry room! A kitchen with cabinets and more than a couple square feet of counter space! Room for a dining table! That was 1997 and my in-laws still live there today. Today my FIL has VA disabilty from his injury he recived in Vietnam, has some VA retirement as well, has his public employee retirement (he drove a dump truck for the county for most of his career), and his social security. For the first time in their lives they’re financially stable and comfortable.

Growing up as a pauper did a lot of damage to my wife’s psyche. She’s loathe to spend money on anything that isn’t an absolute essential, she’s hesitant to use hot water (even though we have a quick-recovery, 80 gallon water heater that can provide hot water for 3 showers in quick succession before needing to recharge, something that takes only half an hour or so), and she has some deeply ingrained hoarding tendencies.

However, after meeting my grandmother who was raised in worse circumstances but ended up going to UCLA and earning her PhD, my wife decided to go to college and pull herself up and away from the poverty that held her back her entire life. She ended up earning an AA and then a BA, the first and so far only person in her family to earn a Bachelor’s degree. Her two sisters do not work because “that’s not a woman’s place.” One sister continues to live in poverty. The other has a husband with a good income so they live more comfortably. But that sister has no ownership of her own life, no marketable skills, nothing. Neither sister does. My wife was determined not to be that person. Her mother disapproved of her going to college, claiming it was my job to support her, not her job to support herself. An attitude which explains much of her upbringing. My wife ignored her, thankfully.

I also went to college although it took me a few years to find my footing. I ended up earning both a BA and an MA and have a good teaching job. While we aren’t wealthy by any means – I’m a teacher, after all – we’re more comfortable than anyone else in her family. We own a comfortable home (a stick-built home with a foundation, something that was important to my wife as literally everyone else in her family lives in travel trailers or mobile homes), we have late-model cars in good repair, we have retirement accounts and a healthy savings account, our son is in college which we help pay for, excepting our mortgage and our student loans (which are farily small as we paid for much our college out of pocket)we have no debt, and we take vacations regularly. We’re now in the same socioeconomic strata my parents were.

19

Hard to say. I grew up in a middle class family in Canada. My (Chinese) wife’s father came from a peasant farming family in Anhui but he became an army officer which was a big step up.

20

I dated (and assumed I’d marry) a woman whose family was from a higher income bracket… well, okay, rich. But the entitlement and selfishness that came with that was unsettling.

I was very happy that the woman I later fell in love with was from a much more “grounded” socioeconomic class.

So according to the thread title, I “married down”, though that sounds like a value judgement.