I guess I can see it really mattering if we are talkling of discrepancies as large as between homeless person and a millionaire. But for most people in between, I should think wealth would be less important than a number of other factors such as education, philosophy, interests, and attitude towards money/spending.
Pick any income/wealth level, and you will find considerable disparity among people at that level with respect to how they feel about money. If I were extremely wealthy, and fell in love with someone who happened to be from a less well-off background, and maybe pursued a low-paying career in non-profit or something, I can’t imagine not wanting to share my good fortune with her. (I can imagine, however, not being in too terrible of a rush to put all of my assets in her name.)
When my wife and I married, she was making about 2x what I was. She stopped working when our 3d kid was married simply because we thought she would make the better stay-home parent, not out of concern over which of us had greater income potential. I now make a very comfortable living. She works part-time, earning maybe 5% of what I make. Tho we’ve had any number of problems over the past 20 years, I don’t think any of them really had to do with income disparity.
We’ve dealt with it in both directions. At first I was running a nonprofit and making crap and he made more, then I left and went back into tech and I made more. For me personally it isn’t about amounts, it’s about effort and fairness. I won’t tolerate being involved with a lazy person that doesn’t pull their own weight. The disparity doesn’t bother me but I’ve never had enough self-confidence to support someone else completely and still think that they’re there because of me and not because of my money. When I was younger and dating it was sometimes an issue if I went out with someone with much less money. Offering to pay for the things that I wanted to do often embarrassed them and having to live like I was poor didn’t work out for me.
When we first met, my wife was a former lawyer/former judge/current university professor and I was an artist who owned a small graphic design studio that consisted of me, one other artist and our sales guy. She has more college degrees than I can remember (a PhD and a JD among them), and I have a BFA that took six on-again/off-again years to get.
She’s still a professor, and a department head, and now I’m a freelance artist/illustrator/stay-at-home dad. Guess who makes the most green. It doesn’t matter and it never has.
I’m definitely not interested in dating anyone who can’t support himself, and would probably be uncomfortable in the company of gazillionaires, but beyond that, it’s not about the money, per se, it’s about the *reason *for the discrepancy.
If he makes less money than I do because he’s teaching, or working at a non-profit, or has otherwise chosen a career that may be more fulfilling than lucrative, that’s fine.
It does not worry me very much. I am 30, male, married, and making six figures as an analytics consultant. My wife is an artist and makes no money at all. I have been with her long enough and when I was poor enough that I do not doubt her motivations. What she brings to our relationship is more valuable to me than any incremental income she might make. I recognize that this arrangement would not be possible if our values were not completely aligned. After all, I plan to leave the private sector as soon as possible to complete my PhD and teach. She is not in this for the money, and neither am I.
Straight male, married, 29, white collar and almost six figures (but not quite).
My wife makes nada, zilch, but she’s working on her novel, so I don’t care. If and when she’s a successful enough writer to be making about what I’m making, I’m retiring and going back to school. There’s only so much money one needs.
My wife is working on a book, too. I love to come home and have her read to me what she wrote. That is almost always an antidote for a shitty day at work.
Bingo. (Straight Male, 57). When we got married I was in grad school and she had taken time off from grad school to work, but neither of us had tons of money. Intelligence, ambition, and attitude towards money count for a lot more. I’d much rather be involved with someone who didn’t have a lot of money, but no debt, vs someone who makes a ton and pisses it away.
Plus, when you get married, at times there will be differences in earnings, as we’ve seen in this thread. If you care too much about income levels, what happens then?
I have a friend who, 10 years back, was a very attractive, tall woman who was a director at a fortune 500 company. She made the bucks.
We would go to out to dinner often (not dating, no expectation of dating - frankly she was wayyyyy out of my league)
She would often complain of lonliness…that there was no one out there to fall in love with/marry etc.
One time I pushed her on this and asked her on who she would find acceptable. She was a very nondefensive, openminded person and answered truthfully. She needed:
He needs to be 2-3" taller than her (she was 5’11")
He needs to be very attractive (she was very attractive herself).
He needed to be in shape (she was athletic)
He needed to make MORE than her (be more successful). Keep in mind she was 30 years old and probably made more than $500K a year.
So, I asked her…what % of the population fits this bill? Using guesstimates and looking at people in the bar (i.e. how many men at the bar do you find attractive? etc) we concluded that about 1 in 2000 men fit her standards. In addition…even if she found one of those 1 in 2000…that man is extremely attractive to the entire female population and even though she was very attractive…that 1 in 2000 man would probably demand the utmost perfection because her standards coincide with what the majority of women would find ‘desireable’ in a mate.
This shook her so much that she decided to give the spark for the conversation a chance - a guy that fit all the requirements above but was shorter than her.
This opened her eyes because she didn’t think about this before…well she said she did but didn’t try to quantify it and so didn’t see how unreasonable she was being.
Eh, I don’t really have a problem with that if he doesn’t. The biggest difference I know I’ve had was dating several guys who made about 3x as much as I was making, while I was in graduate school.
There were several guys who made it quickly into the “no second date” list by indicating that a wife must always make less money than her husband. After all, part of the reason I was in grad school was to have access to better-paying jobs. As soon as I got out of grad school, my income multiplied almost by a factor of 3; it’s nicely higher now.
For the first three years of their marriage, my brother’s salary as a draftsman-designer in a marble company was a factor of about 5x what his wife made as a part-time aerobics instructor. Then she passed her “medical specialty entrance exam,” which gave her entrance to the final training required to be a fully-licensed doctor in Spain; the salary she got during training was the same an already-trained doctor gets (often the trainees bring home more, because of working more of the kind of hours that carry bonuses). Suddenly she was higher than he was. She’s now a full doc and a government employee (mind you, this was her objective all along), which means a stable salary; he’s a construction foreman; they make about the same. If their careers continue to proceed normally, at some point he’ll be higher than her again.
Heh, I usually come home to “hey, hon, what do you think character X would say in situation Y, I need a testosterone(slavic ancestry/other quality I have) check.” Which is just as good.
It’s not just about money, it’s also about ambition, as has been mentioned. A lot of people who make Big Bucks also work 80 hours a week, which leaves them with far too little personal time for my tastes. That’s one way in which a difference in values can masquerade as an income difference issue.
Honestly, I would always need someone making close to the same amount as me. The times when DH or I have been unemployed, I’ve been every uncomfortable with the imbalance. I’m subconsciously worried about being taken advantage of or not contributing enough.
My first wife was an ICU nurse who worked the graveyard shift (I worked days) and put in tons of overtime. The marriage-breaker wasn’t that she made drastically more money than I (and she DID), it was that we seldom ever saw each other, and after 7 years we came to realize we really didn’t know each other.
As long as we were equally able to contribute to our basic expenses, joint and individual, I wouldn’t have a big issue with where any “extra” money came from. It’s much more about intellect and common interests and values for me.
I’m a stay-at-home-mom now, but when I was working, my husband made at least twice what I made. At the beginning of our relationship, before we moved from NYC to FL, he probably made three times. When we first started dating, I was a little uneasy about not being able to pay half of certain expenses (like vacations), but since he didn’t care, I got over it. All income is our money, not his or mine.
The flip side of that is working your ass off for little money (e.g. as a teacher) while your trust fund partner loafs about aimlessly with little work ethic.
Obviously, money alone won’t make the difference. But background is everything, and money shapes that. The biggest income disparity I can think up between people I know (she’s middle class, he’s a multi-millionaire) has resulted in some embarrassment on her part when the families met and a sudden change in her tastes– fashion, music, architecture. I’d like to think she’s ‘grounded’ him a bit, too, though.
This is what I was thinking about. It’s not the money so much as cultural differences that can flow along with the money. These can be overcome if the people in question desire strongly enough, but there’s bound to be a learning curve, especially if one or more family members oppose it.
I couldn’t date someone who didn’t work, and I’m not willing to support someone else financially unless absolutely necessary (such as due to disability or illness). I am not a fan of joint checking accounts, so we usually just split the shared bills and then take care of our own separately.
For me, it’s less about the money itself than about a comparative mindset. I’m kind of ambitious and enjoy working on things that challenge me intellectually and creatively, and I tend to get along better with people of the same mindset.
That said, while I have always dated/married men with more education than I have, conversely I have always made more money than the men I date/marry. I have no idea why it works out that way, it just does.
