Small bit of an Atlantic article.
Is this the reason, so many white men have seemly gone insane?
‘Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.’
@Sooner If you start a thread in reference to a magazine article, it’s extremely helpful to actually include a link to that article, so that people who may want to participate in your discussion can easily see the rest of the article, and understand its context, and not just the paragraph you appear to be quoting.
FWIW, I’m an Atlantic subscriber, but as you didn’t even share the title of the article, or its date, it’s not easy for me to find it on their website.
I was attracted to the broken because I was. I was trying to “fix” them but was really trying to fix myself.
I have since learned better.
I can’t imagine being with someone for their money.
I disagree with the Atlantic article; I think in general it’s a myth that women don’t want to date men that earn less than them. And their data is a correlation, not necessarily a causation.
Though it probably is the sort of thing that varies by location.
IME (and I think I’ve seen data to support this) women in developing countries find relative wealth very attractive, as it can be the difference between having a home in a safe location, being able to go to the doctor, kids go to a safe school etc. Meanwhile in wealthier countries, this is generally not the case; women may still be attracted to ambition, but the bottom-line dollar wealth is less important (not to say it doesn’t matter at all, nor that there aren’t some people who consider it the top requirement).
It may be in comparing countries, that the US is more like a developing country in this regard though, given the tenuous social safety net.
Here in the UK, I have dated women that made substantially more than me (I’m well paid but I can’t touch salaries like corporate lawyer). It was never an issue. Perhaps if I had been on minimum wage, maybe it could have been a stressor, but it’s not like they needed to pay my way.
More like they started out three-quarters of the way there. That description, of a man who needs to feel that “his woman” is being protected and supported by him sounds an awful lot like the psychological profile of a “family annihilator” killer.
The OP’s article is sorta onto something but I agree there’s some correlation / causation confusion there. I’ll also say articles like this get written in mainstream commentary mags about every 6 months for the last 30 years.
Ideally folks marry or cohabit for affection, not cashflow, but who they meet and hang out with is a huge upstream filter on who they might connect with.
For sure the economic, social, and attitudinal independence of young white women has skyrocketed since the e.g. 1950s, and especially since the e.g. 2000s. While that of white men as mostly stagnated, and for lower status white men, been actively declining absolutely. Which means that relatively, it’s a boom time to be a young white woman and a bust time to be a young white man. And the farther down the economic / education scale you go, the more that is true.
This could easily be the result of many jobs that didn’t require or expect a college degree in 1975 now doing so. Similar people could be doing similar jobs for the same pay, but more of them are now in the ‘college educated’ group than before (and have big loans to pay off, which is a real downside of this shift).
I dunno, I think it’s not necessarily true that women want men who earn more, but most want a guy who is at least equal if not higher in status.
But it’s not really clear why this would hit those at the bottom of the income distribution most heavily: in theory women without college degrees could marry men with college degrees while the opposite is less likely, but it’s women without college degrees who are less likely to be married.
Ok but I was responding to the OP, which discusses income specifically.
Marriage rates are also going to be confounded by the perceived expense of getting married, and factors in why people may postpone marriage.
Honestly I’m finding this mishmash of topics pretty confusing (that’s not at you, DemonTree, you’re trying to wade through this same as me). The OP is mostly about income affecting likelihood of relationships and speculates that this might be a cause of white men going “insane”.
The Atlantic article is ostensibly about marriage, which is more specific than relationships, but the only part of it I have access to is talking about high schoolers’ lack of comfort with romantic relationships – so pretty far away from concerns about income.
I have a cartoon from the 1920s that has an attractive young woman, working at her office job, rejecting the marriage proposal of a well-off, fat, balding old man (I’m 3/4 of this!) saying that now she has a job and can hold out for a better prospect.
Families aren’t just “natural,” they have always been, in part, an economic unit, and they change as the economy changes. When you need cheap labour for farming, farm families tend to be large. When you move to the city and have to pay money for everything, kids are not the same asset, and families tend to shrink. It will be interesting to see what people make of our current trends in a decade or two.
Line up all the e.g. 20yo single men in town from poorest / laziest to richest / most ambitious. Line up all the e.g. 20yo single women in the same town in the same order facing them poor to poor and rich to rich. Now have each woman choose a mate e.g. 30 men towards the “better” end of the row. Who’s left over unmatched? The 30 richest women and the 30 poorest men.
The former get along OK. The latter tend to join MAGA, turn to crime, or foment revolutions. It was ever thus.
The big problem comes in when the women are well-matched not just a few men towards the more well-off end of the scale, but a long ways towards the well-off end. Now instead of 30 unmatched and objectively undesirable men, you’ve got 20 or 40% of that age cohort. That’s when the anti-social consequences of male frustration and hopelessness really manifest.