It’s been done.
Handsome, but not aware of it and egotistical, of course. Look great without spending time grooming.
Be persistent but not stalkerish. (for some reason Hollywood loves to show a man being overly persistent to almost stalkerish as being romantic). 
But for all that- woman have it even tougher. Relationships are hard… or easy or whatever.
This is from France, not the US, but suggests this may not be how it works in practice:
However, this might be due to exclusive social circles, or preferences on the part of the women, rather than any intimidation felt by men.
The cause doesn’t really matter if your aim is to reward and promote each person appropriately. This is one reason I dislike the trend to have employees assess their own performance.
Being a man is a double edged sword: you have more power to make yourself attractive by earning money, gaining status, becoming impressively skilled at something, but that means you have to work harder for it.
But like almost everything, the variance on how hard life and relationships are is bigger within each sex than the difference between them.
And as for meeting societal standards on gender roles or pretty much anything else: you can just choose not to. There will be some consequences, but they aren’t necessarily worse than trying to meet an impossible standard.
I was going to suggest that it was exclusive social groups. Past a certain income, your kids go to the finest private schools, you dine at the finest restaurants, etc. You do not have much contact with the common folk. So you have little chance of entering into a romantic relationship with one or marrying one.
I would also suggest that this article seems rooted in Angle/European culture vs American culture. Yes, America also does have social classes and wealthy elites. But for the most part it doesn’t seem as formalized as the Europeans. I think you can enter the inner circles of fancy rich people world just as easily starting a hedge fund or taking your startup public as you can being born into it.
I tried to power through the actual research article but it was a slog. The focus though seems to be mostly the highest 5% with much less correlation for inheritance of other amounts. And there is a bunch of inheritance going on outside of the top 5%.
That said, yes I suspect social classes are more entrenched in France with big money often being old money. And yes at the top 5% of wealth there is a culture gap with the middle third. Where you grow up, what circles you travel in.
Thank you for the link!
Classism is a bigger thing in the UK than America, for sure. We still have actual lords and ladies living in mansions, and prejudice around accents and origins. I don’t know about France, though. They had a revolution, they’re pretty big on the égalité thing.
There’s one area where the UK is more equal that the US: there are no private universities in the UK, and even the top ones have a lot of ordinary middle class students. But still the posh young people seem to stick together with eg the Bullingdon club. Again, I don’t know what it’s like in France.
All the other google hits were about American heiresses marrying broke British lords. 
Here’s a Swiss paper!
Our findings highlight that marital sorting based on wealth is especially pronounced at the extremes of the wealth distribution, exacerbating wealth inequality. Simultaneously, we observe that the similarity in wealth between the parents of married partners is substantially less pronounced. Our findings suggest a more significant occurrence of marriages into ”new money” than ”old money”. Consequently, our study shows that parental wealth has a limited role in contributing to the inequality stemming from marital choices.
Germany!
Relative to France, Germany’s aristocratic wealth has experienced more negative shocks since WWII, social stratification is perceived as less acute, and half of the country went through decades of communism. However, our results come quantitatively close to the distributional outcomes seen in France. By assuming a sequential revelation of inheritance and labor income in marital sorting, we develop a stylized multidimensional matching model which adequately replicates the sorting pattern observed using marginal distributions of these two traits from either gender. Our estimate suggests inheritance is about two and a half times more important than labor income in explaining marriage choice.
And the U.S.!
American men and women marry spouses whose parents have similar wealth to their parents’ wealth. A bigger impact than matching education level. And especially pronounced at both tails of the wealth distribution.
ISTM that distribution skew is mostly due to who travels in which social circles.
The seriously rich & seriously poor both live in rather hermetic bubbles. The middle 80% not nearly so much.
When I was a teen my dad offered some advice: “Don’t marry for money. Just hang out with rich girls until you find one you like.”
I tried, but found I couldn’t hang out in their circles. 
Interesting. All show that wealth is very significant, moreso than income or education. Did any of the papers disambiguate by gender? Also, can you find one for the UK, I’d like to see how it compares.
I took a look at the American one, and it’s examining parental wealth by quintile, which isn’t nearly as limited as top 5%. I wondered how wealthy that was, and it’s not as high as you’d think: owning a house in LA or San Francisco will probably get you there.
When I was at university I dated a guy whose extended family owned a nationally-known company. Adverts on TV and everything. They lived pretty normally though, and he has lots of cousins, so I’m not sure he stands to inherit all that much. You probably have to go into the 1% to get to the seriously rich.
I ask this because, as we all know, people in the US and the UK often use the same word to mean different things. By “universities” do you mean colleges? By “private schools” I meant beginning with pre-school at age two or so. I have vague memories of 60 Minutes doing a report on a prestgious boarding school for boys called Eton. Even if all colleges are public, it would be the first time that the very rich students might mix with the common folk.
Yes. What we call colleges would be more like community colleges in the US I think? You can go at sixteen after finishing school, do A levels and then go to university, or do various vocational qualifications.
Eton is still the most prestigious public school (actually meaning private school). David Cameron and Boris Johnson went there, while Rishi Sunak went to Winchester. And they all went to Oxford, where they probably hung out with other people like themselves. These are the sort of out of touch people who’ve been running the UK. 
Colleges in the UK (are they still sometimes called Sixth Form Colleges?) seem to be more equivalent to an intense form of the last two years of high school for the academically oriented University bound student, or a Vocational High School for the others.
There really isn’t a qualification equivalent to the GCSE in the US, certainly not as an end point to formal schooling for a large proportion of the population.
The equivalent of someone who got middling to poor results on the GCSE in the US is called a “high school dropout” which as you imagine comes with some baggage.
I don’t know your particular financial situation, but for most regular dudes, you’re not going to be able to hang out in their circles. Men are largely invisible to a woman if she doesn’t perceive him as having high economic and/or social value.
Also people with money tend to sequester themselves from people who don’t have money.
I don’t think it’s even so much that women think “ooo he has a lot of money!” They value a guy who looks sharp, doesn’t dress like a loser, can take them out to nice places, doesn’t live in a total dump with three other dudes, is well liked, so on and so forth.
Does that require having a lot of money? Maybe not. But it’s a lot harder to do stuff if you can’t afford it.
That is going too far. Shared interests- like the Society for Creative Anachronism or even D&D or heck, a sewing circle works just fine. That is how I met my current wife- SCA and we have been together now 25 years. I was a bureaucrat, living in a cheap apartment, and driving a Saturn. I was (in the words of a couple of SCA ladies who didnt know I could hear them)- “kinda cute”. So, sure, steady job- but not good looks, or money, or a sexy car, or being a “bad boy”- none of the things some people say you need to attract a woman. And I had had several other serious relationships before them. Of course- I do have the Jessica Rabbit thing “He makes me laugh”.
Same with most of my friends- they met someone through shared interests, not at a bar or thru some dating service. In fact one of my buddies has a string of “girlfriends” and he is not even close to good looking, drives a beat up contractors Pickup etc.
We laugh at the so called “incels”. Okay, sure yeah, get out of your Mom’s basement, get a job, shower daily and get rid of the bad attitude. None of that requires riches or good looks.
No doubt if you are an Adonis with a trust fund and a Porche you can get dates easier- that doesnt mean you can get into a solid relationship.
Sort of my point. He wasn’t saying find a high powered woman, that scares many guys, but a rich girl is another thing.
UK colleges have a lot of different jobs - they are also a place where kids who got poor GCSE results can redo them, for example. A lot of schools have sixth forms now, so the students can just stay at the same school if they are doing A levels. My school didn’t, but I went to a sixth form at a different school, rather than to a college. My husband went to a college and he said it was much better than school because they had more independence there. But 6th form was vastly better than secondary school anyway, because all the kids had chosen to be there. The bored disruptive ones left school, so we could finally focus on learning, and the material was no longer aimed at the lowest common denominator.
I think it’s great that kids who aren’t academic can leave school with some kind of qualification and do a vocational course instead. Unfortunately, there is a lot of snobbery and this is seen as only something to do if you aren’t good enough to get into university. Despite our government constantly complaining about lack of workers with practical skills, they’ve spent years trying to send as many kids to university as possible.
Downside is that you have to specialise much earlier, so you don’t get as good a general education and can lock yourself out of (easy access to) a career based on your choices at 16. We were talking about imposter syndrome earlier, and if I have such a thing it would be for posting here, considering I failed my English GCSE the first time and had to retake the exam, and haven’t had any real instruction in writing since 16.
I’ve heard a lot of men complain about this. I think it’s partly just that men are interested in many women, while women have a pretty high threshold for interest. But perception of wealth/status/ambition etc presumably plays into this, though I don’t think it’s a conscious thing.
I think that’s a bit unfair. It really does seem to be harder to get into a relationship these days. But “get off the apps and try and meet people through shared interests” is good advice. It seems to be extremely demoralising to be a man on an app like Tinder: terrible sex ratio, super low match rate, and frequent ghosting. It’s the ‘shopping for the perfect product’ mentality, rather than meeting someone you like and have chemistry with.
I am not saying it is easy, but it does not require good looks or money.
Yep, local game stores have gaming , bookstores have events, enroll in a few fun community college classes. Apps are okay for busy professionals.
I met my Gobhi at a friend’s party. She was giving me signals to sit next to her and such all night. I missed them. She spoke out while I was leaving. We chatted a lot over messenger. She quickly learned that I had dropped out of college, was broke, was unemployed, and had severe mental problems. She had a bachelor’s degree, a masters in writing, many technical certifications and was working in internet advertising and marketing. We have been together many years now. I know she thinks I am inteligent, funny, sweet and creative. I still have no idea how I ended up with such a wonderful woman.
These days as compared to when? Certainly, 30 years ago, when i was starting out professionally, men complained about how hard it was to get into a relationship. And one of the guys who complained to me is still single, and i don’t believe he’s ever been in a relationship. He’s gotten involved with rearing his sister’s kids, and is much less frustrated than he was when he was 23. But back then, i tried to convince him to take adult Ed classes, or volunteer at a soup kitchen, or join clubs, or go to church events, or otherwise get involved with events where he could meet people, and as best as i can tell, he never did. But he was bitter and frustrated and felt the world had let him down. I don’t feel like this is a new problem.