The romantic life is not just about dinners, walks, flowers and stories from Hollywood movies. Everyday life is much more often made up of mundane choices, in which pragmatism and economics remain important. Not surprisingly, starting a life together involves not only matching characters or lifestyles, but also decisions about money, work and the future. Although the days of dowry and arranged marriages are long gone (at least in Western societies, although exceptions can still be found here) economic issues can still play a role in choosing a partner. Income, job stability or career prospects can affect the sense of security and the idea of a common future.
Dating, especially in the days of Tinder, is also marked by a lot of gender stereotypes. There is talk of men looking primarily for opportunities for casual relationships, as well as women “hunting” for wealthy and well-off partners. This discourse often ignores gay and bisexual people, whose experiences and expectations of dating may be different. The era of dating apps further highlights the mechanism for quickly evaluating a potential partner. Thanks to the ability to present themselves with a few photos and a short description - the popular “bio” - users make a decision in a matter of seconds whether a person arouses their interest.
So it's no surprise that researchers have begun to investigate what information contained in such profiles actually influences our choices. One of the interesting areas of research is precisely work — occupation, employment status or income level. Several experiments have already been created analyzing the relationship between professional status and the choice of potential partners on dating apps. Their results allow us to look at how work can affect our romantic lives today — and whether it actually has the importance that popular stereotypes attribute to it.
Men are more likely to start a conversation with women who work
One study conducted in 2018 in Belgium showed at which stage of using a dating app work actually starts to matter. Although it was initially assumed that professional status would influence the decision to “match”, the analysis showed no significant differences at this stage. A much more interesting effect appeared later - when choosing a person with whom the user decided to start a conversation.
The researchers created 32 fictitious profiles on Tinder — 16 female and 16 male — and showed them to a total of 4,800 real users of the app. The profiles differed in, among other things, information about professional status and work performed. Thanks to this, it was possible to check whether it is the employment information that influences the behavior of users. They found that after getting a “match”, men were more likely to start a conversation with women who were working than with unemployed women. The prestige of the profession itself, on the other hand, did not matter significantly - in the case of women with jobs, the type of profession performed did not clearly influence whether the man decided to write first. In the case of women, the researchers could not draw equally reliable conclusions. In the analyzed material, women were the first to start a conversation in just 12 of 151 matches with male profiles, which was too few observations to reliably assess the impact of a man's professional status.
Interestingly, the work did not turn out to be particularly important when choosing a profile, but it could have been important at the next stage - when it was necessary to decide whether to actually start a conversation after a match.
Do women “hunt” rich men?
It is a common belief that many women in the dating market are primarily looking for a wealthy partner. In the manosphere, this picture has been further sharpened: a woman is sometimes portrayed as a person cynically “using” a man as a wallet or sponsor, and interest in his financial situation is supposed to be evidence of calculation. However, such a picture is a great simplification. Yes, in many societies men are still more likely to occupy better-paid and more prestigious positions, and economic differences between the sexes can make the financial situation of a potential partner matter when planning a life together. However, this does not mean that it is possible to reduce female partner choices to the search for a “wallet”.
A good example is a study conducted in China by David Ong and Jue Wang. NThe researchers wanted to see if the income of a potential partner actually influences interest in him before any interaction began. In the experiment, they used 360 fictitious profiles - 180 female and male each - to which they randomly assigned different income levels. They then watched nearly 4,000 entries on full profiles. The result was clearly different depending on gender. Men visited women's profiles regardless of their declared income level. For women, the situation was different: were more likely to visit profiles of men with higher incomes. Moreover, interest grew with the income of the women themselves. A particularly pronounced jump occurred when the income of a man exceeded that of a woman visiting him. Profiles of men with the highest income level received about ten times more visits than those with the lowest income level.
However, this does not mean that the study proved the existence of a simple mechanism “women want men's money”. The experiment measured profile interest in early dating stage, and not the subsequent choice of a partner, the quality of the relationship or the motivations of the people using the service. The authors themselves define the studied effect as “income attraction” and indicate that it may be one element that helps explain the observed patterns of matchmaking.
It is also worth looking at these results in a broader social context. China is not a society in which women and men have functioned on identical economic principles for generations. Particularly in rural areas, the consequences of strong patriarchal norms and preference for sons continue to be seen. Research on China indicates, among other things, a persistent asymmetry in transfers between parents and children: daughters can provide parents with more financial support and care work, while receiving less of this kind of support from their parents than sons. The cost of marriage itself is also important. In parts of rural Chinese communities, a man's family incurs significant expenses related to getting married, including the so-called. bridle price - the benefit transferred to the woman's family. Research indicates that the high cost of marriage can be a serious economic burden for families with sons. At the same time, the system of such payments does not necessarily imply a greater agency of women; qualitative research shows that bridle price can also reinforce traditional gender roles and create additional pressure on women.
In this context, a woman's interest in the income of a potential partner may be related not only to the individual desire to find a “rich husband”, but also to how the entire marriage market and the distribution of resources between women and men are structured. If a man is more often seen as the person responsible for providing economic security to the family, his financial situation may become more relevant information when choosing a partner.
This, of course, does not mean that every woman in China (and even more so women in other countries) is guided when choosing a partner by his earnings. However, the study of Ong and Wang shows something much more interesting than the popular stereotype: a man's income can influence interest in his profile, but the importance of this information needs to be considered in the context of broader economic and social inequalities between the sexes. After all, the question should therefore not be exclusively: “Do women hunt rich men?”. More interesting is why a partner's income may be a more important criterion for one sex than for the other — and how much of it stems from individual preferences and how much from the social conditions in which people make decisions about relationships. summary
Thus, research shows that the financial situation of a potential partner can influence the interest in his profile, but this does not mean that female choices can be reduced to the search for a “rich husband”. The importance of income is also influenced by broader economic, social and cultural inequalities that shape both expectations of women and men and their choices in the dating market. Sources:
Polski (PL)
English (EN)
Español (ES)
العربية (AR)
Українська (UA)