What happens when a woman’s social status leapfrogs her man’s status? Breakups.
In the past dozen years, nearly every woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress has broken up with her husband, boyfriend or lover — some just months after thanking them from the award show stage.
Status is interesting when applied to women. For women, their status in the sexual market — the fundamental market that underlies all other markets — is locked up in their beauty. Women barter their looks status for high male social status, where male social status loosely defined indicates the man’s ability to provide resources for the woman and any future children. But women can also earn male-centric social and financial status. When a woman jumps up the social status ladder higher than most men, tremors rattle the normally smooth functioning of the dating market. Women with very high social status, regardless of their beauty, perceive themselves “better catches” than they really are. (If the woman is ugly, her self-perceived boost to her image will be smaller than if she is beautiful.) Women loathe dating down with lower status men, so a woman at the pinnacle of social status has, through forces acting upon her beyond her scope of influence or even conscious recognition, locked out a much larger dating pool of men than if she had never risen higher in social status. If she was already in a relationship with a man when her social status climbed above his, the relationship will suffer a buffeting of hypergamous winds that is hardly ameliorated by the fact of their longtime loving commitment.
This is what has happened to those Oscar winning actresses. They rose in status, and their lovers consequently dropped in relative status. Thus putting the brakes on the tingle train.
The line of breakup causality goes both ways. Men are subconsciously aware of the threat to their reproductive success that high female social status brings. This is why men are skittish about dating women with better educational credentials or career prospects. It’s nothing to do with being “scared” or “intimidated” by “strong women”. Men just prefer the pussy path of least resistance, and make calculated decisions which quarry is worth pursuing and which is a waste of time. Men, being the more realistic sex when considering their place in the sexual market, are apt to be better than women at streamlining dating operations for maximum return on investment. This means avoiding women with higher social status than their own, correctly figuring that such women, no matter how superficially enthusiastic about the courtship, will put up a bigger fight before putting out, if ever.
Women don’t want to date down and men don’t want to date women who don’t admire them on some level. Unfortunately, in a relationship where the higher social status woman truly does love her lower status man, (as may have been the case for the Oscar winning actresses in the above article), the tragedy of unintended breakup still occurs, for the lower status man will grow resentful of his fame-riding lover (and with good sociobiological reason) and act in ways which sabotage the love she still feels for him. You may think this is stupid of the man, but generally when we do the bidding of our DNA dictates what’s seemingly stupid for us is the right thing for our genes. At some point in the not too distant future, those loving high status actresses will begin to lash out at their lower status hubbies with the spite of a thousand harridans. Those are the regrettable odds. And who wants to be around for that? Especially with so many cute, lower status waitresses and tattoo artists to happily spelunk?
My advice for men who have a fetish about dating higher social status doctors and Fortune 500 executives and don’t much care about love: Marry them. In the inevitable divorce, you might walk away with more moolah than you brought.
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