Love in a Cold Economic Climate
Money has become more central to romance- should we be surprised?
Welcome to MajorRelate with Dr Eliza Filby, helping you understand the social and economic trends that govern our lives…. If you have any suggestions for any topics you’d like me to cover in future newsletters, do tell in the comments!
In this week’s episode:
What are ‘home bars’ and what does it say about culture now?
We’ve launched our YouTube series - see who we’ve got coming on!
A cool visual that explains the domestic overload
Love in a Cold Economic Climate
In the Age of Romantic Realism, are Love and Money a Packaged Deal?
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
But in an era of rising inequality and economic precarity, are we quietly circling back to Jane Austen’s world, where love and money are inseparable?
We recently ran a YouGov poll asking a cross-generational UK sample how important financial compatibility is to relationship success.
The overwhelming consensus?
It matters. A lot.
And Gen Z, more than any other generation, ranked it as critical.
Not gold-digging …..just realism
Financial stress remains one of the top causes of divorce. And this generation is relationship building in an era defined by low wage growth, unaffordable housing, and a cost-of-living crisis.
The consequence? Welcome to the age of romantic realism.
TikTok’s “marry a guy in finance” trend may be crude, but it reflects a deeper truth: money now plays a central role in modern love. And to be clear, this trend isn’t driven by dependent women but by financially independent ones.
As Peter Coy put it in The New York Times:
Same-sex relationships tell us even more. U.S. data suggests gay male couples tend to have greater income diversity, while lesbian couples are more likely to match on both education and income, reinforcing the idea that the desire for financial parity is, at heart, female-led.
‘A balanced marriage?’
Today’s young women are out-learning - and in their twenties, out-earning - men. The mantra is no longer “I’m looking for a provider”, but “I don’t want a partner who’s a fiscal drag.”
Some misogynists will frame this as proof that women unfairly reduce men to their wallets. But the reality is far more complex. Female breadwinners are now more common than ever. Yet the charge of being “too picky” still lingers - even from unexpected corners.
Never mind Andrew Tate, just examine the words of radical feminist Germaine Greer, who on Louis Theroux’s recent podcast last year suggested that intelligent women needed to lower their expectations and ‘marry truck drivers’. Greer voiced her scepticism of what she called a ‘balanced marriage’:
‘We always think that we need that status in our husband. He doesn’t think he needs that status in us. So, there’s an imbalance at the very beginning ... I mean [look at] Ted Hughes. ……The notion that you should be in competition with your husband is a bad notion.’
The Hughes/Plath tragic example of female submersion in marriage was a perfect backdrop to the Second Wave feminist movement, but the example feels more than a little anachronistic seventy years later.
The economics of partnership have been completely upended since Greer was rallying against it in the 1970s. Most young women aren’t looking for status in a man, they want the man to match them. In an era of extortionate childcare, student debt, and unaffordable housing, women aren’t being picky - they’re being practical.
Today, it is not that women are callously looking for ‘status’ in a partner; most women I know are looking for a man who has their shit together, or at least, is willing to try and get their shit together.
Now, before you berate me for sounding cold and callous in this article - I want to stress that I am at heart a complete romantic - however, I think for too long our generation was fed a diet of crap rom-com notions around ‘falling in love’ and received far too little on the changing financial dynamics around gender relationships….
What happens when men can’t deliver?
So here’s the uncomfortable twist: just as women’s own achievements and expectations around financial and domestic equality have risen, it’s become harder - particularly for working-class men and even middle-class men - to meet them.
That’s not women’s fault. And it’s not a zero-sum gender war.
The crisis here isn’t feminism or masculinity, it’s capitalism and its depleting rewards. The so-called crisis of masculinity is not because of feminism or female success, but because, since the Thatcherite era, society has narrowly defined men by their ability to earn and at the same time diminished their ability to make it, for all but those at the very top.
True equality will only emerge when both genders reckon with the reality that traditional relationship dynamics have fundamentally shifted. That means women letting go of any lingering fantasies of effortless security and where the definition of manhood extends well beyond the economical - to their role as fathers, sons, and neighbours.
And we’re some way there. yes we’ve seen increasing autonomy over money (decline of the joint account for example) but still most millennial partnerships are increasingly what I call ‘see-saw’ partnerships; financially fluid, no breadwinner, but two incomes that go up and down, certainly not linear, involving a mix of contribution and sacrifice from both on the financial and domestic burdens - over a working life that will inevitably be longer than that of our parents.
This is apparent today in working-class and lower-middle-class households that have been accommodating the decline of male breadwinner wages since the 1980s. Where the real tension is right now is in upper-middle-class partnerships; men struggling under the pressure of maintaining breadwinner status and women who perhaps grew up in a male breadwinner household and may expect to recreate that same level of domestic security and luxury…..
That model is increasingly out of reach - unless that one income is astronomically high.
Which is why, in many cases, the shortfall is quietly covered by…
The Bank of Mum and Dad.
Enter the Bank of Mum and Dad…
And here’s where it gets a little more Jane Austen. If the 21st-century love story has a dominant theme, we might assume it's algorithmic… curated by apps, filtered by height, hobbies, and Spotify playlists. When in fact something more old-fashioned has re-emerged: class and wealth compatibility.
We are more sexually fluid and racially diverse than ever, and yet when it comes to romance, we are becoming more rigid about class. One UK study found that 40% of upper-class individuals wouldn’t consider dating outside their social class.
So, increasingly, financial compatibility doesn’t just mean shared budgeting habits, but in affluent households, it is increasingly about matching levels of wealth.
Where once a secretary might marry the boss, or a nurse the doctor, this kind of upward mobility via marriage is waning. Now, the educated, well-paid, and wealthy pair off with the educated, well-paid, and wealthy. It’s not just what sociologists call assortative mating - it’s assortative inheriting.
According to the Resolution Foundation in the UK: “People tend to couple up with those who have similar inheritance expectations to their own.”
In other words, marriage is now reinforcing wealth inequality. The monied middle class aren’t just marrying each other - they’re merging two Banks of Mum and Dad. This is why I suspect divorce rates are in decline and prenups are on the rise.
We’re not returning to the 1950s. If anything, we’re entering a strange hybrid of Austenian pragmatism among the wealthy and modern-day financial realism among the rest. The traditional breadwinner model survives only in the wealthy elite households, and yes, often around those tables (boardrooms) where the major decisions are made that impact the rest of us. In these elite circles, traditional gender roles often endure - not because they reflect modern reality, but because vast wealth cushions the contradictions. For everyone else, true equality and liberation from outdated associations of gender and money have become a financial necessity.
It’s All Relative - My YouTube Show DROPS
In the age of so much automated content, a long-form deep dive on YouTube is where it’s at. In our new series, we delve into Inheritocracy with left-wing legend and Guardian journo, Polly Toynbee. She takes a familiar and highly relatable stance: she disagrees with the Bank of Mum and Dad, but admits to being a parental ATM when it comes to her own kids and grandkids.
Each month, we will be examining a different topic with some excellent guests - coming up in July, ‘What’s Wrong with Capitalism?’ with Grace Blakeley and after that, ‘Why are Rich kids so Miserable?’ with Prof. Daniel Markovitz. Thank you so much to the brilliant team at
for producing the series.The Reading Room
The rise of Home Bars. Would you go to a stranger’s house for a cocktail? In China, a new trend is quietly booming: the home bar. Somewhere between a house party and a speakeasy, only you don’t know the host, and you pay a small fee to get in. Guests are welcomed into someone’s living room for drinks, games, and convo. It’s cosy, curated, and a far cry from the overpriced, overstimulating chaos of your average bar.
My parents met at a house party in the 1960s because that’s what you did back then. It was the cheapest, easiest way to socialise. And in a strange way, this feels like a full-circle moment. A generation burnt out by dating apps, rising prices, and post-pandemic loneliness is opting for something more human.
‘Collapse by a thousand optimisations…… This is how the middle class gets hollowed out’. This substack read on how the AI job apocalypse will unfold rings true, I think!
Love data visuals like this one from the excellent team at @visualcapitalist. In 1850, Household Work made up a significant number of U.S. jobs. Now it barely registers - not because the work disappeared, but because we stopped paying anyone to do it. Proof that some of the most essential labour is also the most invisible.
Thanks for reading,
Eliza