“I’m looking for a man in finance, with a trust fund, 6′ 5, blue eyes ... ”
This satirical statement, first posted in a video on TikTok in April, by US comedy creator Meghan Boni, who goes by the handle Girl on Couch, is now a viral hit turned summer dance-floor anthem, after Boni’s Charli XCX-style vocal was set to music and remixed by several DJs, including David Guetta, netting Boni a considerable sum once she released the song on Spotify.
The somewhat tongue-in-cheek rhapsody is a nod to a common dating issue frequently associated with young women – of having unrealistic expectations in a prospective partner, usually in relation to success, power and the size of their wallet.
It’s not helped by wall-to-wall finance-focused content on our screens, whether it’s the bejewelled and wrinkle-free stars of the Real Housewives franchise series, flaunting their mansions and bodies paid for by rich husbands, or by record audiences tuning into the heaving bosoms of Bridgerton and their poster-perfect suitors, scions of establishment families in the Ton.
While it wasn’t Boni’s intention to spawn a movement, hedge fund managers and high-ranking bankers have attracted notice this summer. “Finance bros are having a renaissance,” announced British Vogue, with The New York Times appearing to agree: the publication reported recently that working in finance is seen as a good thing among Ivy League Gen Z-ers.
Column inches are given over to tips on how best to bag these prize bucks. There are fashion spreads that show readers how to dress to attract these types and influencers offering up ‘tips’ to increase one’s chances with a finance-bro, such as hanging around financial districts’ rooftop bars or even jetting out to Mykonos. You could be forgiven for thinking that a prize date for a Gen-Zer is with a Leonardo-DiCaprio-circa-Wolf-of-Wall Street type.
At the same time, dating sites are reporting a greater desire by young women to box-tick success and wealth when it comes to finding their perfect partner, and with it, the rise of a related concept known as hypergamy, a term used for the act or practice of dating and ideally marrying up.
Although its roots are centuries old – think Jane Austen’s wealth-obsessed Mrs Bennet: the “business of her life was to get her daughters married” in Pride and Prejudice – its modern intentions manifest in finding a partner of good social standing, financial security and maybe even a trust fund or two.
Frances Kelleher, a dating and relationships expert in Killarney, Co Kerry, isn’t surprised Boni’s satirical fantasy is making headlines.
“This is a lighthearted and a fun way of looking at how to pair up,” she says of Boni’s viral hit. “But it has truth to it too. Ultimately, my female clients want a financially strong guy who can provide for them. It’s attractive that a guy has his life together and is in control. Many want a guy who is 6ft because it’s about feeling protected too. So, while it is possible to get all the above, let’s be honest, a trust fund is rare.”
@girl_on_couch Can someone make this into an actual song plz just for funzies
♬ original sound - Girl On Couch
But are singletons buying into all of this in 2024? Among the younger generations, marriage isn’t necessarily a priority, but in the relationship stratosphere, the man-in-finance trend is most definitely on the radar.
“I’m a millennial, and for my generation, the guys in finance were men we tended to stay away from,” says Joanne (30), who works in advertising. “I think my values were always to be an independent woman, but I see a shift in that now in younger generations, like Gen Z’s. In my generation, a man in finance would be seen as someone like Big from Sex and the City. That was my first introduction, and it was more about him mentally than financially.
“But I’ve seen on TikTok how some women have gone out of their way to look for relationships like that and I find much of that content to be post-irony.
“When you think of Bridgerton, the character of Colin is like an archetype of a man who is wealthy, and Penelope [his love interest] is seen to be dating up. I think we took this fictional finance guy and made a trope out it and romanticised it. But when I speak with friends about dating now, there is a joke about dating for money, because dating for love isn’t happening.”
In the world of data, hypergamy has long fascinated researchers. Experts say that to properly understand modern hypergamy, you need to factor in demographics, patriarchal societal structures and plain old genetics.
“People look around and say, ‘women seem to marry up in some ways’ or ‘women tend to marry taller husbands’ or ‘women have better educated husbands’,” says Brendan Halpin, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Limerick (UL).
“Some of this is due entirely to the fact that there are male and female [genetic] differences, so men tend to be taller, and therefore taller husbands are more common. Very often the underlying explanation is quite simple: that you have unequal distributions.”
Unequal distributions are very much at play when it comes to education. In Ireland, more women graduate from third level education than men.
The sinister side of the tradwife movement
The waters start to become muddied when money enters the equation, because men of an equal education background are likely to earn more than their female counterparts. What this means is that women are less likely to have the opportunity to marry up in an educational sense but can seem to be doing just this when finances come into play, purely because men’s top earnings dwarf that of women.
“The interesting thing about education is there used to be a well-established pattern that men were quite better educated than women, so typically women would marry better educated men,” says Halpin.
“From the 1990s, it started to turn around, and then people were afraid that better educated women would no longer be able to find husbands. That was a bit of a scare over nothing. When you look at it, in lots of cases where there is an inequality, and the inequality is almost completely driven by the underlying distributions, so in the past women would have married better educated men, now it’s much more common for better educated women to marry less well educated men, relatively speaking.”
Often, it’s just the differences in how we speak about men and women that is the big issue. While women who marry up can be dismissed as “gold-diggers”, men who marry up rarely get anything like the same criticism.
When George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin in 2014, her accomplished career as a barrister and human rights lawyer put her intellectually ahead of the Hollywood actor, yet few heaped scorn on the match. Clooney even joked in interviews about how he had succeeded in “punching up” by persuading Alamuddin to marry him.
It tends to be more in the online world, and for women, that the notion of hypergamy is viewed as something sinister. That’s particularly the case among growing subcultures such as on message-boards contributed to by fans of Andrew Tate and other “alpha” males. In those worlds, hypergamous women are perceived as dangerous because their supposed intent is to belittle and dismiss men who don’t match up on wealth, professional success and looks.
On the home front, online discussions across social media over the attraction to men in finance and the prospect of a nice little trust fund nest egg, are taken far less seriously. In one recent Reddit thread, the question is posed: “What are Irish women looking for in a man these days?” The responses show that males who aren’t in finance don’t have much to worry about. “I married my husband because he’s honest, loyal, caring. Don’t care about money or anything. He’s a good lad,” writes one woman. “200 acres and a new John Deere,” jests another. Quips one contributor, “With road frontage.”
