I'm fed up with women being criticised for ‘dating up’ — aka hypergamy

For the last few months, I’ve had this niggling feeling that I can’t shake off. Whenever I look at my female friends and their boyfriends, I think, “Him? Seriously?” Then I look at my male friends, meet their girlfriends and think, “Wow, he’s really punching.”

The same could be said about couples in pop culture. While I loved Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s relationship, their break-up didn’t surprise me because I always thought she could do better. I imagined her with a partner who is her equal in terms of confidence and career (like her now-partner, American footballer Travis Kelce) rather than Alwyn, who let’s be honest, few had ever heard of until he started dating her. Alwyn was struggling to make it big in Hollywood and was rumoured to have struggled with Swift’s fame throughout his relationship with her. Kelce has already won the Super Bowl three times while publicly supporting his girlfriend by attending her tour multiple times.

Another example in my opinion is Gisele Bundchen. It has just been revealed that the wildly successful, smart, beautiful Brazilian supermodel is having a baby with her jiu-jitsu instructor. And then there are more examples in fictional pop culture — take Carrie Bradshaw and Mr Big in Sex and The City, or Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl. Of course, both of these men were wealthy but mistreated women in my opinion. Mr. Big would constantly run away from commitment and keep stringing Carrie along throughout the on-and-off relationship, only to marry a much younger woman within six months and then have an affair with Carrie. Chuck trades Blair for a hotel and arranges for Blair to sleep with his uncle.

I always thought these women deserved so much better. And yet, both of these characters settled for them at the end of the respective shows and fought tooth and nail to keep these men in their lives. This imbalance in power dynamics always left me scratching my head.

That is until I recently saw the word “hypergamy” on social media. This is courting someone of a higher socioeconomic or social class than oneself. Of course, this is nothing new; after all, I grew up reading Jane Austen novels. As humans, it’s natural to want to “date up”. The psychotherapist Jack Worthy, who focuses on relationship patterns, said: "Status is shiny and we all pursue what’s shiny in a partner, in a career, in friends. By “shiny”, Worthy means attention-grabbing and desired by everyone. And a lot of the time, those traits are physical. “Height in a man is shiny. Men six feet and taller find much more success on dating apps. A certain hip-to-waist ratio is shiny in a woman. All of us notice shiny traits in potential partners.” A person who grew up middle-class marrying into an upper-middle-class family would count as an example of hypergamy.

However, when I came across a post on Instagram that explained how women are penalised for hypergamy in the manosphere, it didn’t sit well with me. It seemed perfectly acceptable for intelligent, beautiful and successful women to date dull, boring, abusive, broke men, and those men are celebrated. No one accuses them of punching high, whereas when it's the other way around and women “date up”, they are criticised for it.

When the same intelligent, beautiful, and successful women refuse to settle down with any Tom, Dick or Harry, and set strong boundaries for selecting their partners, they are accused of being hypergamous. Is this social critique the reason why all my female friends, including me, have always been scared of being called gold-diggers for having higher standards for dating and demanding that a guy be successful in his career? I also feel I have settled for broke, unattractive, dull men because I was scared of being accused of hypergamy if I were to demand better.

In the same Instagram post, a stat says 80 per cent of women are competing for 20 per cent of the men on dating apps. According to a study titled Tinder Experiments II: guys, unless you are really hot, you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder. The study says: “The bottom 80 per cent of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22 per cent of women and the top 78 per cent of women are competing for the top 20 per cent of men.”

Another study, Are Men Intimidated by Highly Educated Women?, posted on Tinder analysed the differences between male and female behaviour on the dating app. The study demonstrated that men liked 61.9 per cent of women on Tinder and women liked a mere 4.5 per cent of men on the app. This study highlights that women are the driving force in terms of sexual selection, which is evidenced by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. And this could be seen as the reason why women are disproportionately discriminated against for being hypergamous, especially on dating apps. They are being penalised for having higher standards when looking for a heterosexual relationship.

Women's apparent selectiveness becomes an issue only if you start with the assumption that all straight men are entitled to a female mate. And they aren't. Misogynists truly seem to believe that women don't have a right to choose.

Hypergamy helps name a part of human nature and it’s something we’re often uncomfortable applying to ourselves, says Worthy. “Humans — as with many other mammals — are status-conscious creatures. Some of us enjoy more social esteem than others.”

Worthy says an average-looking surgeon can do quite well on the dating market, despite looking average. “[Leonardo] DiCaprio and his models are a conventional example of hypergamy — one of the world’s most famous movie stars trading on his status to date beautiful — but far less famous — models.”

It reminds me of the famous quote by Marilyn Monroe from the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in which she says to a man, “Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty but my goodness, doesn't it help?” She also points out that if she were his daughter, he’d want her to marry a rich man, so why is it wrong when she does it? The man who was shaming her earlier ends up appreciating how smart she is. This proves my point about women being unfairly judged for supposedly dating up.

If women are being punished for being smart about their choices, considering the cost of living crisis, mounting student debt and impossible access to home ownership, then maybe it’s time to reconsider why these choices are so criticised.