The relationship between romantic love and money is complex, and in many cases, their relationship is unsettling. Once a person chooses money to some extent in an intimate relationship, they may distance themselves from romantic love to the same extent. I have already proposed in an article that the price of the bride price is negatively correlated with the intensity of romantic love. And once a person’s primary motivation for entering a marriage or some kind of intimate relationship is to obtain economic security or even class mobility, then we can all easily imagine that such a relationship is unlikely to have much of an emotional foundation, thereby potentially constituting an inauthentic relationship.
Starting from this premise, let us explore a remarkable but rarely seriously discussed phenomenon: the middle class has easier access to romantic love than the rich; moreover, they also have easier access to it than various powerful people and celebrities.
Cases of the wealthy divorcing are endless; Bill Gates, Bezos, Musk, and Buffett have all been divorced at least once. Some wealthy people seem entirely unwilling to enter long-term committed intimate relationships, such as Leonardo DiCaprio. Lana Del Rey is a clear exception because she recently married an ordinary alligator tour guide, Jeremy Dufrene. This is actually a double exception because Lana Del Rey herself fell in love with an “ordinary person” and took the initiative to approach him, while this “ordinary person” did not feel inferior. From the current perspective, this is a happy marriage.
Exactly what factors lead to the turbulent state of the intimate relationships of these wealthy people? This phenomenon is consistent with our starting premise—the unsettling relationship between money and romantic love—but what are the specific internal mechanisms? There are many reasons, but we will focus on the distorting effect of money on attraction factors.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, resources are the primary factor in male attractiveness, which logically makes wealthy men high-value targets. However, the underlying mechanism is much more complex than this simple logic. Psychologists generally believe that the factor of resources does not directly translate proportionally into attractiveness as quantity increases, but is rather more of a threshold. Under normal circumstances, as long as a woman judges that a man’s resources have reached a certain threshold she has set, she will no longer pay attention to the resource factor, but will instead focus on other factors of the man, such as spiritual factors and physical appearance.
But the temptation of the excessive resources possessed by the rich is simply too great; it causes a distortion of the normal threshold mechanism, such that a woman’s focus on the wealthy man does not quickly shift to other factors, but instead remains largely on material factors. For the intimate relationships of the wealthy, an eternal and difficult-to-answer question is: Does she love me for who I am, or for my money? On one hand, the wealthy themselves find it hard to answer this question; on the other hand, those who allegedly fall in love with the wealthy also find it difficult to answer. Consequently, a state of ambiguity becomes the status quo.
Today, this problem applies not only to the wealthy but also to those men in STEM who work for Big Tech companies after graduating from prestigious universities. These people, just after graduation and in the early stages of their careers, earn enviable salaries in big cities, naturally becoming targets of the hunt. Even during their school days, these outstanding seniors from the computer science department were already highly sought after.
Although I have framed the wealthy as men and the pursuers or those seeking the wealthy as women in the above discussion, this is merely for the convenience of the argument. If the genders were swapped, things would not only be largely the same, but the calculation for money might even be more blatant.
I have no intention of blaming those who, consciously or unconsciously, enter an intimate relationship for money, because the distorting effect of money on attraction factors is something that inevitably happens due to human nature, not just to a specific group of people. In other words, if you happen to fall in love with a wealthy person, you would likely find it difficult to clearly answer the question, “Do I love the person or their money?”
The best way is to completely avoid sliding into the situation of this distortion effect.
For the middle class, if you cherish the value of romantic love, you should avoid sliding into intimate relationships with the wealthy, or at least consider it very carefully.
As for the wealthy, if you cherish the value of romantic love and are still young, you might consider presenting yourself as a middle-class person rather than a wealthy one in your daily social interactions.
But an even better way remains to benignly conceal one’s wealthy background and learn the middle-class lifestyle. I have encountered similar approaches before. Someone once concealed their background from me, and the concealment was so flawed that it would have seemed impolite for me even to point it out on the spot. If you do not want your attractiveness to be excessively distorted by money or power, want your attractiveness to match your true value, and also want to obtain genuine romantic love, then a truly useful practice is to benignly conceal your background and blend in with the middle class. This means staying away from luxury goods, developing kind social habits, and breaking free from the influence of your parents’ generation.
The reason for emphasizing “benign concealment” is to avoid any lies. You can achieve this without lying while still controlling the signals you send. Generally speaking, in unfamiliar situations, no one will abruptly ask about your salary or family background because it is a social taboo, and there is even less need for you to declare what your family does at the very beginning. It is only when one reaches a more familiar or even intimate stage that questions about salary and family background arise; at this point, one should honestly and progressively engage in self-disclosure —at this stage, the distortion effect is often already suppressed to the maximum extent.
From the details of the story of how Lana Del Rey and Jeremy Dufrene met, we can also see the key point. When they met, Dufrene did not initially know who Lana Del Rey was; he simply treated her as an ordinary tourist, and Lana Del Rey happened to enjoy that feeling of being treated as an ordinary tourist. Although Lana Del Rey never intentionally concealed her background, because Dufrene happened not to recognize her, the effect of concealment was objectively achieved. From this romantic love story, we can also see how important concealing one’s background is for the wealthy, the powerful, and celebrities.
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