Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Marrying Up

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

The idea of "marrying up" is as old as the hills, but things are, and have been, changing for quite a while. And this episode explains it all.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck, so let's go Tably Ho. So this one is interesting, I think, it's about the idea, and this goes by many names, all of which are fairly misogynistic, I think, marrying up, gold digging, trophy wife, these sort of terms have long been used, even though I did see that Forbes magazine claims to have invented the term, coined the term trophy wife in the 90s. This feels like more of an 80s thing to me, don't you think? Hey, that's what Forbes said, I read that article. But all to say, the idea of marrying up, which actually has a real name behind it, which is,

how are you going to pronounce this, hypergamy? Hypergamy. Hypergamy? Okay. Hypergamy. Hypergamy, that's what I'm going with, finally stumbled upon it. I wonder what Yitzi has to say about all this. Hypergamy.

Hypergamy. Yeah, whatever. Okay. It's basically the idea of what you just said, marrying up, a woman trading something usually her looks for a higher socioeconomic status. She's marrying a husband who might not look as good, but makes more money and she is from a lower class, but she's marrying up because she has something to trade. That is the basis of it.

Like you said, it's pretty misogynistic in general as a concept. The sad thing is, it was absolutely a part of human history for a very long time up until very recently. Yeah. There's geographic hypergamy. There was this journal article called Cross Border Marriages, colon, gender and mobility in transnational Asia, where the author Nicole Constable, and by the way, thanks, HouseToForks.com for this, talked about, it's the same thing, but it's actually, in addition to finances,

it's the lady from the farm moving into the big city to move up both geographically and financially. Yeah. Moving from less developed areas to more developed areas, et cetera. That's right. Again, it was just a thing for a really long time because this was, while women were considered inferior to men, or maybe were prevented from working outside of the house in some societies at certain times in the past, the one way that a woman could control her destiny was

to choose who she was going to marry if her culture allowed her to choose. This was a way to say, okay, I'm going to make a good life for myself. I'm going to choose carefully, and I'm going to choose the guy who makes the most money or has the most status that I can get to marry me. Right. Especially a lot of times, you would have probably a father pushing a daughter to do this. It's sort of like a whole family's moving up in status.

You certainly found this in different cultures around the world in the past. I know that in 1881, it was first found in a book explicitly written about in a book called Panjab Casts. That was a book by Sir Denzil Ibbotson, where they talked about a man seeking to marry his daughter off to a member of a tribe superior to his own. I think culturally, it was a lot of times, parents pushing a daughter to do this. So, the thing is though, if this is like a worldwide cultural trait, even as you have like increasing globalization, eventually you're going to reach this kind of stasis

where women who are at the top of the social ladder and men who are at the very bottom of the social ladder won't have anybody to marry because the woman can't marry up. There's nobody above her. The man can't marry down because there's nobody below him. And apparently some research, especially up into the 70s, found that this was actually the case in some cultures. That's right. And then we came up with a different word.

And so maybe we'll take a break. What a cliffhanger. And we'll tell you what the different word is right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house of her childhood home.

Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing.

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never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Lay it on us, bub. Hypogamy. Hypogamy. Man.

I think hypogamy, if we're going with hypergamy. Yeah. But I was also saying hypergamy and I like that too. So hypogamy and hypergamy, it really gets it across a little more if you can't see it spelled out, you know? I think I just pictured like the skit of us when we're, you know, in our eighties and nineties, respectfully, like sitting around and debating how to pronounce things. Oh, boy.

And I guess we're always, we'll be in there with Emily and Yumi too. We'll all just be living together in some like community in Florida. In the future. And they're like just still rolling their eyes. They have a machine that rolls their eyes for them. So hypogamy is a marriage between a man of lower status to a woman of higher status. Yeah. Like a Jefferson and Marcy Darcy situation.

I don't know what that means. I'm married with children, Marcy Darcy's second husband, Jefferson. I don't, I didn't see that show a lot. I don't remember. I mean, I watched it a little bit, but who were they? Was that the, the neighbors or something? Yeah. The across the street neighbors.

Okay. I think I remember that lady. That's the lady who in real life hated Al Bundy in real life, right? Oh, I didn't know that. Is that okay? I think so. I think they really didn't like each other if I'm thinking about the right person. I did not know that.

So there's also another word and this is, as it turns out, basically almost everyone is homogamy, which is marriage between people with similar, similar statuses and characteristics. Yeah. In our modern world, homogamy seems to be ruling the, the stage. Yeah. In fact, I dug up this article from 2014 and this is from Business Insider, but there was, it was all over the place. Clearly there was just like a study published and researchers compared quality levels, such

as attractiveness, socioeconomic status within couples. And they found that basically the trophy wife stereotype was bunk. It does happen. And that's why you see a news story like, you know, Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones and his, I can't remember, but let's say it was his fifties, married like a 19 year old or something, you know, fairly gross or the, the, the old, that ancient billionaire who was like 90 that had like the Playboy Bunny wife. I can't remember them.

Yeah. So like that stuff makes the news and you see that stereotype sort of reinforced with these big splashy stories. But the, the sum of this study basically is like, that's basically rare and that almost everybody marries people that are like them. Yeah. And the, the one researcher in that, that article basically said, well, some people are like, no, like, look at a doctor, a male doctor usually has a really beautiful wife. And this researcher was like, yeah, look at the doctor.

He's probably likely to be beautiful too. He's probably likely. You mean Dr. Hunk? Right. He's probably likely to be, or McDreamy is more like it. He's probably, he's likely because he makes more money and because he's a doctor to be in better shape, to not be overweight, to go to a dermatologist, to like go to a expensive hairdresser and do these things to be better looking.

And then also by the way, his wife actually is highly educated and had her own career, but she gave it up to stay home with the kids. So you're like missing stuff when you just make these presumptions about it. And from what these researchers are finding, like homogamy is definitely like the way almost everyone goes, at least in the West, in modern times. Yeah. And I will also say, and the one bone I picked to have with this study is they only surveyed couples in their early to mid twenties.

So that makes a lot more sense because I think the traditional sort of stereotype of marrying up or the trophy wife is the Bill Wyman, like the older rich guy who may be on a second wife goes off and finds like some young model to get married to. The question though is, does this make for a good relationship? People get married to people that are more like them across the board because those marriages seem to last more. So does the 60-year-old retiring doctor who leaves his wife and marries the 22-year-old that they probably don't have a whole lot in common, do those marriages work?

Yeah. So it depends. It depends on what kind of marriage you're talking about. What they found was that, I guess, economically hyperguminess and homogamous relationships or marriages didn't have any greater divorce rates than I think the general population maybe. Right. So those educational hyperguminess marriages where the husband has more education than

the wife, those are the ones that resulted in greater rates of divorce. And I think that's the stereotype that you think about in movies where the older, very educated man married some young dimwit and they just don't have anything in common. And that's destined to fail. Yeah. And Tommy Lee was really embarrassed by Pamela Anderson's ditsiness and was really mean to her from what I understand. Oh, really?

Yeah, like really mean. And I think had a real impact on her self-confidence for a while. But I don't know that Tommy Lee has some great educational background, though. Yeah. He never struck me. It's like, well, who knows, I don't want to cast dispersions. I don't know Tommy Lee. Yeah.

Don't judge a book by its cover. They also have found that this is becoming less and less of a thing a period just because obviously in the modern age, there are plenty of women who out earn their husbands and have advanced career-wise further than their husbands. And I, in fact, know some people who had stay-at-home dads instead of stay-at-home moms because the wife and mother had ended up having a much better job. And I think that's just happening more and more because obviously opportunity has changed a lot since the early days of a family trying to marry their daughter off to a higher cast.

Right. And it has changed a lot. But sadly, there's still like a big, there's the perception of widespread hypergamy in America and Europe still to this day. But the researchers found out it's not this idea of marrying up. It's that you can explain the whole thing by the gender pay gap. Exactly. That if women were paid the same as men, there wouldn't be any hypergamy in America or Europe

anymore basically. Right. Yeah. So let's get that gender pay gap closed. Why don't we? It's always, this makes me think of the Sidney Pollock's character in the movie Husbands and Wives. He was, it was sort of that stereotypical thing where this older academic married sort of

a young woman who wasn't as smart as he was. And he, she was just continually embarrassing him at this party and he just snapped at the end and they got in a big argument and he yelled, you're an infant. And that's one of the lines I say a lot is just a joke to Emily and she always thinks it's very funny. Who was it? Sidney Pollock, who great director, but boy, he was such a fun actor in the movies that he was in.

Yeah. He was the eyes wide Chuck guy, right? Yeah. Okay. That is great. Sidney Pollock. RIP. There's one other thing too.

Dom, binary and gay couples, I believe, actually do have greater differences of educational attainment. They're more likely to have differences, but I didn't see that they're more likely to end in divorce. Yeah. Very interesting. So that's it. That's hypergamy, hypergamy, which means short stuff is out.

If you want to know more about hypergamy, go to hypergamy.org.