Yes, you seem to be exactly my type
Era of marrying up or down is over. Now we seek people who are like us
Cinderella would go weeping into her slipper for the age of the upwardly mobile, fairytale heroine would appear to be over.
On both sides of the pond, research is revealing a substantial rise in what sociologists term “positive assortative mating.”
Translation: Getting hitched to someone of similar education, status, and those all-important box-set requirements.
So, where once a secretary might have dreamt of ensnaring her Mad Man, or a Mellors of carrying off a Lady Chatterley, now quacks marry quacks, politicos other politicos, and never the twain shall meet, let alone wed.
Why, even the Duchess of Cambridge, our own rags-toriches, party-crowns-to-proper-crowns princess, attended the same university as her prince and emerged with the same class of degree — from St. Andrews, since celebrated as “Britain’s top matchmaking university.”
The most roundly educated with the plumpest prospects are increasingly embracing power coupledom, either at university (our “mating fac- tories,” as one sociologist puts it) or later in the workplace.
Investigations by America’s National Bureau of Economic Research — being replicated in Britain with similar results — has found a marked rise in like marrying like. The upshot is a widening of social inequality.
The study of American census data, led by Pennsylvania University’s Jeremy Greenwood, discovered 48 per cent of married men with university degrees had tied the knot with a fellow graduate in 2005, up from 25 per cent in 1960. For women, the figure was 44 per cent, an increase of 11 per cent in 1960.
This trend is being exacerbated in Britain by the emergence of a new “uber middle class” comprised of London municipal employees and the like.
According to a study of 40 years of salary data published in the Financial Times, members of this elite tend to boast annual pay of $126,000-plus and be based in the capital. With those in the most lavishly remunerated jobs pairing off, the gap between rich and poor — and even rich and middle — grows more.
How things change. Time was when alpha chaps lived for a gamma-role partner. Stephen Hawking married his nurse. Rupert Murdoch wed Wendi Deng, a former employee. Tiger Woods swooned over a Swedish au pair, and many others fell for a flight attendant.
Yet today, British Prime Minister David Cameron takes pride in his superachieving businesswoman wife, Samantha, as does Steve Hilton, the former Tory director of strategy, in his wife, Rachel Whetstone, now senior vice president of communications at Google.
Outside the halls of Westminster, we have Brad and Angelina, parodying their likeness by sallying forth, identically clad for the BAFTA ceremony.
Posh and Beckham are wont to display similar sartorial predilections, and let us not forget British fashion’s first couple, Stella McCartney and Alasdhair Willis.
Yet the global village promised by the Internet age was supposed to widen our erotic horizons, not limit them.
Yes, only the truly dim now see either gender as a meal ticket. But why the hurtle toward sameness?
In the one camp are what we might term the “economic realists.”
As one gimlet-eyed thirtysomething lawyer — married to a lawyer — says: “People are less rose-tinted about whom they marry and approach it in practical, hardheaded terms — like a job interview.
“Times are hard. Who other than oligarchs can afford a stay-at-home partner? Both sides want, and need, their spouses to be successful to achieve some mutual idea of a good life. And, for that, you’re going to need a PLU (people like us).”
Note, too, that one motive social commentators give for people marrying later in life is that — while our grandparents may have found the one, then lived frugally, gradually accruing assets such as a car and home — today’s materialists want the car, the home, the holidays, and then the wedding as the cherry on the “We’ve made it” cake.
In this case, one’s spouse becomes merely another status symbol — the better they are on paper, the better their value. If this sounds like a CV, well, it is.
There are also what one might refer to as the “romantic realists.”
Attaching ourselves to people later in life means that our personalities tend to be more formed.
It can be difficult enough to find oneself enthralled by someone of the same educational background, let alone straying further afield.
In the end, be it earning power or brain power, it all comes down to what is most important to you.