This article is a follow-up of the previous article which provided dating advice for financially independent men. It gives dating advice to women who are seeking financially independent men.
I met women who started seeking a better life even while in University in the 90s. I've known girls in the Science faculty in NUS 20 years ago who lingered outside the lecture theatre to wait for the male doctors to emerge from the lecture theatres. I also had a good friend who was a top mooter and NUS debater who once asked me for advice on how to deal with a stalker from a different faculty who liked attending law lectures with him. ( It is as if an engineering undergraduate would have advice for someone who has such a nice unique problem like this. Too bad he had no advice for me on how to attract stalkers while in University. )
Fast forward 20 years, I think the situation is very different today but not necessarily in favour for our daughters. There is a smaller dating pool of eligible men as many boys end up in jail, get addicted to porn or simply choose the path of PS4 asexuality. The remaining pool of men know their value, all thanks to apps like Tinder which gives them hook-ups on demand. ( It's no accident that Match which owns Tinder is working on an IPO soon. )
So what advice do I have for the potential gold-digger ?
Don't.
I spend 3 hours volunteering at Family Court every week and I witness the bitterness of divorce first hand as part of my JD program. It's not something I think any dad would want their daughters to go through. A man's financial status should form a baseline for a woman to make a choice but it should not be the highest criteria.
The market for men, especially financially independent men, is highly efficient. Apps like Tinder and businesses like Lunch Actually are actually secondary markets for marriages and sexual relationships. Men, being primarily visual, will first rank women by their outward appearance, and then choose someone of somewhat equal social status to follow the trend of assortative mating.
The burden now exists for women of the future, being the more deliberate and wiser gender to choose properly taking into account how they rank against their peers in terms of good looks.
For the most part of it, financially secure men are like blue chips. Steady dividend flows but expensive to buy. In extreme cases, a woman can at best own only a small fractional share of a financially powerful man and may have to settle for becoming a wife-in-common, sharing her husband with different his girlfriends without him running afoul of Woman's Charter if he received good advice.
I propose this rule of thumb for my daughter.
Find a good conscientious and agreeable man for a husband, failing which, its ok to stay single.
Couples can seek financial independence together by working hard and saving for the future. It's like finding a stock with tiny dividends but high potential for dividend growth in the future. I know one thing rich men understand, it is that their wives who dated them while they are younger are the only people who chose to struggle with them when they were poor. They will never find someone like that again for the rest of their lives.
Otherwise, single-hood is just fine. Just make sure that there's a lot of travel in that life plan.
There is nothing more bitter than seeing a middle-aged woman go to court to seek maintenance arrears from lazy and unmotivated men.
My turn comes up again next Monday.
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