Short Stuff: Marrying Up

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.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the shorts. So if I'm Josh and
there's Chuck, so let's go tally ho. So this one
is interesting. I think, Uh, it's about the idea, and
this goes by many names, all of which are fairly misogynistic.
I think, um, marrying up, uh, gold digging, trophy wife.

(00:26):
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 nineties. Ah,
that feels like more of an eighties thing to me,
don't you think. Ay, that's what Forbes said. I read
that article. Um, but all to say the idea of
marrying up, which actually has a real name behind it,

(00:49):
which is, how are you gonna announced this? Hypergamme a hypergammy,
hyper monogamy, hypergamy. Okay, hypergamy, hypergamy, that's what I'm going
with has to say about this hypergammey hypergammy Yeah, okay,
it's basically the idea of what you just said, marrying

(01:11):
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. Um. And she
is from a lower class, but she's marrying up because
she has something to trade. That is the basis of it.
And like you said, it's pretty misogynistic in in general

(01:31):
as a concept. The sad thing is is it was
absolutely a part of human history for a very long
time up until very recently. Yeah, there's geographic hypergamy. Um.
There was this journal article called cross Border Marriages colon
Gender and Mobility and Transnational Asia where the author, Nicole

(01:53):
Constable and by the way, thanks how stuff works dot
Com for this, talked about, Um, it's the same thing,
but it's actually um. In addition to finances, it's it's
you know, the lady from the farm moving into the
big city, Uh, to move up both geographically and financially. Yeah,
moving from less developed areas to more developed areas, etcetera.

(02:17):
So um. And again this is it was just a
thing for a really long time because this was while
women were considered inferior to men, or maybe we're prevented
from working outside of the house in some societies. At
certain times in the past, the one way that a
woman could kind of control her destiny was to choose

(02:40):
who she was going to marry. If her culture allowed
her to choose, and that this was a way to
like say, Okay, I'm gonna 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,
and especially a lot of times you would have, uh,

(03:00):
probably a father pushing a daughter to do this, So
it's sort of like a whole families moving up in status. Uh.
You certainly found this in different cultures around the world
in the past. I know that in eight one it
was first used or first found in a book kind
of like explicitly explicitly written about um in a book

(03:21):
called Panjab Casts. That was a book by Sir Denzil
Ibbotson where they talked about, you know, a man seeking
to marry his daughter off to a member of a
tribe superior to his own. So I think culturally that's
it was a lot of times, you know, parents pushing
a daughter to do this. Right. So the thing is, though,

(03:42):
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 lader 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

(04:05):
below him. And apparently some research, especially up into the seventies,
found that this was actually the case in some cultures.
That's right. Uh, 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, alright, laid on ut bub hypogamy, hypogammy, man,

(04:46):
I think hypogamy if we're going with hypergamy. Yeah, but
I was also saying hypergammy and I like that too,
So hypogammy and hyper gammy. It really gets it across
a little more if you can't see it spelled out,
you know. I think I just pictures like the skit
of us when we're you know, in our eighties and nineties, respectfully,

(05:06):
like sitting around and debating how to pronounce things. Oh boy,
and I guess we're always will be in there with
Emily and you me too. I'll just be living together
in some like community in Florida in the future. Um,
and they're like just still rolling their eyes there. They

(05:26):
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
from married with children Marcy Darcy's second husband Jefferson. I don't.
I didn't see that shore well, I don't remember. I

(05:49):
mean I watched a little bit. But who were they?
Was that they the neighbors or something? They across the
street neighbors? Okay, I think I remember that lady. That's
a lady who in real I've hated al Bundy in
real life. Right. Oh, I didn't know that? Is that?
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. Uh. So there's also another word, um,

(06:12):
and this is as it turns out, basically almost everyone
is homogamy, which is marriage between people with similar statuses
and characteristics. Yeah, in our modern world, homogamy seems to
be ruling the stage. Yeah. In fact, I dug up
this article from two thousand fourteen and this from Business Insider,

(06:33):
But there was, it was all over the place, so
clearly there was just like a study published and researchers
compared UH quality levels UM such as attractiveness as socio
economic status within couples, and they found that basically the
trophy wife stereotype was bunk. Um. It does happen, and

(06:54):
that's why you see a news story like you know
Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones in his I can't remember,
but let's say it was his fifties married like a
nineteen year old or something. You know, it's fairly cross
or the the old that ancient billionaire who was like
ninety that had like the playboy bunny wife. I can't
remember them. So like that stuff makes the news and

(07:16):
you see that stereotype sort of reinforced with these big,
splashy stories. But the sum of this study basically is
like that's basically rare, and that almost everybody marries people
that are like them. Yeah, and um, the one researcher
in that UM that article basically said, well, some people

(07:37):
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 likelier
to be beautiful too, And he's probably like doctor Hunk, right,
he's probably likelier to Mick Dreamy is more like um,
he's probably he's likelier because he makes more money and
because he's a doctor to be in better shape, to

(08:00):
not be overweight, to go to a dermatologist, to like
go to an 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,

(08:21):
like homogamy is definitely like the way almost everyone goes,
at least in the West in in modern times. Yeah.
And I will also say, and the one bone pick
to have with his 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

(08:44):
stereotype of marrying up or the trophy wife is the
bill wyman, like the older rich guy who may be
on his second wife goes off and finds like some
you know, young model to get married to the question though,
is is does this make for a good relationship? Like
people get married to people that are more like them

(09:05):
across the board because those marriages seem to last more so,
does you know, does the sixty year old retiring doctor
who leaves his wife and marries the twenty two year
old that they probably don't have a whole lot in common? Uh?
Do those marriages work? So it depends, Um, it depends
on what kind of marriage you're talking about. What they

(09:25):
found was that I guess economically hypergaminus sure um, and
homogeneous relationships or marriages didn't have any greater divorce rates.
They then I think the general population maybe. And then
it was educational hypergamyss um marriages where the husband has

(09:51):
more education than the wife. Um, those are the ones
that resulted in greater greater rates of divorce. And I
think that's the stereotype that you think of out in
movies where like, you know, the older very educated man
marry some young dim wit and they just don't have
anything uncommon and that's destined to fail. Yeah, or like um,

(10:11):
Tommy Lee was really like embarrassed by Pamela Anderson's dizziness
and was really mean to her from what Yeah, like
really mean and I think had a real impact on
her 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 as like, oh who knows.

(10:32):
I don't want to I don't want to cast dispersions.
I don't know, Tommy. Don't judge a book by its cover. Uh.
They also have found that this is becoming less and
less of a thing a period, just because obviously, you know,
in in the modern age, there are plenty of women
who out earned their husbands and have advanced career wise

(10:52):
further than their husbands. And I in fact, I know
some people who like had stay at home dads instead
of stay at home moms because um, the wife and
mother had like ended up having a much better job.
And I think, like that's just happening more and more
because obviously opportunity has changed a lot since you know,
the early days of like a family trying to marry

(11:13):
their daughter off to a higher cast, right, and it
has changed a lot, But sadly, there's still like a
big um there. There's the 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 you can explain the whole thing

(11:34):
by the gender pay gap exactly, that if if women
were paid the same as men, there wouldn't be any
hypergamy in America or Europe anymore. Basically, yeah, so let's
get the gender pay gap closed. Why don't we? It's
always this makes me think of the Sydney Pollocks character
in the movie Husbands and Wives. He was It was

(11:55):
sort of that stereotypical thing where this older academic married
sort of a young woman who wasn't as smart as
he was, and 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. It's just a joke to Emily, and she

(12:17):
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, yeah,
Sydney Pollock, alright, there's one other thing too, um uh don.
Binary and gay couples I believe actually do have greater

(12:38):
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 hyper gammy.
Hyper gammy, which means short stuff is out. Stuff you
should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For

(13:00):
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M