How important is a man's job when it comes to dating?

I don't think it's money alone, even though a minority of people do chase it.

I think people are attracted to status, and in the modern world, wealth and status are obviously linked. Status might have meant different things pre-civilisation. Who knows what?

And high status is obviously rare so not everyone can have the high status partners, and people still require partners so most people settle for ordinary partners or people of approximately equivalent status.

Either that, or die alone.

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, although I'd say it's a combination of both evolution and social conditioning. Alternatively, the evolution of society, and the shifts in what is considered attractive to the genders. To be fair, the traditional expectation of men/women hasn't changed all that much in thousands of years, although, then again, the levels of social conditioning that humans are exposed to nowadays, is far greater than ever before.

The media that people are exposed to alters their perception of what is important in their partners, whether its the action movies with the sexy woman, or the epic drama love story. The same with literature/fiction although that's become less important as time has gone by being replaced with other forms of expression (music being part of it). Marketing on TV, on the internet, etc is all going to have an effect on both the conscious and subconscious preferences of people...

It's never going to be entirely about biology. It's true that we are driven instinctively to listen to our biological needs or desire, but we (most people anyway) have also been taught throughout our lives, to control our biological impulses.. and that's going to factor decisively in the partners we choose.

Erm what question? If I missed a question by all means repeat it. Unlike some people - I do not intentionally dodge or avoid questions and if I have done so it is usually a genuine over sight.

But unfortunately no, no "proof" has been offered. The narrative about evolution has been offered. Multiple times. But support for that narrative not so much. Noticing that a narrative based on evolution "makes sense" is great and all. But it making sense or sounding plausible does not evidence it. The burden of evidence still lies await. Especially as we live in a time where we have undermined much of what evolution might have demanded. For example many people who may not even survive long enough to reproduce now do. From glasses to wheelchairs - transplants to treatments like insulin - to much more - we have underminded the demands of evolution time and time again and such people pair off and procreate quite often.

Remember the vast majority - in fact the near totality - of our evolution happened in times much different from the ones we find ourselves in too. Which makes applying concepts that might have been historically true about evolution to the times in which we now live. For example much of our evolution occured in time of being in very small tribal groups - not million strong cities or a global digitial civilisation. So caution is warranted and necessary in over applying evolution concepts to today's world - especially without a shred of supporting evidence.

Not to mention we have undermined the "resource" needs you are referring to in evolution in many ways too with community schooling, social welfare, childrens allowance, subsidising things like education clothing and so forth. The fact is that the "cost" of pregnancy, child birth and child rearing is - while not low - certainly not as high by any means as it once was so we are once again undermining evolution and freeing ourselves of the demands it may once have had upon us and allowing us to select our partners on "higher" ideas and criteria. And in fact it seems that it is the people with less resources - not more - who end up having more children. It is oft noticed that it is the middle and upper classes that tend to have less children and have them later in life despite their "resources" being higher. Again something that occurs percisely because we are not slaves to the demands evolution once put upon our species.

So no I am not seeing the evidence for the narrative that "job" or "earning" is all that "important" at all. One has to take the eye off whether the evolution narrative makes sense or not - and test to see if the narrative actually holds in the real world. And it does not seem to as - which I have pointed out time and again now to you - people of all economic realities across all countries are pairing off time and again. Your own link to the Divorce Rates even goes against the OPs question here too in that clearly they got married and got through the dating game regardless. Issues only arose - it seems - for some small number of women when their being successful in life caused marital strife. But the OP did not ask about marriage. Specifically about dating and your own link not only does not show anything of the sort was "important" during dating - but even suggests the opposite in many ways.

When an evolution narrative fails to hold true in reality the temptation towards confirmation bias is high. Which can be seen when gravitating towards small outlier groups (like rich men and the specific group of gold diggers who pursue them) in order to try and validate the failed hypothesis. Ignoring of course that there is no useful or valid way to extrapolate a generalisation from that specific minority group.

So the answer to the OP in that light is it doesn't seem to be that "important" at all in general. Though clearly it is important to some. But any evidence that it is anything more than a "nice to have" minor preference has not been shown in this thread to date. Just like the last paragraph in your post here - there may be trends in "preferences" - such as there may be a trend towards a certain leg length or financial situation - but there is a difference between trends and "important". Though I did raise in an earlier post about how vague we are all being about what we even mean by "important" in this context. It seems even the word itself - let alone the answer to the OPs question - is quite subjective.

I have heard that yes. It has not happened in my case I have to admit. If anything the opposite is true and it has only gotten better in our 15 years together.

Something tells me there is more to it than simply living in close quarters. Rather it is what happens while you live in close quarters. Or what we allow to happen. Complacency maybe. For example the effort one might put into looking good or romancing might wane because it is no longer "necessary".

I find a lot of the things we do to challenge and improve each other have very positive effects on sexual attraction. For example we do martial arts and capoeira and tai chi together. This pushes each other to improve our skills and our health levels and more. But also - doing something like Tai Chi opposite your partner is extremely sexy and arousing at times. Contrast to say - coming home from work and falling on opposite ends of the couch with TV dinners and Netflix for example.

We also have our own bedrooms. It varies a lot who ends up in which bedroom on any given night. Sometimes together. Sometimes apart. And I think there is a lot (for us at least - the mileage of others is likely to vary) to be said for that in maintaining many aspects of romance and attraction for us.

But a huge one for us is communication. I think living in close quarters can make communication poor, formulaic, and presumptuous. It is possible to even avoid it or miss it because one feels we already know what the other person is thinking in a given context so why bother? For us though we are almost obsessive about communication. In fact it has been the single most important attribute of our relationship from day 1. Not career or money or looks or sex or hobbies or anything else - all of which are very important - but communication over all has been from day 1 being what we clicked over and what has kept us going.

No I did not say I would not answer it. I said I could not answer it. Much different. If the source of the figure and the details behind it were finally revealed from behind this secret shroud - I would absolutely engage with the question.

Again though - and once again this is not you being called a liar before you play the victim again - if a source for a statistic is not offered the only course of action available to anyone else is to treat it functionally as if the statistic was simply made up and does not actually exist.

But no you have not provided the proof you suggest. You have provided a few narratives and references to people who agree with those narratives. For example in post #260 you merely said it "makes sense" but offered no actual evidence. While in post #254 the best we could get is that the "cliches" are "well known". No one denies that I think. It's the idea the cliches are "well supported" that I would question.

So the working evidence supporting those narratives has not been offered here. Links to entertainment shows like Joe Rogan and Mythbusters are not science :) Let's deal with actual science and studies on these matters if we have any. Not media entertainment. Your links to this have been few - and the one link we have discussed most was A) barely relevant and B) did not actually support the concepts in the OP. Unfortunately when the things you have said have been dealt with you merely declare you have not bothered to read the posts (at least twice now). Which does make everything a little one sides.

Once again though there is a different here between things like factors having an influence and factors being important. You said in one post that you can sometimes "make a man more attractive" by putting him in a sports car. Well sure - who is denying that? That is exactly what I have been saying. Having money is a _ preference _ among many possible preferences. You can "make a man more attractive" in many ways not just with sports cars. For example you can "make a man more attractive" by having him in a picture among women than having him sitting alone.

That does not mean any of those preferences of factors are "important" though. It just means that given the wide set of preferences in the world if you are capable of maximising any one of them - or ideally a number of them - you are going to have more success with romantic and sexual relationships. Again - who is denying that exactly?

At this point I suspect some high % of our conversation comes down to little more than a possible difference in what we think "important" means. My opinion is that in the entire space of preferences and factors no one factor appears all that "important" in isolation at all. Modifying one might have a modicum effect on mating success but except in extreme situations (your rich men comment for example) not really significant. And the reality around us is populated with more exceptions than evidence for such generalisations. As I keep saying - and it has not really been addressed at all - the sheer number of people pairing off in every economic sphere belies the idea that wealth is all that important at all.

Appeals to evolution simply do not work solely because they "make sense" and the more we continue to undermine the processes of evolution and rise above them - the less impact they are going to have. Shouting "instinct" at it does not make it true.

But I am happy to continue the conversation until some actual evidence is produced by all means. The question of the OP is "How important is a man's job when it comes to dating" and "Does it make a difference if he's earning 30k or 150k for example?". So by all means let's answer that question. To do so I think first one needs to be clear what we mean by "important" and "difference". Are we talking about his ability to get dates at all? And to what end? To pursue sex? Romance? Marriage? Procreation? All of the above? What measure of success are we using here to differentiate?

None of this is clear and simply saying "Well look at how very rich guys get on" would be to answer the tiniest part of the question and the rest not at all. Citing a single study referencing how large changes later in the relationship might impact divorce rates - is also entirely nothing to do with the question asked. So what evidence is there left so far? Again - mythbusters the TV show - seriously? :) What are we actually claiming here and what - specifically - is the actual hard evidence (not opinion pieces or TV shows about the evidence, but the actual evidence itself) for the claim made?

Yes and I have dealt with the 50% study at this point numerous times including in posts you yourself have not bothered (by your own admission) to read - so again we are going in circles on labouring that point. And if you are not even going to read my posts - then asking what I have in them is not really going to help either is it?

The more important point however is that the study was not at all relevant to the topic of the thread. The topic of the thread is the "importance" of job and earnings of "a man" during dating. A study about divorce rates following stark changing in career of the woman (not the man) has nothing to do with any of that. It was - at best - irrelevant. And without details on who initiated the divorces and why - it tells us nothing at all!

So the evidence that this one single variable is "important" is still not forthcoming here. That study and that figure of 50% is definitely not it. Name dropping does not do it either. If you cite a specific document on the matter produced by them then that is workable. Do you have a title or citation or link I can use?

As for demanding links and citations from me - sure but for what specifically? When you make a specific claim I ask you for a specific citation (usually not getting one, but I ask anyway). If I have made a specific claim you want to know by reasoning for by all means ask! If I can offer citations I will. If I was basing it off anecdote or personal feeling I will admit that.

But so far I have not been making all that many claims. Rather I have been evaluating yours. Evaluation of a claim does not require counter claims. It never has. My feeling is that generally no one attribute is all that significantly important compared with any other attribute. And that feeling is supported by a complete lack of any evidence suggesting a stark difference between importances.

So without any reasons to think any one attribute more important than any other - I simply see no reason to believe they are. Subjectivity plays too much of a role in human relations too. Height can be incredibly important to the next person - weight to the next - sense of humor to the next.

And time and time again I point out the simple fact the undermines most of the "but it makes sense" hypotheses on the thread - which is that people of all financial levels and resource capabilities are pairing off all the time. How is something "important" therefore - if clearly relationships where it is minimal are happening just as easily and frequently as relationships where it is maximised? But no let's ignore the vast majorities of outliers to a hypothesis where we can just say "Look over here at this small cohort of rich guys and what happens to them!" :)

But as I said if we can not even have a conversation on what we even mean by "important" and you can not answer the series of questions at the end of my last post and have simply ignored them - I am not sure what progress can be made at this point. It is simply not even clear if we are talking about the same thing - or entirely past each other. And you do not seem remotely as keen as I to find out.

Sure no one has been denying money is a factor. I keep saying that???

And the fact "high earning people" end up with other "High earning people" has already been discussed too without issue. Reasons for that are not limited to money. We discussed for example how people tend to move in the same social circles as people earning in or around the same as themselves - and the social circles you move in are one of the greatest predictors of who you will end up dating/marrying. Strangely comments about CEO males marrying their secretaries are put forward as if this is all about the woman marrying up - and ignoring the selection criteria in the opposite direction too. Such as the power differential some males like in feeling they have some kind of power over a partner. Further it is quite powerfully along the lines of selection bias and confirmation bias to single out such cases. Most companies have a single CEO or not many more. Most women in the company will not be dating or marrying the CEO. One will. So once again we are moving too quickly to the outliers - the statiscal minority groups - and extrapolating backwards from there. I highlighted the confirmation bias at play there twice now. Consider this the third time I guess.

And the not scientists at the TV show "Mythbusters" can sure show that changing one thing can increase attractiveness to some. Again no one has argued against that. The issue is that other people have also shown that changing other attributes can also increase attractiveness in the same way. This is the problem with going to TV shows or "Peterson says" instead of actual studies. They don't normalise for anything outside the thing they are commenting on. They focus directly and solely on the thing they are commenting on and do not normalise or adjust. This is not science therefore, it is just confirming biases for the purposes of making a TV show.

The point being though that sure - you can change one variable and affect attractiveness. You can change other ones however too with the same effect. So only doing it with one - and not repeating the experiment with everything else - is going to leave you with false positives on the relevance of what your experiment has found. This is why they are TV entertainers and not scientists. Not that that is a bad thing per se. I mean I have cited (though unlike some I do it alongside science - not in lieu of it) the TV works of Derren Brown on occasion while making points! This is not in itself a bad thing. Recognising the limits of the value of such a citation is important though.

Which all just supports what I keep saying - that one can single out a variable and call it "important" - but without showing it is any more or less important than all the other variables too - one would essentially be saying nothing. There is no "mental gymnastics" here (just another one of your personal comments for filler) - or me denying the science. Rather it is me understanding the science but not seeing any one piece of science in isolation.

I refer back again to the link I gave to Trump above. (https://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf) which supports a lot of what we are !both! saying here. Once again - like I keep saying - it shows how you can single out income and show it to be "important" in isolation but when you feed it back into the greater data set you can find all kinds of modifiers to that because other factors are in play too. They show for example that while women do put more emphasis than men on earnings - it is just a small part of multi factor variables. They show for example that a man of certain height or attractiveness (for example) can perfectly have success in dating and so forth. But a man lower on those attributes can augment it with higher income to the same effect.

In other words as other variables are factored up - the relevance of income and it's importance factors down. And Vice Versa. So you quickly see in studies like this that everything - income included - are just single variables in a greater dataset all playing off each other and maximising or minimising one just results in the people putting different weights on the others. Which is - again - what I said from the start.

So as I suspected there actually is not a lot of disagreement here - despite your often (and unrequited I must add) standoffish attitude towards me - rather we are both putting a lot of weight on a different interpretation of the word "important" and ending up talking past each other as a result. It is important yes - just not significantly more so than the complete data set it is part of.

As I already said I too reckon it is important "to the point of instinct". Like height. Weight. Attractiveness. Facial Structure. Race. There is going to be instinctual aspects to all of it.

It again is the difference between singling out one attribute and checking how "important" it is to people - and taking them all and seeing if any are relatively more important to people.

So I have to admit I have genuinely lost sight at this point of what the locus of our disagreement even is. But it is certainly not located in pretence that anyone is not "being real" here.

Yep :) But not - seemingly - all that relatively more or less important than a multitude of other common factors. And how important one factor is tends to wax or wane depending on how good the other ones are. So looks compensate for bad income - and vice versa - for example.

But otherwise yea - that seems to be where we are at.