Hypergamy Isn’t Real and Incels Are Weird For Talking About It

What is hypergamy? Meanings, definitions & an explanation for modern dating

Hypergamy, as it’s discussed in modern relationship & dating culture, is the act of developing a relationship with someone possessing higher status or more resources.

Colloquially referenced by the concepts ‘dating up’ or ‘marrying up’, it is a term within social science—but has much more relevance in the pop psychology and sex advice corners of the internet.

Like many of these similar terms, it leans very heavily on assumed logic from evolutionary psychology to justify some weird and often flimsy assumptions about dating (especially when it comes to women)

A quick summary of some definitions we’ll be using:

• Hypergamy/hypergamous behaviour: As per the above, the practice of dating intentionally for transactional acquisition of more resources.
• Resources: Anything that could exist as an exchange of value between people. Money, attention, status or status signalling, opportunities, time are the common examples—there are definitely more. Can also be context dependent—someone circumstantially popular, for example (like a bartender) has ‘more resources’ in their bar than a random patron. Within the conversation regarding hypergamy, education is frequently discussed—the theory being that women will regularly date up in terms of seeking someone more educated than themselves.
• Incel: Stands for involuntarily celibate. Originally was used as a term to describe someone with no control over their dating life, but has in the last couple decades become politically slanted towards groups of misogynist men that tend to gather in online spaces. Somewhat related to pickup artist communities. They’re a big topic on their own, but in the context of this article, when I refer to incels, it’s as a shorthand for anyone online participating in or espousing the damaging or selfish values towards dating/relationships/women that I’m describing in the surrounding passages, even if that’s a departure from the original/literal meaning of the term.

As an aside—this article discusses heteronormative dating structures. This is predominantly because much of the language and discussion on hypergamy is gendered by definition—and in some cases framed as an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic. These are primarily what I’m concerned with covering today. The principles of dating up/dating down and the values surrounding relationships apply in all cases of dating (see this paper for exceptions), but you might find some of the cultural components related to gendered discrepancies not applicable to queer relationships.

A quick example of hypergamy

Classically, when it’s referenced, hypergamy looks like a woman marrying a rich, famous man for the sake of accessing his resources (status, money, etc) for herself. When these incel or pickup communities discuss hypergamy, it’s often as a pattern of behaviour—the same woman moving from partner to partner when more and more resources become available to her.

It should be very immediately obvious that this is a transactional and deeply cynically unhealthy view of relationships and the people involved. The conversation being slanted so distinctly towards women and their behaviour also make it a pretty colloquially sexist term. You will rarely hear men being accused of hypergamy—rather we tend to characterise the same behaviour in different terms (replacing the wife with a ‘younger model’, for example).

The goalposts will move in regards to the term depending on where you look. In discourse on social/cultural issues, they refer to hypergamy to describe the practice of women dating higher earning/more educated men. In pickup/incel communities, it’s not enough for the women to date up in the first place, they’re espousing that women are constantly on the lookout for partners with bigger and better bank accounts, muscles, status symbols, the works.

(If you believe this is an exaggeration or a mischaracterisation of the conversation, I invite you to google ‘reddit + any of the following: AWALT, hypergamy, monkey branching’ and let me know if you still believe there are not people speaking of these things in this manner.)

Context and defences for hypergamy

This is sounding very negative so far (it is) and you’d be fair in thinking that taking such a model of relationships as gospel is a very unhealthy belief to commit to (you’d also be correct).

It is necessary to look at all the possible interpretations of the term hypergamy in order to head off the radical pipeline that often pushes people to these more extreme definitions and beliefs. It would be one thing to suggest that some portion of the population seeks out higher educated partners or try to date up in attractiveness (we wanna date hot people, who knew!). It would be another thing entirely to give anyone at all the idea that women are constantly maintaining a roster of men and rotating through each until she’s able to find someone with more and more of X resource.

The above type of emotional priming is exactly how cultural assumptions form—the baseline is set by these extreme beliefs, which is then amplified by confirmation bias and social media algorithms. I think being so harsh and inflammatory against the concepts in question is the only way to combat such a pipeline.

The main logic that hypergamy defenders will use is that, in theory, if hypergamy was an accurate model of the world, it shouldn’t matter how unhealthy it sounds—we would all be forced to confront transactionalism in our relationships. More to the point, they lean on the natural intuition in most people to suggest that a person with more resources is more attractive. If you had the choice, you’d take a partner with a million dollars over a partner in debt, all else being equal.

This logic extends to the idea that we need to prepare for this behaviour ahead of time. Pickup artist rhetoric advises leaning into it—developing status and other resources to attract hypergamous women and then being emotionally distant to preempt them eventually leaving for ‘greener pastures’, as it were. Aside from how deeply ridiculous a relationship that sounds like, it’s also a lot of work for a temporary, transactional relationship. Ask me how I know—I’ve tried both sides and it sucks as much as you’d think.

But, ‘facts’ don’t care about my feelings. If people are just naturally hypergamous then as much as I’m against the concept, I’d have to deal with all the consequences; partners cheating or leaving me for other men with more stuff than me, love not being real if I can no longer provide for my partners, whatever other inferences you’d wanna draw from human relationships hinging on the resources one can accumulate.

This leads us to something of a quandary—I’d have to accept that we might have to allow for this type of controversial language if it was a real world occurrence. Let’s work out if that’s the case.

Do men & women actually practice hypergamy?

If men and women were commonly observed trading their relationships in and out for ‘upgrades’, we’d be able to conclude that people practice hypergamy. Without having access to a social science research institute, we’re going to have to settle for some observation and secondary sources. Make of that what you will.

As a reminder, we’d be looking to prove here specifically that:

• Hypergamy happens (by the social science definition of ‘dating up’)
• Humans (or women, I guess, for the purpose of fighting the incel definition) are hypergamous by nature
• Most importantly, that the instinct to seek out a partner with more resources than our current one would be SO OVERWHELMING it would outweigh all other reasons to stay in or stay committed to our existing relationship

First, the low hanging fruit. To start with—it is categorically impossible for EVERYONE to be hypergamous, at least successfully. The global chess win rate is 50% (excluding robots and draws) because each game has to have two people. Likewise, in every contrast of resources between partners, someone has to have less in order for someone to have more.

The math does not support the idea that everyone can be absolutely hypergamous. In a first world society where men and women have equal access to things like education and earning potential, there is no way for any demographic to unilaterally date up. The argument can of course be made that there are systems in place to prevent certain demographics access to these things, or certain imbalances in outcomes—men in university (recently) and the wage gap are very easy examples—which would naturally create occurrences of dating up.

This is hardly the argument—again, addressing the sexist elephant in the room, the suggestion is that women date up, in income, education, status, etc or that there’s a relative difference, i.e. that men want looks and youth and women want money or status.

Unfortunately, this logic also doesn’t support hypergamy. For example, you’d expect educated women to be disproportionately single (not true) given the recently higher levels of women in university and the shrinking dating pool of ‘more’ educated men (a woman with a bachelors degree would only theoretically be able to date men with postgrad degrees, for example). Class, income, status, across the board we find that research shows distinctly few discrepancies in these resources.

On average, people tend to date around their level in these areas, which makes sense—you want your partner to be as bought in as you are, and on a very cynical level, you want both people to look at the other and think ‘man, what a catch!’, which only happens when both people are around the same ‘value’ to one another. And of course, looks are one of the most subjective areas within human relationships, so it would be very challenging to prove there was some kind of material exchange for ‘attractiveness’, whatever that would mean.

This article does a great job summarising the research that support statistical factors that would contribute to hypergamy—to note where I got some of my sources on the subject.

So wait, does hypergamy even exist?

Honestly, if you want the short answer—no.

You can go way way down the rabbit hole of sociology research trying to prove one conclusion or the other, but as a social principle, it’s not yet been observed or proved that humans ‘date up’ in the ways we’ve described above, at least as transparently as the men on the internet want to claim.

Rich, ugly software engineers are not plucking stunning homeless women off the streets and enjoying wonderful, equal exchanges of pure hypergamous value. It’s just not how the real world works.

So the only thing left is the colloquial component—the social issues. It’ll depend on how chronically online you are as to whether you consider this an issue, but think about it—hypergamy would be a problem if it was observable in the research, but the cultural belief that it exists in some capacity could also cause big consequences.

Also, just to note:

Hypergamy, hypogamy and polygamy are different things

Hypogamy is the inverse of hypergamy, dating down in one aspect of the relationship.
Polygamy is marrying more than one person. Polyamory (literally meaning ‘many loves’) refers to dating more than one person. These are not related concepts—poly people don’t exhibit these behaviours any more or less than monogamous people.

Soooo, what now?

To wrap up this introductory discussion, I’d like to suggest that there’s room for a conversation about observable strawmen in cultural conversation that propagate these dangerous views. Both an incel spouting that women are evil, calculating gold diggers and a women ranting about broke boys and discussing strategies to pump men for material goods are causing damage to the values that are necessary for genuinely healthy relationships to form.

Why hypergamy (and the people that discuss it) are unhelpful for your dating life, and what to do instead

Some other research (that you can see here) denotes kindness and intelligence as traits people report as being the most attractive to them.

People have rightfully criticised the significance of self-reporting what you like in a partner. After all, you’re not measuring actual behaviour when you look at studies like this, you’re measuring what you think of your own behaviour. These aren’t the same thing.

The issue with the whole conversation is that, really, we’re trying to equate individual human interactions with a swathe of averages and statistical probabilities. Dating only has to work once—your average experience is statistically going to be a stinker of a date with someone you don’t get along with. That’s how the system works.

Hypergamy and the people on every side of the conversation (incels, misandrists, sociologists, cultural commentators, etc) are looking to turn that experience into something predictable and repeatable—to take the whole exercise and describe it in formulas that avoid the random nature of human-to-human contact.

When you read a thread from a hurt, bitter man describing women as emotionless resource extractors, you’re seeing a person describing the whole world through the lens of his emotively potent past experiences. This creates a sentiment that flits through algorithms or popular discourse and infects the future experiences of other people. No matter how logical we proclaim to be—if we’re primed to look out for gold diggers, we’re going to be judging our dates using some strange metrics. We’re also not going to be looking inward, at what we can control about ourselves.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making yourself more attractive, or pushing an aesthetic that shows yourself off in a particular or positive light. That’s not hypergamy—the belief that you’ll be cheated on because women all want to ‘upgrade’ you is.

Your values matter a great deal, because they inform the choices that you make (and don’t make) in the future. Terms like hypergamy inform what you take for granted and seep into your values in insidious ways. It might be tempting to get mad and double down on hypergamy being an issue because people say ‘I like kind people’ in a survey and then go and sleep with someone hot and awful—but that’s poisoning the well against people that genuinely want kind people, which is the slice of the population you actually want to be dating.

Your goal is to belong to that part of the world, not the grumpy people that check out and ‘enjoy the decline’. We can do better than that. You should join my mailing list too, for more anti-incel propaganda.