I want a private equity boyfriend

This summer, The Wall Street Journal declared the private equity boyfriend the newest piece of celebrity arm candy, with the likes of Olivia Rodrigo, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Andy Cohen all stepping out with people in the industry.

And sure, maybe this is a silly celebrity story. But I think it tells us something more interesting about the economy and what “success” looks like right now.

The desire for a rich partner is not new. The internet is currently chock full of discourse about wanting a “provider,” refusing 50/50 relationships, seeking “princess treatment,” embracing a “soft life,” or wanting a partner who makes it possible to step back from work.

A recent survey found that among singles who care about a partner’s income, women said their ideal partner would make an average of $172,000 a year.

And one in five daters now say financial stability is more important than physical appearance.

I don’t think the fantasy is as simple as: I want a rich man because I like expensive things. I think it’s more like: I want my life to feel easier.

As I’ve written before, we’re not particularly good at figuring out who someone will be as a partner from a handful of dates, so we reach for proxies. Money becomes a stand-in for those harder-to-measure qualities like ambition, competence, generosity and stability.

And as the economy has become more centered around capital (who owns it, who allocates it, who has access to it) proximity to capital has become a status symbol in its own right.

Security and access have become luxury goods, and partners have become part of that signaling, the same way neighborhoods and members-only clubs have.

Is stability sexy?

We’re in the midst of inflation, housing unaffordability, layoffs, and general economic uncertainty. Wealth has increasingly concentrated among people who already own assets, so it makes sense that what we find attractive in a partner would shift alongside the economy.

Research shows that partner preferences aren’t fixed, they change with your own economic position and the broader distribution of economic power. When security gets harder to build on your own, you start looking for it in other people. And when something feels scarce, it becomes more desirable. That’s true of real estate and it’s true of romantic partners.

I think there’s also a generational retreat from the romantic ideal of the “struggling creative”. A lot of people who were raised on the idea that you should follow your passion are now confronting what those careers actually look like: unstable employment, volatile creator income, and expensive cities.

This is part of the cultural acceptance of selling out. There used to be real status in appearing above money. Now celebrities do Kalshi ads, wear Meta glasses, launch tequila companies, start venture funds and turn themselves into walking portfolios of brand deals.

Celebrity culture tends to exaggerate whatever the broader culture currently considers aspirational. If the status ideal used to be the tortured artist who didn’t care about money, dating another artist made sense. If the status ideal is increasingly access and ownership, the person whose literal job is buying and owning companies starts looking pretty culturally legible as a romantic prize.

People tend to partner with others who have similar levels of education, income and social status (Economists call this assortative mating). As wealth inequality grows, relationships can help reproduce that inequality. The pop star dating the private equity executive is basically just an exaggerated version of how cultural capital meets financial capital.

This is what makes the PE boyfriend interesting as a status symbol. He represents proximity to the part of the economy where ownership, networks and capital increasingly determine who gets ahead.

Why women want out

These conversations are coming at the heels of a decade of girlboss culture that told women to lean in, hustle harder, and optimize their way to financial independence. A lot of women did exactly that, and still ended up exhausted, overworked, and not particularly secure.

As I’ve written about before, the tradwife trend and the girlboss era are two sides of the same coin. Both emerged during periods of economic stress, promising financial safety through performance of the “right” kind of womanhood. And neither actually solves the underlying problem, which is that the economy has made basic financial security difficult to achieve regardless of how hard you work or who you marry.

Maybe part of the desire is a clearer delineation of roles, at a time when a lot of women feel like their male partners aren’t doing anything. If you’re going to carry the financial load and the domestic load and the emotional load, the idea of a partner who comes along and says “I’ll handle the money part, you handle the rest” at least has the advantage of being a clear arrangement, even if it’s one that historically hasn’t worked out great for women.

Of course, making a lot of money guarantees absolutely none of those qualities, which is why it’s a fantasy.

But what it does do is take a messy bundle of things women may actually want (competence, initiative, reciprocity, etc) and collapses them into one simple archetype: The provider.

Do we still care about tradwives? (unfortunately yes).

This also helps explain why tradwife content still sticks around.

Academic research on this type of content identifies how dependence can get reframed as luxury. The aesthetic language behind a lot of this content is calm, nostalgic femininity, but the economic structure underneath is a woman trading her financial autonomy for someone else’s income.

Despite the fact that “tradwife” now comes with a lot of political and ideological baggage, the lifestyle being sold underneath still remains extraordinarily marketable.

The original wave of tradwife influencers has started distancing themselves from the movement, in part because the fantasy they created has been co-opted by increasingly extreme content. And yet … many women (including those who reject the label) continue to embrace domesticity and traditional divisions of labor.

What’s ironic is that tradwife content implicitly promises a supportive husband who provides for you, while the actual economic feasibility of supporting a household on a single income has deteriorated.

The PE boyfriend, the tradwife, the stay-at-home-girlfriend content, the provider-man discourse: they’re all different aesthetics wrapped around the same desire: I am exhausted by having to personally optimize my way out of every form of economic insecurity, and I would like to stop.

What do you actually want when you say you want a rich husband?

Wanting financial stability, or a partner who contributes meaningfully, or to be a homemaker or stay-at-home parent … those are all legitimate choices that can be financially sound when you’re deliberately choosing them.

But when you picture being with a provider or having a rich boyfriend or being a tradwife — what are you actually imagining? In most cases, it’s not really a specific lifestyle or a specific person. It’s the absence of financial anxiety. Enough money, enough time, and enough security that life stops feeling like something you have to constantly fight to maintain.

That’s an economic fantasy more than a relationship fantasy. And the problem with trying to solve an economic problem through a relationship is that it requires you to outsource your economic security to another person, which is the exact arrangement that earlier feminist movements fought to dismantle because of how vulnerable it made women.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting a partner who earns more than you, or deciding that one person will prioritize their career while another prioritizes the household. But you should get clear on a few things:

Making a lot of money does not mean someone is financially responsible. Income and financial stability are not the same thing, and the assumption that a partner’s salary will automatically translate into security is dangerous. I’ve seen people making $250K who spend like they make $500K. I’ve seen people making $100K who have a million-dollar net worth. What actually matters is someone’s relationship to money: their values, their honesty, whether those things align with yours.

Earning power isn’t permanent. People lose jobs. Industries change. People burn out, get sick, or decide at 36 that they hate finance and want to teach high school basketball. If your entire financial plan depends on someone else’s career, your plan essentially depends on something you have zero control over.

Financial dependence can be actively dangerous. Women who are financially dependent on a partner are significantly less likely to leave bad relationships, including abusive ones. A recent survey found that among people receiving financial support, nearly a quarter said they’d do whatever the person supporting them said to avoid being cut off. When your stability depends entirely on someone else’s willingness to keep providing it, you lose negotiating power in other parts of the relationship. As I’ve written before, a huge part of financial independence isn’t about earning for the sake of earning. It’s the ability to leave if you need to.

I’m not arguing against marriage or financial interdependence. Nearly every serious long-term partnership involves some amount of dependence, especially once children enter the picture. But there’s a difference between interdependence and having no economic power of your own.

You can’t date your way out of the economy

At their core, these are stories about individual solutions to systemic problems. They suggest that if you just find the right partner — or become the right kind of woman — you can personally escape an economy that isn’t working.

But you can’t individually opt out of a socioeconomic problem. And if the way you try to escape economic insecurity is by giving up your own economic power, you may just be exchanging one form of vulnerability for another.

That’s why you should separate the lifestyle you want from the cultural story being sold to you.

Like, do you want to stop working entirely? Or do you want a job that doesn’t consume your life? Do you want to be a tradwife? Or do you want more time with your children and somebody who carries a meaningful share of the responsibility?

And once you identify the actual goal, you have many more ways of building toward it.

Maybe the answer really is becoming a stay-at-home parent. But then the financial solution becomes much more tactical: increasing retirement contributions for the nonworking spouse, putting your assets in both names, getting life and disability insurance, and ensuring legal protections that recognize the economic value of unpaid labor.

That’s very different from finding somebody who makes enough money that you never have to think about money again.

We’re all people living in an economy that has made stability feel like a privilege rather than the bare minimum. But collapsing financial security and emotional security into one thing is how people end up in situations that look stable from the outside and feel anything but.