First came the positively incandescent, strawberry-size, 30-carat ring. Then it was lace bustiers and designer ball gowns, the cover of Vogue, a joyride to outer space. Finally, the wedding itself — an affair that took the entire city of Venice hostage this summer and was rumored to cost, between the superyachts, hotel buyouts, elite security squads, three-Michelin-star chef and maritime foam party, upward of $20 million. And thus Lauren Sánchez became one of the most talked-about women in the world.
Sánchez is an object of public fascination because of her attaché, Jeff Bezos, whose net worth of roughly $240 billion outshines the gross domestic product of Hungary. But being a gazillionaire’s wife alone doesn’t explain the rabid interest around her. Bezos’ former wife MacKenzie Scott wasn’t cropping up daily in tabloid headlines or riling up Substack Robespierres.
What is it about Sánchez that draws such gawkery? Is it her wardrobe, her spending habits, her striking looks? Is it just good old-fashioned misogyny? Her path from TV journalist and entrepreneur to rollicking socialite of immense spousal affluence can be read one of two ways — as that of either a wily profiteer or a subversive heroine. In the tour de discourse around her marital choices, Sánchez’s own personhood has almost been left beside the point.
Hypergamy, or the act of “marrying up” into a higher socioeconomic class, is not a fresh idea. But the age-old concept is swirling back into popular conversation right now through Sánchez and other modern, intelligent, ambitious women proudly affixing themselves to men of greater wealth and stature — like Jordon Hudson (the 24-year-old girlfriend of the 73-year-old football coach Bill Belichick, who this week applied to trademark “gold digger” on jewelry), Melania Trump (maybe the paradigmatic rich-man spouse of our times) and even Huma Abedin (the political strategist and former top aide to Hillary Clinton who this spring wed Alex Soros, scion of George Soros).
Theirs is something of a confusing new archetype in the year 2025, especially amid the social conservatism reshaping American politics. Disgruntlement oozes out of the so-called manosphere, whose figureheads, like Andrew Tate, claim that women are master manipulators. Wary men are performing “gold digger tests” on dates.
Such suspicions do carry a gritty kernel of truth. For many straight women, hypergamy is an earnest desire — and one more openly on display than ever before. Social media is awash with posts and memes about single women yearning for a man who is, above all else, flush with cash. On Instagram and X and the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” marrying rich is often framed as possibly the smartest personal-finance decision a person could make in these dicey economic times. A woman on TikTok went viral for asking strangers in Beverly Hills to be her sugar daddy. Another TikToker’s video listing her ideal lover’s qualities (“looking for a man in finance, trust fund, six-five, blue eyes!”) blew up into a hit song, a tongue-in-cheek anthem. It turns out that lots of millennial and Gen Z women, fed up with careerism and romantic fantasy, are genuinely interested in trading in #girlboss feminism for marriages of convenience and the promise of economic stability.
So a key aspect of Sánchez’s notoriety seems to lie in the way she symbolizes, for men and women alike, a certain fraught reality. Services like Seeking.com, a “sugar baby” matchmaking service formerly known as Seeking Arrangement, and OnlyFans, a creator platform dominated by men paying women for sexual content, have shot up in popularity in recent years. Seeking has even described itself as “founded on the principle of hypergamy.”
The woman questing for money out of her intimate affairs is everywhere in our cultural works, too: She is the heroine of the rags-to-riches-and-then-some film “Anora” and the protagonist of the coldly practical rom-com “Materialists,” and shades of her exist in all the desultory characters of “The White Lotus” and “Succession” complaining of irksome husbands while winking from behind Chanel sunglasses. This fall, Kristin Chenoweth will star in “The Queen of Versailles,” a rompy musical about a housewife splurging the funds of a man 30 years her senior.
Hypergamists, sugar babies, gold diggers — is this 2025 or 1995 or 1825?
Déjà Vu, Déjà Discourse
To put finance before romance is actually a faithfully originalist reading of the institution of marriage. For most of its history, marriage in the Western world was never about feelings: It was about elite, landowning families’ joining their children together to strengthen their holdings. Husbands and wives were meant to be business partners. When spouses craved affection, they turned to their friends.
It wasn’t until the early 1800s that Enlightenment ideals about liberty, personal happiness and “love matches” began percolating. The default alliance was amended into a preference for “companionable marriage” — a relationship of mutual affection but still predicated on financial security.
A booming art form, the novel, glorified these novelly amorous marriages. Jane Austen’s seminal “Pride and Prejudice,” from 1813, features a male suitor who is clever and handsome and, oh, just happens to have a good deal of money upon which the poorer but class-proud Elizabeth Bennet can capitalize. (Elizabeth’s initial dislike of Mr. Darcy also just happens to crumble after she visits his comically vast estate.) William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 chronicle of upward mobility, “Vanity Fair,” takes a different spin on this kind of relationship: His female characters are charming seductresses who engineer their way into aristocratic ranks through deliberate conquests of higher-status men.
But while “love matches” became faddish, they fiscally benefited only one party. Then, in the early 20th century, rapid industrial development worsened the gender wealth gap that was already set up by man-favoring policies around property ownership and inheritance. Even among poorer classes, the wartime wage-labor economy caused men’s earning power to soar well above their counterparts’: Suddenly, men had the chance to build fortunes in offices, while most women stayed home and the few who worked were allowed to pursue only lower-paid jobs.
Protective of their newfound riches, more men began viewing marriage through the darker lens anticipated by Thackeray. If relationships were now all about passion, then couldn’t one be duped by passion-fakers? A 1919 play about social-climbing chorus girls called “The Gold Diggers” popularized the pejorative for such women. The term stuck. It became an easy way to scoff at any women not piquing societal approval. In putting a magnifying glass to financial imbalance, this growing outcry over gold diggers also played down all the other exchanges of capital that can take place in relationships — the trading of one partner’s money against another’s beauty, youth or reputational cachet, for example.
And the tittering over women’s motivations has always erupted the loudest during times of social strife. “The trope, the rhetoric about gold diggers, pops up in moments of crises about marriage or gender,” Brian Donovan, a sociologist and the author of a book on the cultural history of gold diggers, told me, adding that such periods also map onto economic crises: “During the times people should have been blaming men for making decisions that led to financial crises, women were instead scapegoated for being gold diggers.” Through the boom time of the 1950s and 1960s, there was not nearly as much anxiety about gold diggers as during the Great Depression, when comic strips like “Blondie” parodied female greed.
As women joined the work force en masse in later decades, accusations of golddiggery became more common, not less. With female professional prospects looking up, marrying for money was increasingly seen as “a devaluation of the romantic core that was perceived to be the center of the marriage union,” Donovan says. Moral panics around supposedly avaricious women reflected a bigger insecurity about hypergamy in this environment: Was it a lazy way out or the ultimate triumph?
The anguish blooms perennially. Our current conversation around money marriages and figures like Sánchez, Donovan points out, is taking place at a time when the (overwhelmingly male) billionaire class is ballooning, while these billionaires’ middle-class employees are struggling to afford groceries. And the complex interplay of dollars and cents with harder-to-quantify assets like sexual appeal is also a cornerstone grievance in our rancorous gender spats today.
Looking at just how many people have actually, successfully, “married up” throughout history reveals the extent of our illusions. The largest research ever conducted on hypergamy is a study in England, published this year by the economic historians Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, that evaluated more than 33 million marriages and 67 million births from 1837 to 2021. Clark and Cummins were surprised to find that, on average, a woman’s father’s status — measured through traits like education level, wealth and profession — was on the whole equal to that of her husband’s father. People across the board tended to match within their own socioeconomic stratum.
Moreover, looking at the outlier couples of unequal backgrounds showed no special pattern in female or male hypergamy. “There’s lots of people marrying up or marrying down, but there is no gendered component to it,” Cummins told me. “It’s stunning. We just have the perception. Our minds pick out the patterns, but the data is very clear.” Statistically, the gold digger is a blip, an anomaly.
“The gold digger is like a folk devil, a kind of convenient punching bag for social problems and economic inequality,” Donovan says. “It’s a way to deflect blame.”
Who Is Doing the Mining?
Lauren Sánchez is just as much a “convenient punching bag” for our collective furor at money-hoarding elites as she is a totem of frustration exploding out of both men and women right now.
For many men, she seems to confirm the theory, spawned out of incel communities on the internet and now prevalent in male-centric media, that wealth and status are paramount to securing a woman’s interest. A common refrain about “80 percent of women wanting 20 percent of men” is predicated upon the notion that men must “looksmaxx” into handsome enough specimens, hustle to make as much money as possible and flash this material success like peacocks in order to stand a chance at attracting a woman. But once a man accrues such success, he ought to be careful of women taking undue advantage of him for his money. Both the process and the outcome are undergirded by a resentful belief that the mating game is rigged.
This embitterment sits alongside a related manosphere belief that women, having achieved feminist objectives and surpassed men in areas like education and social-media influence, no longer need to pair up with the opposite gender — so any interest suggests ulterior motives. “I think we’ll see even more accusations of gold digging because of the rise of this kind of hypermasculine Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan figure,” Donovan told me.
Yet for women, the Sánchezes of the world represent something else entirely. At a time when female leadership is conspicuously absent from the halls of power and male politicians are advocating revanchist policy ideas that would usher women back into older gender roles, women like Sánchez and Abedin can appear to be opting right in to this dynamic. They read as a direct repudiation of the last era of feminism — the not-so-long-ago yet already-over time when figures like Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton and Beyoncé urged younger women to “lean in,” “stand up” and demand “a seat at the table.”
Those matriarchs pushed for women to achieve wealth and status, but on their own terms, not on the arms of men. Feminists of that time excluded men from their vision of female empowerment — a view that was literalized in the banning of male members at the pastel-pink co-working club the Wing.
Are Lauren Sánchez, Huma Abedin and Melania Trump, though three very different women, complicit in a backward slide for women’s rights? Or are they independent thinkers who should be congratulated for doing what they want, even if what they want is marrying tycoons? If the girlboss feminism of the 2010s encouraged labor — grit and elbow grease forever — then the marry-a-rich-guy aspiration of the 2020s expresses a desire to leave labor behind, to leapfrog out of the work force and into a selfish pleasure. The pandemic years brought on a “soft girl revolution,” in which Gen Z women online explicitly jettisoned hustle culture for amusement and leisure. Another recent trend, “SugarTok,” features young women bragging about the older men who finance their lives. Tradwives, pledging allegiance to hearth and husband instead of the cubicle, take the idea to the extreme.
The upside of this give-up-the-fight attitude is that it looks like a whole lot of fun: Sánchez gets to spend lavishly, blast to outer space and party with Leonardo DiCaprio on a gondola. Even the least glamorous version still swaps PowerPoints for cozy cashmere sweatpants and Häagen-Dazs on the couch. The downside, though: To champion this hedonistic credo is to also admit that feminism, as we last knew it, might have been a failure.
Girlbosses of old wanted to take the financial crown from men. But here, too, they faced a rigged system — and instead of charging after the broader structural imbalances keeping one gender poorer than the other, they championed the climbing of corporate ladders by individual women. Sánchez certainly makes no claims to challenge systemic inequality. Yet at the least, she is honest about what she represents: nothing more than her own interests.
Though this free-for-all moment is already being deemed “post-feminist,” we are lacking a clear vision of what economic dynamic, exactly, men and women should each be fighting for — which is leading everyone to feel slightly in the wrong, cheated of something they were initially promised. Men fear gold diggers, but women fear being gold diggers, too. One friend of mine recently married a wealthy man, quit her job and now grapples daily with both relief and guilt. “I’m choosing to be comfortable and not struggle, and there is agency in that choice,” she told me. “But am I just repeating my mother and grandmother’s behavior? I came to professional consciousness under Sheryl Sandberg, who told me my job was my calling card. I guess I’m an uneasy trophy wife.”
It’s no wonder that the rom-com genre has died out. Jane Austen declared that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife — but the reality of today’s world is that men and women are each in want of a good fortune, and neither party is totally sure how to reconcile their desire for riches with their desire for the other.
In the recent film “Materialists,” a valiant but oversimplistic attempt to tussle with this modern conundrum, the female protagonist is asked to make an explicit choice between a man with money and a man she loves. This, the movie claims, is a binary: She cannot have both. “Anora,” a grimmer yet truer study on the same subject, understands that it isn’t a binary so much as a Russian doll — here, the protagonist falls in love with a man for his money, showing us an exciting conjugal setup in which capital can broker passion and vice versa. But it’s her growing refusal to accept the transactional nature of things that later leads to heartbreak.
Bleak as they are, what the two films get right is that the quixotic, lovey-dovey view of marriage spoon-fed through culture from Austen all the way into modern Hollywood is no longer satisfying. Boombox serenades and cheesy pickup lines, in this economy? Perhaps the best way out of the morass would be to reset the marital paradigm entirely.
Source photographs for illustration above: Alexander_DG/Shutterstock; Picture Partners/Shutterstock.
Amy X. Wang is a story editor at The New York Times Magazine.
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