Jane’s first clue that her new boyfriend was rich was the swimming pool at his family home. Her second clue was the other pool indoors. Jane met Tim at university in the mid-80s. She had heard whispers that his father was a celebrity, but she didn’t recognise the name.

“I was completely oblivious,” says Jane, now 57. As she and Tim continued spending time together, their differences emerged, along with their similarities. They had both been privately educated but, while Jane had had a subsidised place, Tim talked about going on family skiing holidays and having a boat.

“It didn’t make me like him more – I wasn’t looking for any of that – but it didn’t intimidate me, either,” Jane says. That changed when, after six weeks of dating, Tim invited her to his family home. Though he had described it to her, it had to be seen to be believed, “like something you’d see on Grand Designs”, she says.

It had those pools and a tennis court, and was filled throughout with artworks and wine racks brimming over with bottles of champagne. That was when Jane started to feel uneasy. “I wasn’t used to people having those sorts of resources,” she says.

These days, she shares them: Jane and Tim have been married 30 years and have four children together. It should go without saying that theirs was a love match. But the difference this quirk of fate has made to Jane’s life can’t be overstated.

Marrying into money has long been considered a stroke of good luck, if not actively aspirational. But, in modern Britain, it increasingly means the difference between surviving and thriving. In recent decades, wealth has been rising faster than incomes, worsening social mobility. Those with assets (typically properties and pensions) have seen them increase in value, while those without are finding it harder to earn and save their way to financial security. Last year the Institute for Fiscal Studies concluded that it was “harder now than at any point in over half a century” for Britons to become richer than their parents.

With wages stagnant and house prices and living costs rising sharply, if you don’t come from a wealthy family, your best shot at changing your circumstances now is to marry into money. “You can’t choose your parents,” says Molly Broome, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, which studies inequality, “” It’s no coincidence that “looking for a man in finance” is increasingly being talked about on social media – jokingly or otherwise – as a financial strategy. “It’s one way of improving your circumstances: you’re more likely to shoot up the income and wealth scales by marrying than by working hard,” says Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at the University of Oxford. “Of course,” he adds, “that doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy.”

Vast differences in income and savings can put serious stress on a partnership, and serve as a lightning rod for many of our tightly held beliefs about money, power, gender and class. We might see marrying rich – finding love and money – as hitting the jackpot. But how does such a fundamental disparity affect a relationship, and what are the hidden costs of wealth-gap relationships?

Wealth is about more Wealth is about more than just salary. Paul, an academic and consultant, earns about £90,000 a year, putting him well above the median gross annual earnings in the UK of about £35,000 a year. His partner, Esme, earns about half that in management. On the face of it, it’s a sizeable gap, with Paul the major breadwinner for Esme and their young child. But not only does Esme own the London flat they share, mortgage free, she stands to inherit more than £800,000 from her parents, and a house.

“No amount of money I will make in my lifetime will ever match what she’s going to get,” Paul says. But, while neither of them are inclined to be flashy with money, Esme is even more low-key than he is. She has no taste for luxury labels and doesn’t even own a car. “There’s nothing, when you talk to her, to make you realise that she has the money she has,” Paul says.

His first clue was Esme’s confidence on the slopes: she taught Paul to ski soon after they got together, on holidays with her family. The disparity between them is eased by their “similar expectations”, Paul says. They split bills and childcare costs equally; he also pays Esme £7,500 a year in rent (the maximum permitted tax-free). For London, that’s cheap, he points out.

But the biggest impact of Esme’s wealth on their relationship is ensuring their mutual freedom, Paul says. “She is financially independent: she doesn’t need me.” That relieves some common relationship stresses, he continues: “If you think about even our parents’ generation, it would be common for the woman to put up with the mistakes of the husband … simply because of financial needs.”

Not all wealth gaps are experienced so evenly. While marrying rich relieves some pressures, it can create different ones. Even after 30 years of marriage, Jane still feels uncomfortable about her husband’s wealth. “I can’t accept that I’m in the same position as him,” she says. She defaults to “being quite prudent and sensible with money”, reflecting how she was brought up. But her ambivalent feelings about her position strike deeper. For years, Jane refused to open a joint account, even though her own meagre salary was swallowed by household and childcare costs. “I’d stress about going overdrawn, then Tim would say, ‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’” But it made Jane feel horrible “to ask for a handout”, she says, despite Tim’s continual reassurances. “He’s like, ‘Don’t be silly, it’s our money’ – but it’s never, ever felt like ‘our money’.”

It helps that he is somewhat awkward about the subject, too, she says. Tim was already a teenager when his family came into money, so “they had known different”, Jane says. “I think that’s what made it work, really.”

While some of their friends actively manage their money, and try to grow it, Tim avoids even opening emails from the bank. That suits Jane, she says. “I think we’re both just kind of in denial about the money – which, of course, is the luxury of having it.”

Finances tend to influence our intimate relationships whether they are talked about directly or not. “My partner and I have a healthy relationship, but there is still a power dynamic: you can’t ignore that,” says Pamela, 47. “Money creates a power dynamic.”

As a top lawyer, she has always earned “significantly more” than her partner, Lucas, 53, an academic. When they met 15 or so years ago, there was already a six‑figure gap between them. Now Lucas earns about £20,000 a year, working part-time, while Pamela, a partner at her firm, brings in about £2m. “It’s a bit ridiculous,” she says. “I still can’t get my head around the amounts, let alone the gap between us.”

But, Pamela says, it’s never posed a problem within her relationship. “Both of us feel professionally satisfied and successful: I think that’s probably why we’re still together.” She also credits Lucas’s “pretty unique” sense of self. Before they met, Pamela struggled to meet men who weren’t threatened by her success. Some tried to compete with her, she says; others felt redundant in the relationship, like “they were just my handbag”. “It really irritated me. I just thought, ‘Why can’t I find a guy who is comfortable in himself, who doesn’t need to be bigger than me?’”

Lucas wasn’t fazed by Pamela’s workaholism, or her money. “It was very refreshing,” she says. They only had their first transparent conversation about finances when they were expecting their first child, years into their relationship.

Now their finances are structured evenly, with shared accounts and equal legal stakes in their property and investments. “The lawyers always pull me aside and say, ‘Are you sure?’” Pamela says, laughing. But, if anything, being the higher earner focuses her mind on fairness. “He’s an independent guy – that’s not what’s keeping him,” she says.

Pamela’s demanding job means Lucas takes the lead in parenting their two children: itself a valuable contribution, she points out, and one she strives to recognise as equal to her own. It’s one way in which a “female breadwinner” creates a different dynamic, Pamela suggests. “You perhaps have a slightly different perspective on what you should be giving your partner, as in: they need a life outside the home.”

Every parent needs that, she agrees, “but I’m not sure everyone gets it”. A lot of her high-earning male peers take advantage of their wives’ financial dependence, “and assume they will not walk away”, Pamela says. Some are having affairs, or have a string of failed marriages behind them. “They get bored; it’s not the level of respect you’d hope for.” Plus, Pamela adds, sometimes “they expect a lot in return, like dinner on the table when they walk through the front door”. She and Lucas tend to order in, she adds, laughing. “The expectations are definitely different.”

But while the two of them might be at ease with their relative contributions, they don’t escape those gendered judgments. As a female breadwinner, “you’ve got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable”, Pamela says. Other mothers who are supported by their husbands to stay home are often “utterly baffled” by her passion for work: “They will ask quite sharp questions, ‘But why would you want to?’ It’s harder to build female friendship groups when you’re the odd one out.”

At her workplace get-togethers, Pamela finds herself gathered around the grill with the other breadwinners, most of them male. Lucas, meanwhile, gets treated as “a curiosity piece”, as the rare man who is content to earn less than his wife – and even openly mocked. “He gets more of the derision than I do, definitely,” Pamela says. “But I’d place a large bet on my partner not feeling emasculated at all.”

It speaks to both the cultural fascination with wealth-gap relationships and the peculiar tensions and challenges that individuals within them have to navigate. Even smaller disparities have to be proactively managed, against ever-increasing economic pressures, to avoid resentment.

“You’ve got to be a team,” says Susan, 45. She met her now-husband Richard at university in the late 90s: he was studying pharmacy and she was doing a multimedia degree. Back then, says Richard, 48, “I thought she would end up earning more than me.” But a few years later, his salary was steadily going up and Susan’s IT career had stalled. “Right from the get-go, I sort of stumbled,” she says.

After their first child was born, in 2011, the couple agreed that Susan would return to work part-time. Today, she does three days a week in an administration role, bringing in about £16,000 a year to Richard’s £80,000. It helps that they have a similar “careful” attitude to money, Richard says, shaped by their parents’ financial struggles when they were growing up.

Susan agrees. “You can’t have one side of the partnership wanting to live a different lifestyle … That’s one of the big deciding factors in how successful you can be, with a wage gap like this.”

They pool their income in a joint account, split bills proportionally, according to what they earn, and approach financial decisions together. At the same time, Susan adds, “I am conscious of the fact that he is contributing a lot more.” Her failure to launch her career affected her feelings of self-worth as well as her earning potential, Susan says. “It was hard to deal with … When your partner’s climbing pay grades, you feel like you’ve been left behind.” She can also feel vulnerable, relying on Richard’s salary. The worst-case scenarios prey on her mind, she says: “If something terrible happens, am I going to be OK?”

Those fears influenced Susan’s decision to continue working part-time, though her earnings don’t go far. When their youngest child, now nine, starts secondary school, she is thinking of increasing her hours, “for a bit more security”. It’s not that she has particular personal concerns, Susan adds. “But we hear so many stories: ‘Don’t be financially dependent on someone’ … I’ve just thought, if I drop out of the workforce, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get back in.”

In today’s perilous economic conditions, a highly paid partner has come to represent a stability that is otherwise hard to achieve. As the TikTok earworm goes, “I’m looking for a man in finance: trust fund, 6ft 5in, blue eyes.”

The song, by 27-year-old New Yorker Megan Boni, went viral in April, and has had more than 58m views and an official remix by French DJ David Guetta. Boni has said her intent was satirical – but the sentiment struck a chord with young women seeking a shortcut to a “soft life”.

On social media, videos abound with advice on “where to find a rich man” (financial districts, hotel bars, fine restaurants). One American influencer visiting London posted a TikTok video of her “husband hunting” around Westminster, zooming in on pubs spilling over with men in chinos: “Go find u a Mr Darcy.”

The parallels with Jane Austen’s time, when marriage was inextricable from security, aren’t just anecdotal. “The reason those 19th-century novels were so much about who married whom, and who inherited what, was because that was the last time wealth was really important, relative to income,” says Torsten Bell, Labour MP for Swansea West (and former chief executive of the Resolution Foundation). “That might have made for good novels – but it doesn’t make for a fair society.”

Most of the online discourse about “how to marry rich” is tongue-in-cheek as young women blow off steam. But it has been accompanied by the unsettling rise of female influencers such as Shera Seven (real name Leticia Padua), advising in earnest on how to snag a wealthy mate.

Jilly Kay, a senior lecturer in communication and media at Loughborough University, who has been studying these “female dating strategists”, says many frame their advice as empowering and even feminist. “There’s a recognition that there is wealth inequality, that upwards mobility through work is a lie … but there is absolutely no sense that this is something that could be transformed on a collective scale,” Kay says. “The only thing you can do is play the game as an individual, using these traditional feminine attributes.”

To Kay, it reflects a “deep fatalism” about growing financial precarity and heterosexual romance. “It’s about grasping at the one thing that could quite quickly transform your social standing.”

But security and relationship satisfaction, even love, don’t have to be mutually exclusive, says Karla Elia, a content creator and “dating coach” with nearly 1 million followers on TikTok. In her videos and private coaching, she instructs women how to meet – and, hopefully, marry – a “provider man” who is intrinsically motivated to take care of his family.

Relative to some of the influencers described by Kay, this makes Elia a romantic. Her content combines elements of manifesting (claiming that it is possible to achieve “abundance” through the power of the mind), dating advice and financial planning to advise women how (and who) to marry for maximum reward. Elia, 25, from California, says her followers are highly educated, professional, “high-value” women who want children without the unequal division of labour they saw growing up. “We’re tired of being undervalued and underappreciated. That’s where my content steps in.”

Elia says she doesn’t work with clients whose only criteria for a partner is that they are rich, “because that’s very, very unhealthy”. (Plus, she adds, he might be cheap.) More important, Elia goes on, is finding someone who is motivated to increase his earnings and support his partner’s financial goals. “I personally could never be with someone who doesn’t make either as much money as me, or more,” she says.

It’s not because earning less makes him less of a man, Elia adds; it’s about making the most of their ability to build wealth as a couple. “If I can provide a specific lifestyle for myself, and you’re not adding to that … then what is the point? And my husband knows this,” she adds.

Elia met her husband on the dating app Bumble in 2021 and they married soon after. When they met, he was in the military; he is changing careers to one that’s more lucrative, Elia says. Eventually, she hopes to be able to wind back her online business and start a family – but she intends for that contribution to be recognised.

“It’s a sacrifice that the woman makes, to stay home,” Elia says. With her clients, “I always advise them to have an exit strategy, to make sure that the husband is either compensating them or investing in their savings.” She acknowledges that people find her mix of feminist and traditional values confusing. “I think it’s this new wave of feminism,” she says, “of having options.”

The current economic pressures are already influencing our relationships, well beyond our choice of partner. Many people feel stuck cohabiting with partners they can’t afford to leave. Housing and childcare costs are also influencing couples’ decisions to delay or forgo children. Becoming a mother today is estimated to cost women £70,000 in wages in the decade that follows.

Against such a brutal backdrop, the economic importance of a partner – someone to split the bills or save for a deposit with – can’t be overstated. If they are rich, well, so much the better. But the odds may be against you, Dorling warns: “The bigger the inequalities are in your society, the less the opportunity is to meet somebody further away from your world.”

It’s because of the vast and growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in Britain that wealth‑gap relationships are looming so large, he adds. “In somewhere like France or Finland, if you enter the higher part of society, you’re not going to be that much better off.”

The Resolution Foundation is calling for tax reforms and changes to pensions and inheritance, to reflect the large increase in wealth and spread the benefits. But, for the moment, it’s a truth universally acknowledged: if you’re not in possession of a good fortune yourself, you’ll benefit from a partner who is.

Jane, who married into money by chance, is very aware of how unfair it can seem – because of who she happened to fall in love with as a teenager, her children will have options others don’t. “That’s a huge feeling for me: just the injustice of it all,” she says. “How is it OK that we live in a world where there’s so little opportunity – yet some people are going to be OK, just because?”

She tries to be mindful of her good fortune, treating her school friends when they go out. “It’s just less for me than it is for them,” Jane says.

They used to know her as the friend who was always broke; now they tease her about having married Tim for his money. Jane is both amused – and mortified. “It’s just a big joke – because everyone knows that I kind of married him in spite of it.”

Some names and identifying details have been changed.