Dating down the wealth ladder

Dating down the wealth ladder is a much more difficult issue for guys vs girls, but the same problem that faces rich guys also faces rich girls, to a lesser extent.

The major problem for dating when there is a significant amount of wealth involved is that the wealth introduces a new motive for pursuers of the rich to date the rich, and it's obviously dating/marrying for the money. A rich person, if they were smart, would always have that worry at the back of their minds: "Is this person dating me because they love me, or because they love my money?" It makes choosing potential mates very tricky, because sometimes people are very hard to read, and you may not find out their true motives until it's too late.

I've heard stories of people undergoing brutal, life shattering divorces. It's usually the wife who married into the rich husband's family. The wife marries the guy, has a kid or two, and divorces the guy a couple of years later, and takes half his fortune. The worst part, is that for some of these cases, the woman also takes away the kids as well. A prime example would be what happened to Jordan Belfort in Wolf on Wallstreet. I can't remember if Jordan had half his fortune ripped away from him, but he certainly lost custody of his kid. Maybe his cocaine addiction had something to do with the loss of custody, but others may lose custody of their kids regardless if they had done anything wrong to being with. It could simply be a matter of the father working 14 hours a day, providing for the family, only to have the judge rule the father unfit to care for the children do to his excessive work hours, which of course, the father puts in for the sake of the family. I had a coworker tell me of his friend, who was uber rich in Vietnam. Owned 3 houses, and I think he was a doctor, or some other respectable profession. This person not only had a bad divorce once, but twice. In the end, he was forced to live in a garage, and work as a mechanic. I don't know why he couldn't keep his old job though. Maybe the story was embellished, but it still serves to make a point on how rich people have to be careful of the gold diggers.

For us not so wealthy folks, we don't have as much worry as the rich. I mean, even if it goes to divorce and everything gets split, what's the worst that can happen? I lose my $400k house? It sucks, for sure, but it won't exactly end you, like losing a couple of million dollars. Since gold diggers set their sights on people of far greater wealth than you or I, we should be safe from most of the cutthroat gold diggers.

So all this was geared towards the rich guy. The rich girl... I don't think I have enough experience to talk about them. They are a mysterious breed to me. I would think as a guy, we'd be too proud to be gold diggers and marry for the money. But then again, there is an entire spectrum of doucheness in their world, and I don't doubt there are guys just itching to divorce their rich wives for the money. Heck, there are probably guys out there who married 80+ year old women for the money, and just waiting for them to die.

All in all, I'm sort of glad that most of my relationships are going to be lateral across the wealth ladder, or up. It's pretty hard to date down the ladder when you're already near the bottom of the rung. Also, the thing with being at the bottom of the rung is, there is nowhere to go but up.