There is the widely-held belief that more money makes you more successful with women. I consider this a highly dubious claim. First, for hook-ups, the question of how thick your wallet is likely does not even enter the picture. Sure, if you’re operating at the level of a genuine hobo, the most chiseled abs most likely won’t help you. This is just common sense. Don’t be (too) poor, and your looks will do the trick. For serious and stable relationships, on the other hand, financial solidity is a prerequisite. In this day and age, the “system” encourages women to raise her kids all on her own, and if she has kids from multiple fathers, it’s no issue either because Daddy Government foots the bill. Yet, if you want to properly raise your children, you have to stick around and foot the bill. You need at the very least a steady, average income for that.

I would say that if you make more money, chances that you will have a hotter (and smarter) wife increase up to a certain point. Yet, as with so many things in life, diminishing returns kick in quickly. Also, if you wait too long to settle down, you will be less desirable because a guy ten years younger than you who has about the same amount of money will, ceteris paribus, likely be more attractive to an attractive woman. I think if you, as a guy, settle down in your 20s, you are making a big mistake. Wait until you hit your financial stride, maybe get a solid promotion or two, and then start a family. Most people hit their financial plateau at around 40. The difference between what you make at 25 versus 35 can be quite substantial. Afterwards, meaningful promotions are not easy to get, so it may well be that your income at 45 is only marginally higher than it was ten years ago. So, get to that financial plateau, which may or may not be one, and make a move.

I think that most of us can agree on the previous paragraph, but now let’s take a turn towards an extreme. One of the bigger illusions of the self-help community, besides the belief that every loser will bang top models with “game” is that every loser will make millions with some harebrained scheme online. Money is the carrot that makes those people spend ludicrous amounts of money on seminars that are taught by people who are making money by giving seminars in which they tell others how to make money. A fool and his money are easily parted, as the saying goes. Stable is not good enough. You have to be a millionaire or even billionaire. It’s about big bucks, baby!

But then do some research and be amazed. The smarmy former CEO of Google and billionaire, Eric Schmidt, was spotted on Burning Man a couple years ago. He had his sexy mistress in tow. Schmidt is an old and unattractive dude. Even when he was young he wasn’t much of a looker. His chick was a wrinkly hag, roughly his age. You could pick up a woman of similar caliber at your local dive bar without trying. Or think of Jeff Bezos: He has more money than God, and, seemingly, the best he can get is a 50-year old actress. Admittedly, she looks pretty good for her age, thanks to copious amounts of cosmetic surgery and photoshopping. I don’t want to sound too pompous, but, in absolute terms, those women are nothing to write home about. Any guy banging a cute woman in her 20s would not trade with those billionaires. Then there are guys like Bill Gates who married an utterly plain woman. I can’t even imagine that any guy would walk past Melinda Gates, no matter in which year, and think, “Man, I got to hit that!” She’s a solid 4/10. You almost wonder what the point of getting rich is. (Oh, right, for Gates it’s about combatting malaria and hunger in Africa so that those people can multiple in ever-greater number and flood into Europe.)

The more I think about it, the more it seems that the compensatory effect of money has a low upper bound. Schmidt is a pretty ugly dude. Bezos, even the buff iteration, is not much of a looker either. He’s short and pretty unattractive. Among their crowd, others fare better. The founder and CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison, had a reputation for banging top models and got married four times over the years, successively replacing his partner with a new model, pun intended. Ellison is pretty good-looking. Yet, I would say that he could have done similarly well with a bit less money.

It’s a fun game to pull up pictures of high-powered CEOs and speculate about how well they would do with the opposite sex. The Indian dude running Google today probably has a net-worth of dozens of millions of dollars. When you watch footage of him, you get the impression that he’s a meek and unconfrontational character, on top of being relatively unattractive. I bet he would strike out against a mere millionaire with decent looks nine out of ten times. The point of all this is that the more I think about the importance of looks as opposed to money, the more it seems that looks win out, almost regardless of money.

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