I lean red in a lot of ways, but this one sort of baffles me. I'm constantly hearing from TRP that women place an extremely high degree of importance on a man's income, which is simply not something I see in the wild. I'd like to hear from both pills to help me make up my mind about whether my experience is an outlier or if TRP really is getting this one wrong.

For reference, I am 27, female, fairly poor (although my family background is firmly middle class), and currently live in the southwest United States, although I've lived in many other places, so my experience has been fairly diverse in a geographical sense.

I have literally never once heard a female friend or acquaintance gush over a man's income. His looks, definitely. His personality, obviously. Intelligence, yup. His "masculine" occupation, yeah, occasionally (stuff like construction worker or brick layer usually). I personally don't really care at all how much money a guy makes as long as he can support himself - or actually, I might go so far as to say I'd prefer he didn't make any enormous sums because relationships seem to work out better when both partners are in more or less the same economic class.

I will concede the following:

-Some women care greatly about money. Gold diggers and sugar babies obviously exist.

-In the past, women needed to care about their potential husband's finances to a much greater degree due to the expectation that he would likely be supporting the family solely on his income.

-Women on the whole care more about their partner's income than men do.

The idea I would like to see explored in this thread is that most or even every woman is highly concerned about her bf/husband's income. I would also like to see how both sides feel about the notion that for most or every woman, a potential partner can offset undesirable traits (lack of physical attractiveness, stiff personality, whatever) with a high income. This has definitely not been my experience.

TL;DR: I have a hard time believing that women in general care as much about a partner's money as TRP claims, in large part because I don't care about it at all and none of my female friends appear to either. Are we outliers? Are we deceiving ourselves and don't actually know what we want? Or is TRP actually mistaken about how important money is as a factor for men in the SMP?