Who Wants a ‘Man in Finance’? (2024)

This year’s “Song of the Summer” is highly contested; artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX, and Sabrina Carpenter have been duking it out at the top of the charts. But an unexpected hit has emerged from TikTok. You may have heard it yourself:

“I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. Six-five. Blue eyes.” Repeat, until the man himself appears—or the ghost of Andrea Dworkin rises up to roll her eyes.

Megan Boni, a video creator also known as Girl on Couch, shared the sample in April with a prescient caption: “Did I just write the song of the summer?” Her 19-second clip has gone on to collect nearly 60 million views and inspire hundreds of parodies and remixes—including by music-industry superstars such as Diplo and David Guetta. Investment-banker bros have played it at parties across New York. Costumed dancers (in the requisite banker uniform of a blue button-down and zippered vest) have performed it in flash mobs around London. “Man in Finance” even slipped into the Kamala Harris meme rotation as the presidential candidate’s supporters attempted to identify her ideal running mate.

In interviews, Boni has said that she made the song to poke fun at daters with extreme standards for potential partners. But whether or not it’s actually tongue in cheek, “Man in Finance” has taken off for a good reason. Its lyrics encapsulate two of the biggest trends at the core of modern heterosexual dating: the passing of the girlboss era and the unexpected return of vintage gender norms.

Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’

Economics have always played a major role in how people form relationships. But in modern dating, pure romance is usually the priority: Talking openly about one’s plans to marry rich is seen as outdated at best. Yet members of Gen Z (Boni herself is 27) tend to be more open about their desire for financial security and seem less opposed to what used to be called “selling out.” It’s a mindset exemplified by the fascination with “quiet luxury” and “old money” aesthetics, alongside a recent profusion in snag-a-rich-guy dating advice shared on social media.

Jess Carbino, a former sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told me that this craving for stability “points to a sort of exhaustion” in how many young people view their own prospects for building a career and a home life. They’re overwhelmed by “the general impossibility of fashioning an American dream in the same way of their parents and grandparents,” Carbino said. This sentiment reflects a lack of faith in traditional modes of advancement such as work and education, and, for women, perhaps even in established feminist values of self-sufficiency. Why climb a greasy career ladder (which may be missing the rungs at the top) when you can take a 6-foot-5 elevator to a life of luxury?

Millennial women came of age amid the popularity of Lean In, which argued that they could find joy in working hard to have it all, in the boardroom and in their personal lives. Nowadays, you are more likely to see references on social media to the “soft life” trend, which is an outright rejection of girlboss aspiration, reframing the concept of “success” to prioritize rest and relaxation over hustle. The current “tradwife” movement can be seen as another manifestation of the anti–Lean In backlash, celebrating women who reject paid labor outside the home to focus instead on running idyllic households. The new “dream of feminine leisure,” as Monica Hesse called it in The Washington Post, is traveling abroad, cooking from scratch, and maintaining an elaborate fitness and beauty routine (or perhaps a picturesque homestead, like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, the latest object of farm-to-table controversy) instead of trundling into the office every day.

Of course, someone will be needed to underwrite that lifestyle, which is where Mr. “6-5, blue eyes” comes in. The problem is that he isn’t as easy to locate as an aspiring tradwife might want to believe. According to statistics from the Department of Labor, roughly 5 percent of American men work in “business and financial operations occupations.” Trust funds are rarer—fewer than 2 percent of Americans reported having one in 2010’s Survey of Consumer Finances, although that number has likely grown since. Boni’s “Man in Finance” would be a comically rare find.

Read: What would society look like if extreme wealth were impossible?

But that meme, however exaggerated, points to another factor complicating the desires of many daters today: Ongoing shifts in the labor market and patterns of educational attainment mean that, for a certain segment of high-achieving, well-off young women, finding men who meet, let alone wildly exceed, their economic standards is becoming ever more difficult. In several major metropolitan areas, including New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., according to Pew Research, young women are outearning men—even as the traditional norm of men as providers in relationships persists, whether in social-media discourse or in the single-income household laid out as ideal by right-wing politicians. Meanwhile, the tools people use to date may be moving expectations in the opposite direction from reality. As Boni herself pointed out in an interview with the BBC, “Dating apps are making dating so much more impossible because they’re really raising everyone’s standards” by creating the illusion of infinite choice.

Social media tends to highlight the surface attributes of romantic relationships (stunning looks, displays of wealth, over-the-top gestures), causing people to overlook the subtler qualities (communication, kindness, commitment) that make real partnerships work. For inexperienced daters, the online world may be distorting their understanding of what kinds of matches are actually possible—or tricking them into devaluing their own achievements and independence in favor of a lifestyle that may not be sustainable.

Of course, having high standards isn’t unreasonable. And the ones the “Man in Finance” song points to are, in reality, quite fair when stripped of hyperbole. “You want to date someone who’s economically stable, and you want to date somebody who’s attractive to you,” Carbino told me. “Those are good things to hope for.” For all the dissatisfaction within today’s dating market, that’s still achievable. You might just have to wait for Hot Finance Summer to turn into Normal Relationship Fall.