She may even lay out her lifestyle philosophy on TikTok or Instagram: she wants a man who ‘delivers’, who pays for holidays, restaurants, the flat, handbags and hotels. She isn’t simply looking for a partner. Sometimes she’s looking for a certain standard of living.
And above all, she’s open about it.
Perhaps that’s what has changed.
For a long time, financial considerations in romantic relationships were hidden behind social conventions. Today, in certain digital spheres, it has almost become a statement of identity: ‘I know my worth’, ‘I don’t date a man who earns less than me’, ‘minimum six figures’, ‘princess treatment’.
Has women’s freedom, then, given rise to this strange paradox: wanting to be completely independent whilst claiming the right to be fully supported?
Of course, not all women think this way. The vast majority work, pay their bills and don’t spend their lives searching for a billionaire on Raya. To portray the ‘gold-digger’ as the epitome of the contemporary woman would be as caricatural as reducing men to chasers obsessed with twenty-year-old girls.
But the character does exist. And, above all, she has become extremely visible.
Social media has provided this age-old mindset with an extraordinary backdrop.
Private jets, luxury hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, watches, beaches in the Maldives, German cars, outrageously expensive handbags: a partner is no longer just a lover. They can become a means of social climbing and a status symbol.
In this image-driven economy, dating someone who is rich, famous or powerful carries added value: it generates content.
The relationship then becomes a CV.
And the lover, a social badge.
Research into romantic preferences has, in fact, long shown that economic status can play a role in partner choice. Some studies find that, on average, women place greater importance on a partner’s economic resources than men do. But recent research also emphasises the decisive influence of culture: these differences are neither absolute nor identical across different societies.
Even more interestingly, a study published in 2025 – which looked in particular at old French marriage advertisements – shows that in France and Canada, economic criteria had historically taken a back seat to personality-related criteria. In other words, the idea that we are naturally programmed to choose a wallet rather than a person is far too simplistic.
What may be changing today is not so much the desire for wealth as its constant display.
The problem arises when this economic preference turns into contempt.
When a man who earns a decent living becomes a ‘loser’.
When the employee, the struggling artist, the nurse, the teacher or the small business owner disappear from the radar because they cannot offer a trip to Dubai in business class.
When an individual’s worth ends up being conflated with their wealth.
For behind the very modern discourse on ‘standards’ and ‘personal worth’, something incredibly old-fashioned sometimes re-emerges: a man must provide the resources and a woman chooses the one who possesses the most.
It’s not really that revolutionary any more.
It’s actually rather 19th-century.
With a smartphone.
We must also look at the other side of the coin. Some wealthy men are fully involved in this market and are also seeking a transaction: their money and status in exchange for their partner’s youth, beauty, availability or physical prestige.
The fifty-five-year-old businessman who only wants to date twenty-five-year-old women is not exactly the innocent victim of the system.
He, too, is shopping around.
Thus arises a sort of sentimental capitalism perfectly suited to our times: she selects wealth, he selects looks, and yet both still claim to be looking for love.
This is probably where the phenomenon becomes interesting.
The ‘gold-digger’ may not simply be a mercenary woman. She is one of the characters in a world where absolutely everything has become quantifiable: number of followers, income, beauty, fame, connections, travel, clothes, restaurants, property value.
Even love ends up being subject to the logic of ranking.
How much do you earn?
Who do you know?
Where are you taking me?
What can you treat me to?
By constantly seeking to know one’s ‘worth’, we end up, above all, putting a price on everything.
Including people.
And perhaps it is this, far more than the ‘michtonneuses’ themselves, that constitutes the real scourge of our age.
