2025’s film Materialists hinged on a question that is supposed to be romantic but is actually economic: would you choose the rich man who looks perfect on paper, or the broke man you actually love? The protagonist, a professional matchmaker for wealthy New Yorkers, spends her days optimizing other people’s romantic portfolios (height, income, pedigree, future earning potential) only to discover that her own heart is not so easily aligned with market logic. For as much as the movie plays as a love triangle, it is really a story about class sorting.
Outside the theater, most people don’t experience this as a dramatic dilemma because the decision has already been made in advance under the guise of “standards.”
In 2024, I joined a progressive church in Austin, the kind where people use phrases like “late stage capitalism” in casual conversation and no one bats an eye if you say you’re reading abolitionist theory for fun. Recently among my church peers, the topic of household finances came up and I mentioned, offhandedly, that my boyfriend and I don’t split living expenses 50/50.
“So your boyfriend’s a freeloader?” someone replied.
Reader, I shit you not: the woman who asked me this is a software developer making six figures and whose parents still Venmo her her mortgage payment every month.
I wish I could say this was a one-off moment of breathtaking irony, but it wasn’t: I am surrounded by progressive, anti-capitalist people who are materially supported by family wealth, higher-earning partners, or both — arrangements treated as normal, even prudent. Dating, it turns out, is one of the last places where otherwise egalitarian people feel perfectly comfortable being small-c conservative.
In a sea of friends and acquaintances alike with their pronouns listed in their bios and masked protest selfies featuring prominently on the grid, I have found myself (perhaps naively) taken aback by how openly some people on the left articulate class filters for partners while maintaining a self-image of radical egalitarianism. I have heard variations of the same rule many times, often from people who identify as progressive or socialist: must have a four-year degree, must be “ambitious,” must have a professional career.
On paper, these preferences sound practical. In reality, they function as a sorting mechanism that maps almost perfectly onto existing inequalities. In the United States, education and income are not evenly distributed by race, class background, or gender. Filtering for credentials or professional status disproportionately excludes people who have already been excluded from opportunity, especially Black men.
As an Afro-Latina, I prioritize dating Black men as a political choice. In a world structured by anti-Blackness — what Christina Sharpe calls the “weather” of white supremacy — loving Blackness intimately feels like both resistance and self-regard. It is not the only valid choice, but it is mine. If the world is determined to devalue Black life, choosing Black partnership feels like a refusal to collaborate.
That choice also means accepting statistical reality: structural inequality means that, on average, Black men are less likely to hold college degrees or occupy white-collar jobs, not because of lack of ability or ambition, but because of uneven access to education, employment discrimination, criminalization, and wealth gaps that compound across generations. A decision to only date college-educated professionals is not technically banning Black men from your dating pool but it does make their inclusion unlikely enough to be negligible. I have dated men who did not finish college or who work outside the white-collar sphere. None of them were projects. None of them were dependents. They were adults navigating an unequal economy with the tools available to them. None of them lacked intelligence, emotional depth, humor, or integrity. What they lacked was the credentialing pipeline that signals respectability to the middle class.
Manual labor, service work, gig work — these are treated as evidence of insufficient ambition rather than as necessary labor in an economy that depends on them. Meanwhile, ambition that looks like climbing a corporate ladder is coded as virtue, even if it produces nothing of tangible value beyond shareholder returns. We progressives claim to respect “the working class” in the abstract while avoiding them in practice, especially when intimacy is on the table.
This is to say nothing of the fact that many working-class people demonstrate forms of ambition that are invisible to professional-class eyes: supporting extended family, navigating precarious employment, acquiring skills outside formal institutions, surviving systems designed to grind them down. These do not show up on LinkedIn, so they do not count.
Which is to acknowledge that class difference makes people nervous, especially when it intersects with gender. Many people, including those capable of delivering a flawless critique of patriarchy, still believe men should earn more than their partners. When they don’t, the relationship starts to look illegitimate, like something is upside down. When I make more than my partner, insisting on splitting expenses exactly 50/50 feels less like fairness and more like ideological theater. If income is unequal, equal contributions are not actually equal. In my current relationship, we don’t go dutch on living costs: I pay more because I earn more. To me, anything else would be unethical.
This is where the conversation usually derails into “people are allowed to have preferences.” Of course they are. No one is obligated to date anyone. Safety, compatibility, and shared values matter. But preferences do not emerge in a vacuum, and when millions of people share the same ones, they produce social outcomes. We would never argue that housing discrimination or hiring bias stops mattering because each individual decision is personal. Why should romantic exclusion be immune from scrutiny?
Dating across class lines is not always easy. It can require uncomfortable conversations about money, status anxiety, and different life trajectories. It can mean confronting your own assumptions about success. It can also be deeply clarifying. You learn quickly whether your politics are aesthetic or operative and whether the people around you are invested in your partner as a person (versus who is more interested in what your partner signals about you).
What I have learned is this: many people are perfectly happy to advocate for economic justice as long as it remains theoretical. Redistribution sounds noble until it shows up in your living room. Solidarity is easy at a rally; it is harder when it affects who you bring to brunch.
Materialists frames the choice between wealth and love as a dramatic exception. In real life, many of us never allow that choice to arise at all; we pre-filter our lives so thoroughly that only one kind of partner ever makes it through.
None of this means anyone should force attraction or treat dating as charity. It is an argument for intellectual honesty: if your politics center dignity across class lines, it is worth asking whether your romantic life quietly contradicts that belief. Who gets ruled out before you even know them? What signals of respectability are you mistaking for character? And why does the prospect of “dating down” feel more threatening than the reality of inequality itself?
Love will not overthrow capitalism. But intimate life is one of the places where hierarchy either calcifies or softens. If nothing else, it reveals what we actually believe about other people’s worth when no one is grading us on ideological purity. If there is a call to action here, it is not “date someone poorer than you.” It is simpler and harder than that: interrogate your filters. The literal ones on apps, sure, but more importantly the invisible ones in your head. Notice which kinds of work you instinctively respect and which you dismiss. Pay attention to whether your idea of compatibility is actually just class familiarity. Otherwise, you may discover that your politics stop at the bedroom door and that the revolution will not be coupled.
subvert and worship 
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