The Great Divide: How Economic Class Determines Relationship Success

“There is no war but the class war,” states James Sexton emphatically in his Soft White Underbelly interview. After 25 years representing both ultra-wealthy and middle-class clients in divorce proceedings, this New York attorney has witnessed firsthand how economic class in relationships determines outcomes far more than race, gender, or any other factor we discuss publicly.

His conclusion is stark: “Class is almost everything. We’re in late capitalism. This is about money. Everything’s about rich and poor right now.”

The Uncomfortable Truth About Wealth and Relationships

While society focuses on culture wars around gender, race, and identity, Sexton argues these conflicts distract from the real divide: wealth inequality in marriage.

“The person who’s part of a traditionally disenfranchised group and has money is way better off than the person who is white, heterosexual, cisgender, male, and broke,” he observes. “Wealth is everything.”

This isn’t a comfortable message. We prefer to believe love transcends economics, that genuine connection matters more than bank accounts. But Sexton’s decades of experience watching marriages dissolve tell a different story.

What Ultra-Wealthy Clients Reveal

Sexton represents billionaires—”worth billions with a B”—and sees their massive advantages up close.

“They have an incredibly unfair advantage,” he states without equivocation. “It’s amazing the disparity that wealth creates.”

Buying Your Way Out of Everything

“There’s so many things you can buy your way out of. It’s shocking to me,” Sexton reflects. “So many problems that can be solved by money.”

While core problems like mortality can’t be purchased away, “even those can be improved. If you have cancer, you can’t buy not having cancer, but holy shit can you buy amazing treatment.”

Wealthy individuals in divorce can afford:

• The best legal representation
• Private investigators
• Forensic accountants
• Expert witnesses
• Appeals and extended litigation

Meanwhile, middle-class clients often settle disadvantageously simply because they can’t afford to fight.

The Tax Advantage

Perhaps most galling: “I have clients who are worth billions with a B and pay less taxes than the guy who mows my lawn.”

The American tax system heavily favors wealth. Capital gains receive preferential treatment. Complex trusts and structures shield assets. Entire law firms exist solely to minimize wealthy people’s tax obligations.

For relationships, this creates enormous power imbalances. A wealthy spouse can access resources a middle-class spouse cannot even imagine.

How Class Warfare Plays Out in Divorce

The impact of economic inequality in divorce proceedings is comprehensive and brutal.

Legal Representation Quality

“Most people get as much justice as they can afford,” Sexton explains. “If you have a good lawyer, you have an incredibly unfair advantage. If you can hire apt counsel.”

A wealthy spouse can retain Sexton or attorneys of his caliber. Their less wealthy spouse might use a general practitioner or represent themselves.

The outcome disparity is massive. Skilled divorce attorneys know every loophole, strategy, and pressure point. They can extend proceedings until the less-wealthy spouse exhausts their resources and must settle.

Asset Hiding

Ultra-wealthy clients have sophisticated methods to hide assets:

• Offshore accounts
• Complex trust structures
• Shell corporations
• Cryptocurrency holdings
• Art and collectibles

Uncovering these requires expensive forensic accounting. Middle-class spouses often lack the funds to pay for such investigations, meaning wealthy partners successfully hide significant assets.

Lifestyle Maintenance

In many jurisdictions, spousal support calculations consider “lifestyle during marriage.” But wealthy people can manipulate apparent lifestyle.

One spouse maintains an understated appearance while hiding wealth. The other spouse becomes accustomed to a lavish lifestyle they can’t maintain post-divorce without substantial support.

Wealthy divorcees can deploy experts to argue their lifestyle was actually modest despite evidence to the contrary. Less wealthy spouses can’t afford equivalent expert witnesses.

The Two Americas of Relationships

Sexton’s practice reveals two entirely different relationship realities based on economic class.

The Ultra-Wealthy Experience

For billionaires and multi-millionaires:

Dating is transactional. Young, attractive women (or men) explicitly trade beauty and companionship for access to wealth and experiences. Both sides understand the arrangement.

Marriage includes prenuptial agreements. Wealthy people protect assets before marriage through comprehensive legal frameworks.

Divorce is inconvenient, not devastating. While expensive, divorce doesn’t threaten their lifestyle or future. They remain wealthy afterward.

Children are insulated. Even in contentious divorces, wealthy children maintain stability through private schools, trust funds, and continued access to opportunities.

The Middle-Class Experience

For everyone else:

Dating involves genuine uncertainty. Without vast resources, people must assess actual compatibility rather than trading clear currencies.

Marriage changes everything legally. Middle-class couples often forgo prenuptial agreements, making divorce financially catastrophic.

Divorce devastates finances. Splitting household income across two residences often means both parties suffer significant lifestyle decline.

Children experience instability. Custody battles, moving between homes, and reduced resources create lasting impacts.

Why We Don’t Talk About Class

Despite class being “almost everything,” it’s rarely discussed honestly. Sexton explains why:

“It’s not in anyone’s—certainly not in the government or mainstream media’s interest—to tell us that. It’s better to tell us that the problem is who’s using what restroom or the problem is [other culture war issues].”

The Distraction Machine

“We would rather they have us fighting culture wars with each other than all getting together and going, ‘Hey, you know what? We should all have basic affordable healthcare,'” Sexton argues.

Gender wars, race discussions, and identity politics—while sometimes addressing real issues—also serve to prevent class solidarity. If poor white men and poor women of color recognize their common economic interests, they might organize collectively against the wealthy.

Instead, media focuses on hot-button social issues while economic inequality grows.

The False Dichotomy

When Sexton raises economic justice issues, critics often respond with: “Oh, you want to live in a socialized society where everybody’s got the same?”

His response uses airplane seating as metaphor: “There’s economy, then there’s business class, then there’s first class. I haven’t flown economy in a long time. First class is amazing. Economy, from what I can tell, is steerage now.”

His point: “I’d be okay with first class being a little less nice if that would make economy a little bit better for the majority of people on the plane.”

This isn’t communism—it’s basic fairness. Wealth inequality has reached levels where the ultra-wealthy enjoy absurd luxury while the working class struggles for basics.

The Poor Man’s Dating Crisis

Economic class doesn’t just affect divorce—it fundamentally shapes who can participate in modern dating.

“Poor men are just screwed right now,” Sexton observes bluntly. “I don’t know a lot of women that are willing to invest anymore in a poor man. They don’t really have to.”

The Dating Market as Economics

Dating apps function as markets where users signal value through photos and brief descriptions. For men, wealth signals include:

• Professional photos at expensive locations
• Pictures with luxury cars
• Travel experiences
• Designer clothing
• Successful career indicators

Men without these markers struggle to compete, regardless of personality, potential, or character.

“Buying stock in Jim Sexton when he was 26 years old, that’s a smart investment move,” he reflects on his younger self. “Buying stock in me now—you know how expensive the shares would be now?”

Young men building careers can’t demonstrate future potential on dating apps. They can only display current status—which for most young men is limited.

Female Hypergamy and Economics

Evolutionary psychology suggests women historically sought mates with resources to support offspring. Modern feminism attempted to eliminate this dynamic by encouraging female financial independence.

The result? Successful women still prefer successful men, but now they’re competing in the same economic sphere. A woman earning $150,000 annually rarely dates a man earning $40,000, even though she doesn’t need his financial support.

This creates a dating crisis for men in lower economic strata while high-earning men enjoy expanded options.

The Instagram Economy

Social media introduced a new dimension to class and relationships: the appearance of wealth.

Performative Affluence

Many people curate social media profiles suggesting affluence they don’t possess. Rented luxury cars, borrowed designer clothes, and strategic photo cropping create illusions of wealth.

This benefits some (appearing wealthier attracts partners) while harming others (feeling inadequate compared to fake lifestyles).

Wedding Content as Class Signal

“I have never seen so much wedding-related content,” Sexton notes. “There are a large number of women in their 20s and 30s that want to get married so they can have Instagram content.”

Elaborate weddings serve partly as class signals. A $100,000 wedding tells a story about family wealth and social position. Instagram extends that signal’s reach exponentially.

The pressure to perform affluence through weddings, homes, and lifestyle content creates financial stress that undermines the very relationships being displayed.

Sex Work and Economic Class

Sexton discusses sex work and marriage as an extension of relationship economics.

In countries where prostitution is legal, “This is not considered something degenerate men do. This is something men do, and this is something married men very often do.”

His observation: legalized sex work might actually help some marriages by addressing male sexual variety desires without emotional affair complications.

But here’s where class enters: “Successful men with money that now in the current dating marketplace are the men that women are interested in—it would be too easy for those men to go, ‘Well, why would I buy a woman when I could just rent a bunch of women?'”

Wealthy men could indefinitely rent sexual and romantic companionship rather than making the commitment and resource transfer marriage requires. This particularly applies if sex work becomes more normalized.

Meanwhile, less wealthy men lack resources to participate in either traditional marriage (expensive to enter and exit) or the sex work alternative.

The Uncomfortable Solution

Sexton’s analysis suggests a solution most people resist: acknowledging and addressing economic inequality directly.

What That Looks Like

“We should all have basic affordable healthcare,” he argues. “Then if you want to buy something special or fancy and you want concierge medical, then you pay a little more for it.”

This applies beyond healthcare to relationship support structures:

• Affordable childcare that reduces marital stress
• Living wages that allow single-income households
• Healthcare not tied to employment
• Affordable housing
• Accessible legal representation

These wouldn’t eliminate relationship problems, but they’d remove economic stress as a major divorce driver.

Why It Won’t Happen

“The people who created the problems are not the people who are going to solve the problems,” Sexton observes cynically.

Political and economic elites benefit from the current system. They’re not incentivized to change structures that advantage them and their children.

What This Means for Your Relationship

Understanding class and relationship dynamics offers several insights:

Economic compatibility matters more than we admit. Similar earning potential and financial values predict relationship success better than shared hobbies or attraction.

Money stress destroys relationships. Financial anxiety—not absolute poverty, but the stress of insufficient resources—creates conflict that erodes even strong partnerships.

Dating markets are economically stratified. People generally partner within their economic class. Cross-class relationships face additional challenges around values, expectations, and family dynamics.

Wealthy people play a different game. If you’re not ultra-wealthy, don’t compare your relationship to those of billionaires. They operate under entirely different rules and constraints.

Prenuptial agreements make sense. Regardless of wealth level, clarifying financial expectations before marriage prevents devastating conflicts later.

The Divorce Lawyer’s Economic Realism

After 25 years watching money determine relationship outcomes, Sexton has no illusions about romantic love transcending material reality.

“Love is an economy,” he insists. “We’re bringing different things to this transaction, but they have tremendous value.”

This doesn’t make him unromantic. He believes love is “the best thing in life.” But he also believes honesty about economic realities serves relationships better than pretending money doesn’t matter.

“Class is almost everything,” he concludes. “There is no war but the class war.”

For relationships to succeed in an era of unprecedented wealth inequality, couples must acknowledge this reality. They must discuss finances openly, understand how economic stress affects their partnership, and build structures that protect both partners regardless of earning disparities.

Anything less is denying the single biggest factor in relationship success and failure—and denial, Sexton would tell you, is the fastest route to his office.

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Source: James Sexton interview on Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel. James Sexton is a New York divorce attorney and author of “How To Stay In Love” and “If You’re In My Office It’s Already Too Late,” available on Amazon.