The Ups and Downs of Dating a Man in Finance

Admittedly, I’m not the likeliest person to be putting together a primer on dating men in finance. I have dated very few cishet men in general, and the ones I have dated tended to be broke-as-a-joke musicians and comedians who were perfectly comfortable letting me pay for our vodka and ramen (which I somehow convinced myself was feminist? Ah, being 23). But between Olivia Rodrigo’s new private-equity-associate beau and Nicole Kidman’s fling with a private equity investor in Italy, having a finance-bro boyfriend is feeling very in—and, as I’ve gathered from friends and colleagues whose names I will anonymize, there are some very clear pros and cons to the experience.

“I don’t find that my boyfriend’s finance-guy background manifests in that many ways in our actual relationship, especially since he’s not overly invested in the job like I feel a lot of finance guys are. But it’s nice that he has a stable job!” offers Jane, who’s been with her man in finance for three years. “What I don’t love is how much time his job takes up. We can never make plans on weekdays because he stays at the office too late, which is a minor annoyance for dinners and things and a bigger annoyance when I want to go to a concert or something with him that can’t be pushed to the weekend. It’s also very annoying when we have a holiday booked and he winds up working the whole time, or says he might not be able to go. First-world problems!”

Indeed! But certainly helpful to know before you book that last-minute getaway with a man who might not actually be available to enjoy it with you. (Personally, this wouldn’t bother me, but again, I like my men destitute and/or avoidant…not for nothing do I find the scene in Blue Crush where the protagonist’s rich NFL hookup leaves her in a hotel room with his credit card possibly the most romantic scene in cinematic history.)

Unfortunately, some women have had less success dipping a toe in the finance-guy dating pool. When Ana matched on Tinder with a Goldman Sachs employee about nine years ago, she thought he was “flirty but seemingly normal.” Then she agreed to meet him for a weekday lunch at Del Frisco’s Grille for their second date. “It all started out fine, and then he started bringing up that he knew the bathrooms there were single-person, with big mirrors…basically, he was trying to get me to go have a lunch quickie in the bathroom,” Ana recalls. “He had clearly known this setup in advance and picked it just for that. I was totally icked out and stopped responding to him after that.”

Obviously, not all finance guys are lunchtime sexual deviants—don’t sue me, Goldman!—and I’m sure some of them are perfectly able to strike a work–life balance that doesn’t piss off their partners. But where does one meet them? I turned to Vogue’s Slack for help in this arena, asking my colleagues who are on Raya to initiate a swipe session and see how long it took them to come across a man in finance. For one Vogue staffer, it took exactly five swipes, with another accomplishing the mission in just three and telling me: “Raya is majority finance bros and not the tortured creative types I hoped for when I signed up.”

While the Democratic Socialists of America card in my wallet compels me to look askance at most men who make their living on Wall Street or its global equivalents, I have to admit that any guy you date has the potential to be a let down, no matter his vocation. Why, I’ve been bummed out and/or ghosted by plenty of women and gender-nonconforming individuals in so-called “helping professions,” which suggests that a) I am truly in my romantic flop era and b) it’s ultimately about the character, not the career.