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A simple woman in a plain dress. A dashing man in a pristine suit. She is a nobody. He is the most eligible bachelor in the room. Their eyes lock across a sea of strangers. And so begins a tumultuous love story. The world tries to tear them apart but, despite their differences, their love is strong enough to hold them together. And, as a nice little bonus, her romantic happily ever after comes with the perk of a whole bunch of money – and a healthy dose of social status to boot.
This is, of course, the basic premise of the Cinderella story. And it's a tale as old as time. But it's also one I kind of imagined we had left firmly in the past. After all, the most basic rules of #feminism are that we don't need to rely on men for our own financially stable happily ever afters, right? Well, apparently, we have all started to become a little more open to the idea of a good old-fashioned Cinderella story of late.
The chemistry is truly off the charts.
Of course, the best love stories are always about star-crossed lovers: couples who are kept apart by… something. Sometimes it's a misunderstanding. A family feud. Another romantic interest. But these days, the only thing we seem to be interested in seeing is a couple torn apart by class. Is it just me, or does everything seems to be a rehashed version of Cinderella RN?
The most obvious is, of course, the latest season of faux-Regency era romance series Bridgerton. Maid Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) is not like the other maids, because she has a perfect RP accept and speaks French, by the way. She takes a night off, dons a giant silver mask and attends the Bridgerton ball. There, she locks eyes with Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson), who has recently been dubbed the season's most eligible bachelor. After pining for the mysterious Lady in Silver for a while, he falls for the maid version of Sophie – and a whole lot of drama ensues, most of which, is all to do with their insurmountable class differences. It's hardly a huge spoiler to reveal that Sophie will indeed get her happily ever after – in this case, a life of true love funded, of course, by the bank of Bridgerton.
What if she isn’t Lord Penwood’s daughter?
Then there's Hulu's Love Story, another of the year's biggest TV romances, which transplants the Cinderella story to ‘90s New York City. The Ryan Murphy show follows the real-life story of Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pigeon), who married NYC’s most eligible bachelor John F. Kennedy Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly) just a few years before they died in a tragic plane crash in 1999. Despite Carolyn's cool girl status denoted by her all-black minimalist wardrobe and chic job at Calvin Klein, the show makes sure to inform us that, ultimately, she is kind of a social nobody who was plucked from the obscurity of a Boston mall. JFK Jr., on the other hand, is a tabloid darling, a People's Sexiest Man Alive recipient, and, as a Kennedy, basically American royalty. Carolyn's friends and family are flabbergasted that she has managed to land this modern day “Prince Charming.”
To give both Sophie and Carolyn a little credit: neither of them seem particularly interested in their respective love interests' money and status. In fact, in both cases, they see it as more as a nuisance than a selling point. Nevertheless, both shows can't help but paint their versions of the Cinderella story as the ultimate fantasy.
Other recent romances also borrow from the Cinderella playbook – though they choose to flip it on its head in one way or another. Take the recent, much-discussed Wuthering Heights. By removing any element of racial prejudice, Emerald Fennell turns the Emily Brontë novel into a pretty simple tragedy that hinges on the debate of love versus class. Cathy (Margot Robbie), despite her all-consuming love for poor Heathcliffe (Jacob Elordi), choses to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). It is, she thinks, her only way out of a life of poverty. It is only when Heathcliffe leaves for a few years and returns with a mysterious new fortune of his own that she really begins to regret her choice. She could have had it all!
And the list of Cinderella-gone-wrong tales goes on: There's 2024's Best Picture winner Anora, in which sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison( dreams of being pulled out of her daily slog by a wealthy man. She catches her “whale” (a practically prepubescent Russian rich boy) but he turns out to be unreliable and she's yanked violently back out of her wealthy happily ever after and plonked straight back into her old life. Or, last year, Celine Song's Materialists, which saw Dakota Johnson playing a matchmaker who had given up on love and was on the hunt for a rich guy to solve all of her problems. Ultimately, her feelings for down-and-out actor played by Chris Evans are too strong. Or The Housemaid, which saw Sydney Sweeney playing Millie the maid, daydreaming about getting together with the hunky and rich man of the house Andrew (Brandon Sklenar). Like Anora, the only downside to her Cinderella dream was that the rich guy turned out to be a piece of shit.
I think I'm gonna die in this skin room.
And our current obsession with average-girl-gets-the-Prince-Charming-guy extends beyond the screen into the realm of social media, where the class divide seems to be just as a big a talking point when it comes to relationships. See, for instance, the rising “swag gap” trend on TikTok, that sees people calling out differences in aesthetic style in relationships. While not overtly about class, how we dress and what we wear offers a lot of coded information about social status, and it doesn't take long before this trend veers into being about class.
A few years ago, we also had the infamous “looking for a man in finance” trend. What began as a joke song quickly devolved into very real videos about young women who were in fact seeking out trust fund boys.
TikTok is also filling up with videos celebrating “old money.” See this one on old money date night outfit ideas, or this one offering up an old money couple's outfit check.
And studies back all of this up. Research has found that many Gen Zs are actively seeking out wealthy partners. In fact, just under half of them cite money as being more important than physical compatibility.
While this regression to money-focused, status-focused relationships is, arguably a pretty anti-feminist development, there are plenty of logical reasons for it. The cost of living is sky high – buying a home feels impossible without the bank of mum and dad (or, in this case, the bank of a Prince Charming). Inequality is increasingly every year with what some have gone as far as to call the death of the middle class. Many young people feel downright scammed by the education system which has saddled them with impossible amounts of debt. In a nutshell, we are tired and financial stability, let alone financial comfort, feels like something of a fantasy. Is it any wonder we have started to include that fantasy in our approach to romance?
It's certainly a rather depressing state of affairs. The general consensus seems to be: is love even love if it's not also going to make you rich? And not just rich, but rich enough to flaunt your old money couples aesthetic throughout the Ton, in the Calvin Klein office, on the moors of Yorkshire – or at least on TikTok.
