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Is the primary complaint of women in Korea really that the men don’t have enough money, then? That hasn’t been widely reported.
I'm sure you could find more, but even just a brief perusal gives me examples of this from the Atlantic in an otherwise unsympathetic piece. I feel like it's pretty well known even with only a relatively passing interest in Korea.
Two examples inside that article are that of an engagement getting broken off because a downturn in a business owned to-be-groom's parents spooked the to-be-bride and her family, and a late-50s university lecturer finding out that he wouldn't meet the salary demands outlined by Korean women now.
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Yes, it doesn't add up, although the general narrative of the comment is fairly convincing. Simple anthropology tells us that roughly an equal number of boys and girls are born into upper middle class South Korean families. They have the same advantages in life. For every single woman with high expectations, there's a well-paid single man of similar social status.
Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were. Contemporary young UMC men also seeing their wages diluted by women's entry into the labor market and rising housing costs. The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
Hence why in America women generally contribute to housing costs. I'm not sure about the statistics, but Americans mostly seem to buy houses when already engaged/married/ready to have a baby. Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?
People often are, particularly about personal preferences.
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I can't say about Korea, but in China there's a whole Thing about buying houses, and who pays, and who owns it in the marriage, and who gets it in the divorce. It's like someone took America, realized that we're all sappy romantic meme-infected morons, and solved for the equilibrium. Which turns out to be a ruthless financial battle of the sexes.
If Korea has gone further down the Neo-Confucian gender-role rabbit-hole than China, combined with the same Western personal freedom as long as you don't marry, no wonder it's such a nightmare.
Especially with the male oversupply (see: one-child policy and preference for sons), at least up till quite recently, owning a residence is considered the minimum requirement for getting a decent match in China, at least in the urban areas. It gets to the point where multiple generations might be investing in a property for a son so he can get ahead (admittedly not just in romance; also stuff like residency status and rights, but I am very far from an expert on this)
More anecdotally, I know of Chinese women who openly discuss/brag about what sort of make of car/house/whatever accessory they require before giving a man the light of day.
Not sure how the owning a house thing is doing with the property market still in freefall.
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