What does it take to be Marriage Material in Singapore ?

I think it is about time we update some figures on what it takes to be marriage material in Singapore.

According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, women across multiple cultures value economic resources, earnings potential and ambition much more than men when selecting their mates. This is why the world is full of examples of rich and powerful old men marrying younger trophy wives but you can hardly find examples of rich, wealthy women marrying athletic and young men.

In fact, evolutionary psychologists are specific enough to say that women desire men to be in the top 70% percentile of earning power compared to male peers.

Getting statistics on this is a little challenging and we will need to get data from different sources and make a series of assumptions before a useful estimate can be derived.

The first source of data is to get household income statistics per member for 2018 which pegged at $3,804. Each household has about 3.3 members in 2018, so we can derive a total household income of $3,804 x 3.3 or $12,553.

Once we reach this stage, we may have to make some assumptions about a typical household to zoom into our data on working folks. One such assumption is that a household has two working members, so a person makes about $12,553 / 2 or $6,276.

Finally, we have to adjust for the gender gap at work. Women draw a salary about 87.5% that of men at work. So we have to adjust the salary again backtracking to $12,533 x (100 / 187.5) or $6,694.

So most guys should gun to order produce a salary of $6,694 including CPF before they can consider themselves marriage material or within 70% of male cohorts.

Of course, just because women desire an earning potential at the top 30% percentile in surveys do not mean that they actually get it in practice, there are only 30% of such men to go by in society today. In practice, women also desire other traits like kindness and generosity in their men.

There are interesting conclusions from this exercise. If you have $1,000,000 but listen to enough bull-crap from commissions sales folks and think that earning 4.75% from an endowment fund is a big bullock cart wheel, that's only $47,500 a year which misses the mark if you think that you can "shake leg" your way to marital bliss. So even a millionaire would need a day job if he listens to the insurance industry and still want to be considered a worthy marriage partner.

The hurdle rate to be taken seriously in the dating game for "shake leg" millionaires is at least 8%, which means that you need to wrack your brains in the investment game to play it well.

Of course, guys are still way luckier than women when it comes to mating game.

Men are a lot more superficial than women. When it comes to selecting women for marriage, they consistently go back to waist to hip ratio of 0.7. Worse, men of all ages prefer dating women aged 27.

Some useful Waist to Hip ratio figures for your consideration.

• Scarlett Johannsson has a WHR of 0.69. 
• Gisele Bundchen has 0.66. 
• Tyra Banks has 0.67

In such a case, you don't need a Bloomberg terminal. 

A measuring tape will do.