
OPINION – Dating someone out of your financial league – is there a happy ending?
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GUEST - Queen Malobane, Provincial General Manager: Gauteng at Metropolitan.
It’s a tale that’s old as time: penniless woman meets wealthy man, they fall in love, and the rest, as they say, is history. In fact, it’s the very premise of rags-to-riches stories such as Pretty Woman, Maid in Manhattan, even Cinderella…and the list goes on.
While these storylines have been traditionally rooted in a ‘white knight’ dynamic with a happy ending, what they never show are the inevitable complications and hard conversations that arise when dating someone who is out of your financial league.
What happens when it comes to dividing up the household expenses? Or when one person in the relationship is expected to support the other’s financially challenged family members or dependents? “In real life, these are the kinds of situations that arise if one person in a relationship earns significantly more than the other,” says Queen Malobane, Provincial General Manager: Gauteng at Metropolitan.
It’s a tale that’s old as time: penniless woman meets wealthy man, they fall in love, and the rest, as they say, is history. In fact, it’s the very premise of rags-to-riches stories such as Pretty Woman, Maid in Manhattan, even Cinderella…and the list goes on.
While these storylines have been traditionally rooted in a ‘white knight’ dynamic with a happy ending, what they never show are the inevitable complications and hard conversations that arise when dating someone who is out of your financial league.
What happens when it comes to dividing up the household expenses? Or when one person in the relationship is expected to support the other’s financially challenged family members or dependents? “In real life, these are the kinds of situations that arise if one person in a relationship earns significantly more than the other,” says Queen Malobane, Provincial General Manager: Gauteng at Metropolitan.

