The fairytale cash-grab hypergamous women want to experience in dating is, in fact, “too good to be true.”

Do all men cheat? Should we, in fact, just take their money and power down emotionally?

These are the questions that arose out of the recent thewizardliz cheating news. Her dating advice that grew her Youtube channel to eight million subscribers revolved around choosing a man solely based off of his ability and willingness to provide financially.

Given the nature of her advice and that she comes from a background of unhealed childhood trauma, I can’t say I’m surprised. She has said that she grew up without a stable father figure and with a mother who was the family’s only provider and rock. Her father cheated on her mother and did not support her financially. Seeing how much her mother struggled, Liz vowed to never be in the same situation, and her solution was to find a rich man to take care of her. Along the way she also built a cult following and stable income for herself giving advice on YouTube.

The irony is in the fact that by taking her own advice–to only seek out the man with the most money, and neglect any other forms of vetting–she recreated her childhood. She is now a single mother to a child whose father cheated. She will now bear the brunt of providing a good life for her child.

The hypergamous model of dating is theoretically sound, but often fails in practice. Why? The women drawn to hypergamy are blinded by the lights–dollar signs–and ignore red flags. A woman after money can easily get swept up in the glamorous show of a love bomber, which I suspect was the case with Liz and Landon. She even admitted that she was uninterested in him until he sent her $10,000 claiming he just wanted to get her attention and spend time with her. Actually, he wanted her to “be his wife.” There are a couple problems with this behavior on his end, ones that might be obviously icky to a woman of sound, healthy intuition. However, a woman guided by the trauma of her youth–abandonment, neglect, insecurity in the home–sees this as a fairytale. He was a knight in shining armor. Even if she claims to have a guard up, she was completely vulnerable to him. The veils over her eyes are what drew her to him and prevented her from seeing the truth.

I am a firm believer that any man who wants to be with a woman should be willing and able to provide for her financially. Most women will probably agree with me on that. The issue in this case, and that often occurs with hypergamous women, is that their fixation with money distracts them from what really matters: the man himself. Lots of men can provide, but if your plan is to have a relationship, it takes more than money. The most important thing to consider when you are vetting a man, even before his net worth, is values. What he values as a man is usually very clear to any woman in the right mind to see it. Does he have a close relationship with his family? What do his friends say about him? Does the lifestyle he lives now align with yours? Any man can tell you what he wants in the future, but what does he have to show for it today? Is his image consistent–does everyone see him the same way you do? Outside of your relationship, what kind of life does he have? Especially for a woman who has been through trauma with men, these questions are essential to ask. If your intuition was fully healed, you probably wouldn’t need to ask these questions; the answers would be obvious to you because anything that does not align with you would be clear to you. But most women just aren’t there, so we need to ask. We need to vet. It is the only way to be safe, and to choose the right man.

Now, women who’ve taken her advice mistakenly believe that all men cheat and every woman’s goal needs to be financial independence so that when her relationship inevitably fails, she has legs to stand on. The truth is so far from that. But our beliefs feel like indisputable facts, so until she heals, she will continue to seek out confirmation that all men are cheaters. And because of the principle, whatever she seeks, she will find. She will only see the cheaters in the world and she will miss the great, healthy men. She will never know any other truth than that which she allows to enter her subconscious. This applies to every area of life.

If she took the time to heal from her bad experiences with men and learn to identify a healthy man, she would not need to spend her life preparing for the worst. She could expect and demand the best and date from abundance, not scarcity. Unfortunately, as I imagine Liz did, most women enter into dating already expecting and fearing the worst, still guided by a trauma-based belief system. There is no one to blame for this, not even Liz. She is simultaneously a victim and creator of her circumstances. What really matters is that she is the only person who can take responsibility for what happens to her next, learn from the past, and create a better future. For the sake of her child, and for the millions of woman watching her content, I hope she does that.

how to vet potential suitors