Sam: Classy Love

Now we’ve had a bit of a rant about class and sex before, but what about class and love?

It turns out that despite all the talk about class mobility and ever increasing opportunities men and women are marrying much more within their social class than ever before. With huge amount of cheap high quality clothing and a more informal style to dressing you’d think that it would be harder to pick people’s class. Certainly your top hat and tails would have made it very clear in the past. But according to Dalton Conley, a sociologist at NYU we are just as deft as ever at passing style judgements that precisely pick a potential mate's class. Ed Byrne was having a good old rant about class the other day and summed up how sensitive we are to class perfectly: ‘How come a jumper over your shoulders shouts Sloan, while the same jumper around the waist means Chav?’. 

Apparently we are attracted to partners with the same class as us because they will have the same interests, share our opinions and validate our own choices. We all knew Pretty Women is a load of schmatlz, just deep down I certainly would like to think love wasn’t really at all about someone’s social status and background.

Turning the mirror back on my self, my fiancée is pretty much the same class as me – and uncomfortably, when I look back at my past relationships they are all embarrassingly of a similar class. Any posh totty or down in the mines working class on the way was something that passed by pretty quickly. I hate it when sociologists are uncomfortably correct.

So how does class fit into your love life?