That’s a reasonable answer and I agree.

I’m a man who dates women, and so are the men you date. They can speak for themselves (if you ask them) but I’ll give you my answer here.

First, a point of clarification.

Here in the United States, women have more money than men, and much greater discretion over shared money than men. Warren Farrell measured this once, and if I recall correctly, he found that women decide on how about 80% of discretionary spending is allocated.

It’s called “shopping,” and the women are the ones in the relationship who do it, which is why advertisers and the media outlets who depend upon them cater to women.

Greater female assets and spending power is not so much because women have higher incomes. It’s because of two reasons:

1. Women live longer, and inherit the shared wealth of marriages to a much greater extent than men do.
2. Court-mandated alimony and child support (i.e., transfer payments) still favor women over men.

You don’t look (to me) like an heiress, a wealthy widower, or the custodial single parent of several children who decides how to spend court-mandated transfer payments.

So these two underlying mechanisms of women’s wealth don’t apply to you, and I can understand why you wrote “Money is power, and here in the U.S., men have access to the majority of it.” Farrell’s research in The Myth of Male Power will probably not dissuade you.

Second, you already revealed the beginning of your own answer to the question “How do women show investment in a relationship?”

You wrote:

Sex, or even the suggestion of sex, is money’s sister currency. Women have something men don’t, something men want badly. What more brilliant, simple, or radical way for a woman to secure more power (money) for herself than by capitalizing on her je ne sais quoi? Why should a man ever have a woman’s time, attention, or skill without earning it?

It is true that, for many young women (including Cardi B), sexuality is the single greatest source of a woman’s agency, and a the only source of “power” in romantic relationships. Your rhetorical question, “What more brilliant way for a woman to secure power… ?” is at the core of your admiration for a former sex worker like Cardi, who makes explicit the money-for-sex transaction that most relationships only imply.

Third, investment requires opportunity costs.

For example, when a man buys you dinner, that’s money that is no longer available to him to spend on other things — including his ventures, adventures, his children, or strippers, prostitutes, or other dates.

The time that a woman spends on the date is an opportunity cost, too — it’s just a lot lower, given that she was probably going to eat dinner, anyway. The only question for her was, “With whom?”

Personally, I find the transactional model of sex unsatisfying. If you don’t find your sexual experiences intrinsically rewarding for their own sake, you’re doing it wrong. Even if some sex isn’t great, at worst it’s an experiment in finding out what you like and don’t like.

Sex alone is not an opportunity cost for women.

Pregnancy and childbirth is an opportunity cost for women.

Fourth, sexual attraction is biological and involuntary.

The lizard parts of our brain that drive sexual desire do not understand birth control, or family court. Sexual desire is not a cognitive activity.

Sex is the vehicle by which women come to bear children, which is the ultimate “investment” that a woman can make. And there is no doubt that male attraction is correlated to the perception of female reproductive capacity, which is why older women are less sexually attractive to men than younger women.

It sounds rational for a women to monetize her sexuality while she’s young, because her sexuality is a depreciating asset. To convert a depreciating asset into an appreciating asset makes economic sense, sure.

Fifth, what about older women? When the sex is diminished, what do they bring?

You suggested “spending time, making plans,” and that that might be right. You also said, “spending money,” and maybe there’s some truth to that, too.

You also wrote, “creating a safe environment for said man to take off his manly armor,” and therein lies a catch-22.

The man who has the means to make a financial investment in you has already learned to manage his emotions without you. He’s learned to compete. He’s learned to win.

And your time, plans, and money are largely irrelevant to him, because his financial success grants him access to an abundance of women’s time, plans, and he has no use of your money.

What’s in scarce supply for the type of man so many women seem to want to meet are these characteristics:

• femininity.
• creativity.
• followership.
• shared world view.
• willingness to recognize and share in the male burden of performance.

Sex, time, and plans are all necessary but insufficient qualifications for such a man.