A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

The quip frames “success” in heterosexual marriage as an economic asymmetry: a man’s achievement is measured by out-earning domestic consumption, while a woman’s is reduced to securing access to that earning power. Read straight, it reflects mid‑20th‑century gender norms that tied masculinity to provision and femininity to dependence and spending. Read critically, it can also be taken as barbed satire—exposing how narrowly society defined women’s “success” and how transactional the idealized marriage market could be. Either way, the joke’s bite comes from treating love, status, and selfhood as subordinate to money and social roles.