There’s a reason that different classes didn’t marry until recently. I don’t say this to be anti-romance or to cast the poor as an insidious group that is out to steal the wealth of the good and moral rich. I’m not Emerald Fennell! When two people marry who come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, the anxiety of someone marrying just for the other’s money rarely, if ever, comes into question. When a man and a woman with family money married in the Gilded Age, the idea was that they could only gain from combining each other’s enterprises. 

Whether an upwardly mobile, formerly poor person is a gold digger is unimportant. If they’re perceived as being lower class, they will be treated as a gold digger by the rich, no matter how much money they actually make. An investment banker who grew up in poverty recently got into an awkward situation with his generationally wealthy wife’s friends. They accused him of marrying for money, and when he made it clear that he made more money than his wife, she was less than pleased.