"Do you have your own apartment? Your own car?"

What she's actually testing

Where you sit in the resource hierarchy. This is hypergamy operating in real time — not as a moral judgment, but as a biological filter. Her evolved criteria evaluate providers and protectors. The filter is ancient. Your discomfort with it is modern and irrelevant.

Why it works on most men

It's unusually direct, which disarms men who expected subtlety. The two failure modes: defensiveness (signals insecurity about your position) or over-disclosure to impress (signals need for her approval). Both reveal you're calibrating your response to what she wants to hear rather than what's true.

The response framework

The obvious: answer factually, without performance. Yes or not yet. No apology, no over-explanation. The disruptive: the man with real direction doesn't feel this question as a test — because he knows the trajectory is what matters, not the current snapshot. 'Not yet — I'm building something' from a man who genuinely is going somewhere has a different quality than the same sentence from a man who isn't. She's not just reading the answer. She's reading the frame behind the answer.