When it comes to interacting with people other than their Meal Ticket, gold diggers are often extremely self-centered, vain, manipulative and bitchy Socialites with no other goal in their life than pampering themselves and buying whatever catches their fancy.
A common subversion of this trope is to have her turn out to be a Hooker with a Heart of Gold after all. Another way that works play with this is to have a rich man pretending to be poor, so as to ensure that any woman he becomes involved with loves him for himself and not his money. Yet another way to play with it is to have her genuinely fall in love with her meal ticket.
Also common are women who go after young members of the armed forces, and the United States stereotype of the "dependapotamus" outlines this best: a woman in her late teens or very early twenties who lurks around the base or near wherever young soldiers typically congregate, who hooks the first naive young boy who grew up in some podunk backwater locale, gets married to him extremely fast (usually within months), and then does the absolute bare minimum while leeching off of him and his military benefits, and probably cheats on him whenever they're deployed as well.
Historically, this used to be the rule for both parties; back then the now-rare male "fortune hunters" were much more common (stereotypically, they would woo young heiresses without parental protection or older women with money but no looks). This was particularly common in Victorian Britain, as economic changes forced many Peers to face that their old way of life had become unsupportable (particularly their country estates). Their primary source of income since the Middle Ages had been agriculture, but the main crop (grain) could be far more cheaply grown in the United States, Canada, Russia, and (later) Australia where land was abundant, and with steamships it could also be imported so cheaply the importers could undersell the aristocrats even though they were bringing the stuff from the far side of the world. The economics were fairly similar regarding livestock (a possible alternative to selling grain), with the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina often being able to undersell domestic British producers of beef, mutton, and pork, especially after the invention of refrigerated ships around the 1880s meant that the meat could be transported "on the hook" (i.e. as already slaughtered fresh meat) rather than "on the hoof" (i.e. as living animals) or as cured meatnote (though this wasn't as consistent; some British producers could keep up with the New World).
The aristocrats initially tried to "fix" their problem with protectionism
, but this failed. Since that left only dairy and fruit-and-vegetable production as viable agricultural alternatives, and the British market could only absorb so much butter (which Ireland was better for producing anyway) and jam, many young British nobles married the daughters of self-made industrialists and merchants (who had previously been seen as too low-class for the upper crust to marry), particularly American ones.For instance The Other Wiki even has a list. By the 20th century, the male gold diggers had almost disappeared (except for more villainous roles), and middle-class women were now getting married to richer men, establishing the current image of this trope. A modern variant known as "FinDom", or Financial Domination, couples this trope with BDSM, where the wealthier partner acts as the submissive, and is decidedly more up-front about it.
Another male variant exists in the Japanese Visual Kei subculture: Visual Kei artists, especially lifestylers or current or ex-Delinquents, are almost unemployable outside of their own industry in a culture dependent on conformity as a requisite of traditional employment. As a result, quite a few indies, beginning, or unsuccessful artists will work in a Host Club and/or seek out a mitsukano or mitsukare ("honey woman" or "honey man") to provide for them on a financial level.
