#69. On being a woman in America

A reaction to the viral essay you might have read last week

Photo by nrd on Unsplash

I, like everyone else in a certain corner of the internet, read the viral Cut essay last week about a 27 year-old woman, writer Grazie Sophia Christie, making the case for marrying an older man. This will mark my third reaction to a viral Cut essay in the last year or so–what can I say? The Cut is my favorite media outlet that’s still standing, and it certainly has a way of dividing the internet by publishing pieces that are very clearly meant to engage and enrage.

The last time I wrote a reaction piece like this, it was in response to the essay “Adorable Little Detonators” from last September, which recently re-entered my orbit because of a podcast episode I recorded last week on an adjacent topic. Basically the article asked: Does parenthood change friendships? And since we already know the answer is mostly a yes: Who is the asshole when things inevitably change for the worse–the distracted parent, or the immature childfree person? (Or, wow, maybe it’s neither?) My essay last September was a bit of an empathetic take on how I related to the author as the only childfree by choice person in her friend group, even though she was being absolutely eviscerated in the comments, mostly by current and future parents who found the article wildly triggering. So here I go again, in a similar, bit different vein.

I say similar in the way that I, once again, want to offer a slightly different perspective than a majority of the hot-button reactions I read in the comments section of “The Case For Marrying an Older Man,” calling the author immature, self-absorbed, insufferable, an odious brat, and a terrible writer, among other insults. She is undoubtedly a pro-life conservative, which I found out yesterday after writing this reaction which immediately made me mad and I almost killed this entire piece, but I guess I’m tired of living in a world so unbelievably divided by politics and shielding myself in my liberal echo chamber. Forty-one percent of women in America identify as “pro-life”–a figure I find absolutely insane–whether I like it or not. Are the experiences of those in the 41% immediately invalid because I don’t agree with their politics? I guess I’ve decided not. This is the world we live in. So I can’t say I really relate to the author this time–at least on the surface and a few layers down–but if we dive deep enough, I can.

I won’t give you a full summary of the essay (likely you have already read it), but the gist is this: Grazie Sophia Christie is a 27 year-old Harvard alum splitting her time between Miami and London, who met her husband in college by going to a grad school event that she wasn’t invited to, for the sole purpose of putting herself in the right places to fall in love with someone older.

“The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.”

Christie and her husband have now been married for four years and live mostly in Europe because of his career. She talks about the negative perception of their age-gap relationship (which, let’s be honest, isn’t that wide – her husband is 37!) and how she looks around at women who marry men their own age and thinks she got the better deal. Mostly.

First, this is not really an essay about marrying an older man. It is slightly more about marrying a rich man, and I loved this reaction article from Slate. Here’s the takeaway from that piece:

“But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

Christie’s essay is definitely more about the advantages of marrying someone with money, I absolutely agree. But that’s just one layer of the onion peeled away. I think there are two other important themes bubbling under the surface, and one of these is actually about age.

Gen Z men–men the author’s age–have less dating experience than any other generation before them. The men of this generation don’t find dating important, play video games every day, and have suffered badly from helicopter parenting. They are also more likely than Boomers to think feminism has done more harm than good, all of which makes them less appealing to Gen Z women as prospects for romance. Women already do so much work in relationships–Christie gives multiple examples of women she knows in same-age relationships who have to “train” their male partners as a mother might–so is it actually that surprising that many Gen Z women would prefer to partner with Millennial men who have already learned a thing or two about life and romance, or each other?

There’s also something else worth exploring as a deeper theme of this essay that I find even more interesting. Something we already know, but maybe don’t like to spend time looking at when we feel a little triggered, because it’s easier to cast Christie as the villain of feminism and a giant step backward for the modern woman. And that something is just how hard it is to be a woman in America these days.

“Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking.”

At 27, Christie is one of the oldest members of Gen Z–a generation whose women are completely overwhelmed by stress. Sixty-seven percent of 18 to 34 year-olds–including all the members of Gen Z who have entered the workforce–reported feeling “consumed” by their worries about money in 2023. Is it actually that surprising to learn Christie’s real/fantasy life includes a rich husband who whisks her off to England–one of the least work-oriented countries in the world–and takes almost all of the stress of logistics and decision making away? Is it actually so shocking that Christie went out of her way to fall for a financially stable foreigner who could take care of her more like a parent than a partner, when 31% of people in her generation are currently living with their parents due to financial need? Is she a villain of feminism, or a seriously stressed out young woman willing to give up her own identity for an easier life? 

Yes, we hate this perceived “step backwards” for modern women being published on a huge platform like The Cut. Especially as liberal Millennial (and probably Gen X) women, who feel like we have absolutely worked our asses off throughout our 20s and 30s, done everything our parents told us to do to have a great life, and still feel various shades of financially miserable. Like we never, ever have enough time or money to truly do things our own way. Of course we’re going to be triggered en masse by a younger woman who found a different (i.e. backwards) way out of financial insecurity and the sometimes extreme overwhelm that can come with making very “adult” decisions literally every day, even though she paid a huge price for her path. One that most of us reading would never make. But this essay isn’t about us–it’s a reflection of American society told through the lens of someone from the next generation.

I’m speaking for all of us here so feel free to cross out, modify, and add where appropriate, but in order to live our dream lives, we want: Satisfying romantic partnerships, solid friendships and the time to nurture them, fulfilling careers that pay us what we’re worth and offer 401(k)s, a defined life purpose, nice houses, sufficient time off to take vacations, no debt, interesting hobbies (and the time and money to pursue them), a real sense of personal identity and time set aside just for ourselves, enough money for little indulgences here and there, the respect we deserve from both men and society, and the freedom to choose if, when, and how many children we have. But the reality is that most of us can’t have all of these things, at least not all at once. We have to choose.

Let me turn inward for just a moment, as someone who was not immediately enraged by Christie’s essay. Personally, I feel that I have at least a light sketch of most of the things on this list (though some are very much a work in progress). I consider myself extremely fortunate, lucky, and privileged. I also worked very hard to get here and made a series of difficult decisions in my 20s and 30s that supported my pursuit of each. But, as privileged and planned as I am, I am also able to have many of the things I want due in large part to the one thing I don’t want: Children. It doesn’t feel like a “price” or a sacrifice to me, not exactly, because in order to feel like I gave this one thing up in order to have the others, I would have to feel like I actually wanted it in the first place. Because of this, I feel a little like I’m reading the essay through a different lens.

“To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged. When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.

The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.”

Don’t get me wrong–I am also very tired, even though I am not racing against the motherhood clock. But I am lucky in that the one thing on the “life dream list” that I don’t want is something that largely pays for my ability to have the others in the time, freedom, and financial advantage it gives me. I’m sure some Millennial/Gen X parents are convinced they have all of these things at once, and maybe they do (I also wonder if these are the same people who are rich by comparison, since money can actually buy things like houses, indulgences, vacations, therapy, and most importantly – time), while others feel that giving up children is actually a price unwillingly paid, so other items on the list have to go unrealized for a time. Or at least, evidenced by the amount of women in their 20s and 30s who are currently undecided about wanting children who you probably know personally, it’s a price that is being strongly considered by millions of American women, every day. I don’t think it’s as simple as “just don’t have children and you can have everything else!”–but it certainly helps. So does being, or marrying, rich.

Christie mentions she and her husband will decide to have children soon, which reads to me, like her politics, as yet another idea that was inherited or made for her and not decided of her own volition. So her price seems to be her individuality, her personal desires, and her ability to write her own life story. Which, unlike having children, is something you’d have to pry out of my cold, dead hands. Marrying a man with money has allowed her to have almost everything on the dream list, except for this. Read this passage again through the lens of an anxious Gen Z woman who has looked around at the lives of her Gen X and Millennial sisters (especially those with kids) and decided, “nope–I have to find another way.”

“Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique, but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.”

My takeaway from this essay was that being a modern woman in America is just fucking hard. So hard that some women–like Christie–are reverting to old patterns of male dominance and feminine submission to simply cope with the reality we live in. Maybe America–with its absolutely abysmal government policies for maternity leave, working mothers, and women who are pregnant and don’t want to be–caused this reaction. Don’t just blame Christie. She’s also a product of her environment. You may read her as sad, abhorrent, stupid, immature, or some combination of these insults. Her decision to give up her sense of self in exchange for an easier life seems laced with desperation. But is she actually the villain in this story? Or is she an intelligent, anxious young woman who looked around her at age twenty and said: Is this what it means to be a modern woman in America? And if yes–no thank you?

Let me be clear–I’m not trying to be a Christie apologist. I wouldn’t, and didn’t, make the choices she did. My husband is five years older than me and makes more than double what I do, but we still make decisions and split everything 50/50, because we aspire to be equals in our relationship. True “partners,” as Christie so clearly fears. At the same time, she’s also not entirely wrong in some of her criticisms–I am the one cleaning our house and doing all the laundry, always the one remembering to take the lint out of the dryer, not because I am a woman, but because I am a woman without children who has the time and flexibility, while my husband runs around like a tornado for his job, rarely slowing down enough to even realize he has run out of socks. I am happy to help him in this way, because I can. Even though we made different choices, and are very different people, I think it’s useful to read Christie’s story with an empathetic ear, instead of just one with hot steam pouring out of it. I keep reading articles and seeing content on social media that talks about how absolutely “fucked” everything is. We already know it feels nearly impossible to be a woman these days. So is it any wonder that this is one woman’s reaction to the modern world she has to live in?

LMK how you feel in the comments–this is a spicy one. Comments are open to everyone! 🌶️

K bye,
Kelly