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Yesterday, an essay in The Cut went viral, just as it was designed to do. In any moment, but especially the current “divorce moment,” this piece is clickbait, a guaranteed hate-read, and fodder for collective outrage. In the essay, Grazie Sophia Christie writes about the benefits of having strategically married at a young age, and to an older man. At 20, she recognized an “unfairness” built into heterosexual women’s lives: they find themselves “clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood,” trying to discover themselves and establish a career, while racing against a ticking biological clock. Then, she says, they come up against the reality of men preferring younger women.

Christie says that she found a workaround: she used her youth and beauty to secure power, stability, and an “ideal existence” through marriage to a man ten years older than her. In her own words, she took advantage of women’s “tragically short window of power.”

There are plenty of holes to be poked in Christie’s specific argument, but I’m more interested in this piece as a familiar form: the “marry him” essay. This is far from the first time someone has gone viral by arguing that marriage is the solution for the challenges and inequities that straight women face—whether it’s in fertility, beauty standards, corporate ladder-climbing, childcare, finances, or anything else.

Back in my day, these messages came from older women. In 2008, Lori Gottlieb published her viral essay in The Atlantic titled, “Marry Him!” The subhead: “The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough.” It was an epic example of culture trolling, published in the Valentine’s Day issue. Gottlieb, then a single 40-year-old mother with a baby conceived via donor sperm, presented herself as a cautionary tale. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” she wrote. “Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.” (Never mind the social infrastructure that might adequately support such wants.)

A few years ago, I revisited that book to see if it was as bad as I remembered. It was worse. Women, and their romantic and sexual desires, were portrayed throughout as frivolous, shallow, selfish, and greedy. There was a whole chapter titled, “How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life.” Much like Christie, Gottlieb wrote:

We forget that we… will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children.

Gottlieb’s explicit “marry him” message came on the heels of more implicit arguments, like Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which argued that casual sex could damage women’s “ability to sustain a long-term commitment.” There was no shortage of articles and books in that era focusing on the ways women were ruining themselves for love, from watching porn to focusing on their careers. These were all just subtler ways of urging women: “Settle! Marry him!”

Several years after Gottlieb’s bomb drop, we got Susan Patton, the mother of two sons at Princeton, who wrote a letter to the university’s newspaper urging young women to use their youth, beauty, brains, and elite collegiate setting to land a good man. “Forget about having it all… Here’s what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate,” she wrote. Her argument relied in part on her contention that men are happy to marry younger women—so act quick and lock it down while “surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.” Her letter sparked a firestorm of outrage. Also: a book deal.

Now, a decade later, this essay in The Cut delivers a similar message, but from a younger woman who sees herself as a savvy strategist capable of controlling her own destiny. Christie is a perfect reflection of a “postfeminist” emphasis on personal power, choice, and empowerment. Hers is a preemptive manifesto as opposed to Gottlieb’s regretful one.

I’m reminded of Female Dating Strategy, a subreddit founded in 2019 in response to the misogynistic Red Pill. FDS sees the dating landscape as unfairly advantaging men and attempts to teach women how to excel despite that inequity. The aim is to secure commitment from a “high-value male,” often through maneuvers that could have been pulled from a vintage dating manual, like withholding sex. An emblematic FDS post: “Sure, we all want to get rid of patriarchy but instead of letting it [sic] us get us down and hopeless, some women have turned to shrugging, admitting ‘it is what it is’ and using it to live their ideal life.”

I’m reminded, too, of aspirational tradwife and stay-at-home girlfriend content on TikTok, which repackages old bargains as new freedoms.

Whether it’s an essay screaming “marry him,” while reminding women that they aren’t getting any more attractive and their eggs are drying up, or a 23-year-old stay-at-home girlfriend capturing the luxury of exercising and suntanning while her boyfriend is at work, one thing remains constant. In the face of both biological and systemic inequities, heterosexual women are encouraged to get theirs, despite it all. Of course, they will not get theirs. They will get only the meager rewards, and many punishments, of a system designed to exploit them.

Want more on this? Here are a few related reads (and, if you haven’t already, I’d be thrilled if you upgraded to a paid subscription so I can keep cataloging this cultural moment).

It's not just divorce that's in the air

'From ho to housewife'

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November 2, 2023

Are stay-at-home girlfriends 'having a moment'?

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