Class? In An Age Gap Discourse?

It's likelier than you think!

It’s a credit to the evil editorial strategists at New York Magazine that I’m writing my third or fourth newsletter in response to a deranged and discourse-setting New York essay that nonetheless raises some interesting points about motherhood and women’s labor. Good work, sickos.

This week New York gave us the much-tweeted personal essay “The Case For Marrying An Older Man,” by a young woman whose husband is 10 years older than her. As a fellow wife of modest age gap experience, I thought myself pretty well positioned to sympathize with this essay or to object to it on petty and personal grounds. But it’s only minimally an essay about age. It’s really an essay about money—one that fits neatly into conservative myths about tradwives and the non-working woman.

In her essay, writer Grazie Sophia Christie describes herself as an aging ingénue who, as an undergraduate, set out to land a wealthy older man. Her advantages as a Harvard student, she writes, lay not in academic prestige but in “my youth. The newness of my face and body [...] I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.”

Other writers have already unpacked this depressing outlook on youth and opportunity. “She erroneously posits as fact, her youth is worth more in potential futures than anything she could learn or create at school,” Becca Schuh writes in her Substack.

Christie is giving us a reheated serving of dated stereotypes that claim women’s main form of advancement and mobility comes from marriage—preferably young, and conveniently before women can accumulate any real career capital for themselves. This is all demonstrably untrue. But the New York essay comes at an interesting moment when antifeminist movements, typified by TikTok tradwives, are pushing back against women’s participation in the paid workforce. Christie, who describes herself as a Miami socialite, may share few visual cues with a “Little House On The Prairie”-LARPing influencer, but she’s part of their political project of women’s disempowerment.

The supposed benefits Christie describes about her age-gap relationship (and honestly, they’re 27 and 37, that’s not so weird) have less to do with age than they do with income. Her husband pays their rent and their travel expenses (which “shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”), while she claims to enjoy a life of the mind, abandoning “a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer.”

A few things here:

Most people, statistically, will not marry an old-money European, as Christie’s husband is described. There are simply not enough of those to go around. Most couples, age gap or no, will have to work. Christie portrays her relationship as something like a patron-artist dynamic, contrasting her relaxation against the reality of most women’s working lives. 

“There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest,” she writes, which really gives away the essay’s whole game. Feminism is cast as a system of drudgery, whereas professional wifedom brings years of rest and relaxation, provided your husband can foot the bill.

This is the same stupid sleight of hand that trad cultures pull. Antifeminist influencers like to lean into understandable discontent with working life and pretend as if its alternative is a life of Instagrammable leisure, supported on someone else’s income. That arrangement comes with a tradeoff: the ceding of their decisions to someone else. 

“I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself,” Christie writes. “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. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.”

You are, actually, supposed to grow up and achieve adulthood. (Also, can I step out of my lane and speculate for a moment here? Girl, you’re describing a sex thing. You can just bottom. You don’t need to extrapolate it into a whole lifestyle.) 

And I think Christie and even the most hardcore tradwife influencers know they’re meant to grow up. Because a life of pure, childlike leisure never seems to satisfy them, even if genuinely available. Instead they’re always engaged in some outward performance of work, like periodically publishing a magazine article, or Instagramming oneself baking a loaf of sourdough in a beautiful kitchen. 

In his book Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graber notes that “as early as 1901, the German psychologist Karl Groos discovered that infants express extraordinary happiness when they first figure out that they can cause predictable effects in the world, pretty much regardless of what that effect is [...] Groos coined the phrase ‘the pleasure at being the cause,’ suggesting that it is the basis for play, which he saw as the exercise of powers imply for the sake of exercising them.”

It’s good to do something and to make your presence felt in the world. It’s how we avoid going insane. It’s how we come to know ourselves. 

“Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that ‘they’ are the thing which just caused something to happen,” Graeber writes. 

To forgo one’s agency is to remain in an infantile state, to dissolve into another person’s will. Or as Schuh writes of Christie’s essay, “it clarifies another of her illogical presumptions: that an existence you marry is yours to begin with. It’s not! It’s the person you married’s existence! You are a passenger. Hope that helps!”

The best-case scenario offered by these high-gloss depictions of wealthy marriage is something like perpetual childhood. The worse, and far likelier case, is economic dependence while doing the less-visible and less-monetizable work of raising children and keeping house. The right relies on female workers’ real grievances to launder this likelier scenario through images of leisure.

I would love to read the pitch email that placed this essay in New York, because by most standards, it’s an unremarkable document in conservative gender relations. It’s giving Instagram fundamentalist. It is advertised, however, as a treatise on age gaps, which are buzzy conversation-bait at the moment. 

Anecdotally: over the past few years, my social media feed has seen an explosion in age gap discourse. I mean “discourse” in the derogatory sense. It’s valid, and often vital, to interrogate power disparities in relationships. But so much of the specific conversation around acceptable and unacceptable ages for romantic partners seems self-defeating, and indeed often devolves into irresolvable bickering between social media users who disagree on details of depersonalized, hypothetical relationships. (Is 21 and 26 too weird? Well what if you adopt the scientifically bunk argument that people younger than 25 are incapable of full consent due to undercooked brains?)

I am less interested in these arguments (bicker away, friends) than in what they elide. These are debates that seem to concern power, but are often incapable of addressing patriarchy, in a moment when patriarchy is having a real comeback. These are debates that nod at men’s economic and political advantages, but reduce those advantages to matters of life experience, as if those same structural inequalities do not also harm women in same-age heterosexual relationships or—if they do—as if those harms are so minor that they’re best viewed under the magnifying glass of an age-gap couple where the disparities may be more pronounced. We’re mincing birthdates and engaging in borderline-phrenological brain science in search of some magic number in which all inequalities are voided, all risks mitigated, all structural violences voided. 

While discussing the New York story with some friends, one recalled a New York Times Vows column about a bride and groom who were 27 and 72, respectively. Unusual, we agreed. The relationship would not be without significant challenges, and would not be preferable for any of us. But the couple seemed respectful of each other’s intellect and agency, each spouse with their own careers and safety nets, and hopefully their own escape routes if the marriage went south. 

“I'd be more worried about people closer in age but it's like, she's his intern,” I messaged. 

Is a 10-year age gap exploitative? It has plenty of opportunity to be, as does a same-age relationship in which a man controls the finances while a woman cares for children and does unpaid domestic labor while her options for independence dwindle.

Christie doesn’t have children, but plans to. “When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least?” she writes.

Let me help with this one! If it’s his kid, he should be an equal partner—not a “helper”—in child rearing, regardless of his age! She hints at the approaching event horizon of work but notes that “if such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted,” which is a hell of a way to describe one’s upcoming entry into labor if they’ve never really worked before. Good luck!

I don’t begrudge the work I’ve done before or after having children. It’s helped me discover who I am and who I’m not. It’s given me options and identity and a broad, interesting world. Motherhood (or rather workplace structures that remain hostile to motherhood) has also thrown logistical complications in my career. Not a surprise for most women, but a disappointment time and time again.

At some points, Christie does try to expand her theory of rest beyond that which wealthy wives can afford.

“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,” she writes.

I agree, actually, but in an anti-capitalist sense that would require the decentralization of work from everyone’s lives and the creation of new public systems to replace it; of reliable, affordable living that makes everyone freer and makes bullshit jobs obsolete.

Somehow I doubt Christie means it the same way.

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Heads up: I usually publish twice a week, but between holiday school closures, a forecasted snow day, and some upcoming travel, this week’s schedule is a little dicey. Talk to you soon!