A girl's gotta have a backup

You expose yourself to significant risks if you choose to forgo building a career

The trad wives of TikTok, the unfulfilled girl bosses, and the red pilled men in search of a beautiful mid to call their own all assure us: a strong focus on career is not in most young women’s best interests. Instead, young women are better off directing their energy towards finding an older, more financially secure man and locking him down before they “hit the wall” so that they can get to work making his babies before their eggs are all dried up. After all, whatever “email job” they might have will never compare to the value they can add and the meaning they can make raising their children, and so building a family should take precedence over gaining accreditations and promotions.

It’s almost certainly true that most parents would say their family and children are more important and bring them greater fulfillment than does their job. This is especially obvious when you consider that not everyone is a well paid knowledge worker performing intellectually stimulating or impactful work. A lot of jobs are just jobs. And a lot of people would stop working in a heartbeat if they didn’t need the money. Given all of that, having the option to be a stay at home parent, or to only work part time at a low stress job can be attractive to many.

The “trad” marriage set up, where the husband performs most of the necessary paid work and the wife performs most of the necessary unpaid work, works well for many couples. Having one parent as the primary caregiver and the other as the primary breadwinner has efficiency benefits (especially if you have lots of kids)—it’s certainly easier to succeed at work if you don’t also have to manage tons of domestic responsibilities, and since child and elder care needs often conflict with being out of the house and unavailable from 9-5 it’s much easier to manage those if you only need to perform part time or flexible paid work rather than having a full time high-stress job. These traditional norms, while certainly not right for everyone, can provide a rough guide for how couples might benefit from division of labor within the family.

But… there’s an unavoidable tension between maximally benefitting from division of labor within a family and each (adult) member of the family being maximally functional as individuals. And the degree to which each member of a couple could be functional on their own can affect incentives and power dynamics in a marriage.

There’s a big difference between a woman with earning power ultimately deciding to get off the most high-intensity career track available to her after having kids (and after spending years with her husband) and a woman who chooses to forgo developing the skills or gaining the accreditations necessary to give her earning power in the first place who is searching for a husband from that position. The second woman might end up getting a “good deal”, but she’s also a lot more vulnerable.

I think it’s pretty clear that as women have gained economic independence (and the option for no fault divorce) marriage norms have in many ways improved for women. Men now do more housework, more child care and less wife beating and marital rape. Sure, some of this change is cultural, but it also reflects the fact that most men simply can’t get away with that stuff anymore. And I think that’s at least in part because their wives are much less vulnerable to a dissolution of the marriage.

Of course, women didn’t get these changes for free, they now perform significantly more paid work, even after kids, but many find this to be a worthwhile trade. And women who do choose to be full-on SAHMs also get to benefit from most of these norm changes. But… would we maintain these changes if women in aggregate opted out of education, massively reduced the amount of paid work they perform and if divorce was made less accessible? I’m not so sure we would.

The Case for Marrying an Older Man

About a year ago, an article by Grazie Sophia Christie, The Case for Marrying an Older Man, generated a lot of buzz in my corner of the internet, including many concerned and/or irritated tweets coming from other (mostly older) women. The article outlines the heroic tale of a woman who overcame social judgement and front-ran all of us in the trade of a lifetime, one which her peers irrationally refused to take (presumably because of feminism?): marrying an older man before you’ve hit the wall, forgoing career development and living a life of affluence and peace.

Sure, it’s possible that some of these tweets reflected other women’s jealousy at the easy and luxurious life she described, one in which she only performs paid work which she finds fulfilling. But they also illustrated rational concerns about encouraging young women to leave themselves vulnerable to male kindness by forgoing building personal optionality. She notes the sort of questions her relationship generated when she, a 20 year old undergrad at the time started dating a 30 year old MBA student:

Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita: “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

And while Grazie briefly acknowledges that there are costs to her set up…

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there [...]

… she quickly moves on to conclude that the benefits she gets, the ease of her life, blow such concerns out of the water. But for a lot of women, what’s implied by there being limits on what you can be angry with your partner about is an unacceptable price to pay just so that you can be lazy in your 20s.

It’s not that I don’t believe she’s happy, it’s just that I (and probably many of the other older women readers, who chose romantic partners rather than romantic mentors) recognize that she got very lucky. Her husband may be kind enough not to remind her of her vulnerability too often, not to take advantage of the relative power it gives him, but he could (it just floats there). And many other men in the same situation would. I could be wrong, but my intuition is that there’s likely a correlation between being the sort of older man who wants to support a younger woman financially (well before they start having kids) and being the sort of older man who would take this sort of advantage. And my intuition is also that many 23-year-olds wouldn’t necessarily be experienced enough to be able to tell the difference.

Grazie doesn’t just describe why this relationship dynamic works for her, she also recommends it to other women, making the case that “same-age same-stage relationships” too often end up with a “woman who is doing too much for too little.” But while many women could of course snag a guy a little bit older, the lifestyle she married into is simply not available to every cute, smart 20 year old (there are a lot of them after all!)

This piece doesn't so much make the case for an age-gap relationship as it does for a wealth-gap relationship (which is admittedly easier to find if you’re open to an age-gap). If some random undergrad followed her advice, sneaking into grad parties to look for their own eligible bachelor, they’d likely be disappointed to find that most recent MBA grads do not live the life she describes (bi-continental with a “cleaner thrice a week”).

Much of her article amounts, in my view, to giving women the “advice” that they ought to marry a kind, handsome, rich man who will take care of them without limiting their freedom. But… there’s a very limited supply of such men who are both single and looking for a romantic mentee (“My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend.”) The reason few women are taking the deal Grazie took is not “feminism”, it’s a supply / demand issue. And it’s a recognition that most “deals” that look too good to be true… are.

Failure modes

The obvious failure mode of a relationship in which the woman forgoes developing the skills and gaining the experience necessary for her to have independent earning power, and the one which people tend to focus on, is abuse and mistreatment. Perhaps, as Grazie alludes to in her article, a woman’s youth can equalize a wealth imbalance, but even if that’s the case it’ll only be the case for so long, by definition. And if you don’t intend to work, that means that relative to a working peer you’ll only be able to consider dating men who meet a higher income threshold—which of course means you can’t be as selective on all the other metrics you care about, including his desire to have power over you.

But the other obvious failure mode is financial distress. If at some point in your marriage your breadwinner fails to bring in enough bread… there’s not that much you can do if you don’t have any marketable skills of your own. This isn’t to say that you should be so risk intolerant that you insist both partners make as much money as possible all of the time. There are many cases where it’s very reasonable to have one partner scale back their career or stop working entirely. But still, being someone’s mentee might be cute when you’re in your 20s and still have “high breasts, most of [your] eggs, [...] a flush ponytail, a pep in [your] step that ha[s] yet to run out” but it probably won’t be so cute if your husband ever falls on tough times. Then he might really wish that he had a partner.