The Case for Getting a Life

This essay in The Cut is titled “The Case for Marrying an Older Man” and its first sentence is: “In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery,” so I can’t say I didn’t know what I was getting into. But Grazie Sophia Christie and an editor who remains unnamed but obviously despises her have created a classic hate-read of the kind I thought was extinct in these debased times. In thirty eight hundred intermittently grammatical words and as many unnecessary commas as possible Christie tells the story of her life as a twenty year old Harvard nymphet provocatively reading Lolita in the Harvard Business School library in order to bag an older man and graduate with her MRS degree, a tale so old she thinks she made it up.

I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out.

I swear that’s an actual quote. What the hell is a “flush ponytail?” Anyway her plan succeeds:

I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe…

After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

But, twist! When they met, she was twenty and he was a burned out, grizzled… thirty. When she said “older” she mostly meant “rich.” Now seven whole years later she’s ready to explore a philosophical territory made up of something like the negative space excluded by intersectional feminism and class solidarity. Recognizing that all too often it’s women’s labor that molds men into a shape women find appealing, Christie sees her proper role as the beneficiary of this labor, previously done by some now-used-up thirty year old hag. Not for her, the teaching of coasters! For her instead, the life of a robot girlfriend from classic sci-fi.

Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

This is an essay that dares to ask: “What if I made my whole life out of red flags?” The great irony of having time enough at last to “write full-time” is that when your rich husband funds your vanity lit mag, nothing will ever force you to learn how to write well.

Anyway they’re planning to have children soon and that will obviously go splendidly. Nobody in history has ever been this twenty seven years old, and I can’t wait for the update six or seven years from now, when she starts to get her first glimpse of how very long life really is.

by Rusty Foster, Today in Tabs |  Read more:

Image: Celine Ka Wing Lau

[ed. Otherwise known as golddigging. Currently burning up the internet. See also: ah, to be young (idiots, continue)]