maybe you shouldn't marry the rich, old man

and if you do, don't do this

tonight, i want us to dissect the words of a woman who knows so much yet nothing at all. a woman who missed the forest for the trees, yet still managed to make herself a sprawling estate while others would have settled for a simple tree house. a woman whose words launched a thousand ships of awe and anger, both earned and unearned. a woman who has to live with the curse of thinking her beauty is all she has in this life. a woman who mistakes her physical looks for power, and eschews any semblance of responsibility for a gilded cage of “ease.”

tonight we dissect the immortal words of grazie sophia christie’s march 2024 article for the cut, “the case for marrying an older man: a woman’s life is all work and little rest. an age gap relationship can help.”

an indecent proposal

she begins her article in a location familiar to all diouana women: the south of france. unabashedly, she wrote:

“in the summer, in the south of france, my husband and i like to play, rather badly, the lottery. we take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. i purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. i never cash them in, nor do i check the winning numbers. for i already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

he is ten years older than i am. i chose him on purpose, not by chance. as far as life decisions go, on balance, i recommend it.”

it’s interesting that she frames it as he marrying her; meaning, he gave her the privilege of being his wife as opposed to her letting him become her husband; thereby proving he was the victor out of all her suitors. here, we surmise that her worldview is centered on him as her source of gravity and not herself. her posturing be damned.

through memory, she shares the origin story of her marriage and how she became his wife:

"ironies began to mock me. i could study all i wanted, prove myself as exceptional as i liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. my youth. the newness of my face and body. compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. i shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. 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.

so naturally i began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each saturday to the harvard business school to work on my nabokov paper. in one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. 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. apologies to progress, but older men still desired those things.

i could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. each time i reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. as for me, i liked history, victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books i’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. i’d have disliked being called calculating, but i had, like all women, a calculator in my head. i thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

i was competitive by nature, an english-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (great american novel; email job). a little bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. i resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. restless one saturday night, i slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an hdmi cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. i danced. i drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. 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.

i used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. not him. in those early days, i spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than i ever have since. i wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native france, something befitting a daughter-in-law. it worked; i meant it. after graduation and my fellowship at oxford, i stayed in europe for his career and married him at 23.

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."

first we begin with her realization that time is not on her side. she has a biological clock that will tick louder and louder as the years pass on; she’s daunted by the reality of working in a corporate setting to make her living, knowing full well the hellscape that awaits her.¹ being the fighter that she is, she refuses to lose. she also refuses to suffer, so she looks for what she perceives to be a “cheat code” to a woman’s constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness: marrying older.

as a fellow harvard alumnus, i find her description of the dating scene on campus apt: “i resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me.”

thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected is a funny way to frame your female classmates. but the most damning phrase of all is what follows, “opposite of me.”

her description of her female classmates reminds me of the idea of “a harvard ten,” a phrase as offensive as it it elusive. offensive because it assumes a lack of physical beauty in exchange for intellectual strength. as if a woman can’t have both. but then again, we know that everyone is afraid of beautiful women.

further, the concept, at least its signified, of a harvard ten always struck me as caroline basset-kennedy cosplay. only those blonde, skinny, and slightly ugly (in an aristocratic sense) need apply. our author, grazie sophia christie, a beautiful redhead from miami, does not fit the bill. neither did i.²

given that she points out that those callow harvard boys only liked, at least publicly, thin, sexless, emotionally detached but socially connected female collegiates and she resented them for it, one has to assume she didn’t receive the attention she wanted from the type of harvard men she wanted.

to be fair to her, those boys really were callow. i remember a hellish night at the owl, and reaching out to a man i’ve only ever referred to as a philosopher-king, asking him, “how were you in college? these men are clearly on their way and yet…” to which he wrote me a sonnet that ended with, “…those boys, still concerned with chasing mayflowers…no wonder you find yourself unimpressed.”

so, i get it. those men weren’t fun. but i don’t imagine the hbs men were any better.

to each their own, i guess.

power and its miscontents

sidestepping her invocation of hubert humphrey as she describes her college-aged body (“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. apologies to progress, but older men still desired those things.” is wild work), her raison d’être for her routine visits to baker library is interesting and deserves its own meta-analysis:

“why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can.”

assuming the burdens of womanhood is our price for living a life truly on our own terms. this line of thinking is the foundation of my diouana woman universe. womanhood is bloody and requires us to get our hands dirty (metaphorically speaking) if we stand a chance to stay in the game long enough to win.

from the author’s perspective, a young woman’s power is in her beauty. from my perspective, a young woman’s power is in her future. those two things are not mutually exclusive. you can recognize the immense value of your beauty, 1/5 of your erotic capital, and cultivate it through skill and also understand that being beautiful will not solve all your problems, so you cultivate other aspects of your essence and exteriority as well.

the idea that women have “a tragically short window of power” is patriarchal thinking at best, and feigning ignorance at worse.

what is power? i’m asking an intellectually honest question here.

what is power?

faithful readers of diary of a diouana woman will already know the answer, but let us revisit the exchange between queen cersei lannister and lord petyr baelish, better known as littlefinger, to hammer the point home:

“cersei [touching littlefinger’s sigil]: a mockingbird. you created your own sigil, didn't you?

littlefinger: yes.

cersei: appropriate; for a self-made man with so many songs to sing.

littlefinger: i'm glad you like it. some people are fortunate enough to be born into the right family. others have to find their own way.

cersei: i heard a song once. about a boy of modest means; [who] found his way into the home of a very prominent family. he loved the eldest daughter. sadly, she had eyes for another.

littlefinger: when boys and girls live in the same home, awkward situations can arise. sometimes i've heard even brothers and sisters develop certain affections. and when those affections become common knowledge, well that is an awkward situation indeed. especially in a prominent family. prominent families often forget a simple truth i found.

cersei: and which truth is that?

littlefinger: knowledge is power.

cersei [to her guards]: seize him. cut his throat. stop…oh wait…i've changed my mind. let him go. step back three paces. turn around. close your eyes.

cersei [to littlefinger]: power is power. do see see if you can take some time away from your coins and your whores to locate the stark girl for me. i would very much appreciate it.

cersei: *makes her exit, with her guards in tow.*

power, in any environment where the stakes are high, hinges on the ability to direct resources. money, information, and time are resources we’re all familiar with.

the idea that being a young and beautiful (mutually exclusive) woman means you have power, aka the ability to direct resources is misguided. especially in institutional settings. meaning, any environment where power is hierarchical and concentrated at the top.

we’ve explored this in my previous essay, power is not a young woman’s game and my recent psa, psa to diouana women who understand power as a verb.

we all exist in a system. right now, the system runs on capitalism. meaning that money (read: profit) is the resource everyone is after, and are often willing to exchange all their time for it. within this system, there are institutions that perpetuate it. do not mistake capitalism for the system, it’s merely the mechanism. it’s important to understand this nuance because i believe you to be a beautiful, hardworking young women. and this system values you. not necessarily because you’re beautiful; it could care less actually; but because you’re willing to exchange your time for money and in doing so, you perpetuate the system. it values you because you are useful. it values you because you choose, for logistical and moral reasons, to live in an economy of favors, not an economy of love. i wrote about these two economies in my essay, “the wisdom of whores.”

in fact, your willingness to forgo the pursuit of the economy of love that grazie sophia christie lives in, is why her article cut so deeply.

as an aside, remember that article i referenced in my most recent psa? this idea of being value to the system because you perpetuate its existence was touched upon by the author, albeit in a highly offensive way, so be warn:

“anyway, perfectly ordinary slaveowner dicaprio asks a rhetorical question, a fundamental question, that has occurred to every 7th grade white boy and about 10% of 7th grade white girls, and the profound question he asked was: ‘why don't they just rise up?’

kneel down, quentin tarantino is a genius. that question should properly come from the mouth of the german dentist: this isn't his country, he doesn't really have an instinctive feel for the system, so it's completely legitimate for a guy who doesn't know the score to ask this question, which is why 7th grade boys ask it; they themselves haven't yet felt the crushing weight of the system, so immediately you should ask, how early have girls been crushed that they don't think to ask this? but tarantino puts this question in the mouth of the power, it is spoken by the very lips of that system; because of course the reason they don't rise up is that he— that system— taught them not to. when the system tells you what to do, you have no choice but to obey.

if "the system tells you what to do" doesn't seem very compelling, remember that the movie you are watching is django unchained. why did django rise up? he went from whipped slave to stylish gunman in 15 minutes. how come django was so quickly freed not just from physical slavery, but from the 40 years of repeated psychological oppression that still keeps every other slave in self-check? did he swallow the red pill? how did he suddenly acquire the emotional courage to kill white people?

‘the dentist freed him.’ so? lots of free blacks in the south, no uprisings. ‘he's 'one in ten thousand'?’ everybody is 1 in 10000, check a chart. ‘he got a gun?’ doesn't help, even today there are gun owners all over america who feel that they aren't free. no. you should read this next sentence, get yourself a drink, and consider your own slavery: the system told django that he was allowed to. he was given a document that said he was a bounty hunter, and as an agent of the system, he was allowed to kill white people. that his new job happened to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident, the system decided what he was worth and what he could do with his life. his powers were on loan, he wasn't even a vassal, he was a tool.”

i bring up this jarring passage from an equally jarring article written in 2013 to illustrate my point: the system is the system; power is power. beauty is a tool. not power itself.

to grazie sophia christie’s credit, she clearly understood the stakes of the game. in her own words: “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."

her preferring to consider a thing called ease resonance with my litany of part love letter, part manifestos i’ve written on here; notably, when you're a woman too beautiful to work (hard).

i get it.

what i do not get is willingly abdicating power in favor of “ease.” i do not mean the “power” that comes from a high-powered corporate career. nor do i mean the “power” of being “an equal” to your partner in a gloria steinem sense. no, i mean the power of being lucid to everything around you, even if you do not. comment; of understanding the stakes and directing outcomes in your favor; of having a say in how things unfold and capital is deployed; the power of being an owner, not just in license but action.

this kind of power prevents one from playing the role of the “pliable, submissive wife” because it’s oxymoronic, contradictory, and will make you lose your edge.

more on that later.

a woman of (in)dependent means

what i do appreciate about grazie sophia christie’s recounting of her marital origin is how committed she was to getting what she wanted. that i respect: “one of the organizers asked me to leave. 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.”

she speaks of her husband like a woman in love. “on intimate terms with the universe” is a beautiful way to introduce one’s partner.

it’s clear she played her hand expertly: “…i wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native france, something befitting a daughter-in-law. it worked; i meant it. after graduation and my fellowship at oxford, i stayed in europe for his career and married him at 23.”

it’s the little things that count, and people always remember those who remember them.

wasn’t it nicki who warned us?: “…shoulda sent a thank-you note.”

back to grazie sophia christie’s haunting article. as one continues to read, one dives into into her worldwide surrounding relationships. assertively, she wrote:

“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.

there is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. a boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. she ‘likes to do it for him.’ a million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. all while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. hauling him at her own expense.

i find a post on reddit where five thousand men try to define ‘a woman’s touch.’ they describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. candles, coasters, side tables. someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. to give compliments. i wonder what these women are getting back. i imagine them like cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. on occasion i meet a nice couple, who grew up together. they know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me. but i think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and i think, no, absolutely not, too risky. riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

my younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. by his age, i had long since wisened up. he leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. his towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. his lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. she is capable beyond words. statistically, they will not end up together. he moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. she picked out his couch. i will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. if they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. i tell her when i visit because i like her, though i get in trouble for it: you shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. he’d burned out — but i could reenchant things. i danced at restaurants when they played a song i liked. i turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what i provided. 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.

at 20, i had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. i’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom i was meant to bet regardless. my husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. analyzable for compatibility. he bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster; listen, don’t give advice. young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

my husband isn’t my partner. 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. adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. but his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. i moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. by opting out of partnership in my 20s, i granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. i am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. when i searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. he had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). meanwhile, i took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. if each was a start-up, the other was the first hire, an intense dedication i found riveting. yet every time she called me, i hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. i pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

the author expertly highlights what every young woman who dates an age-appropriate (or even older) man comes to see: he’s not fully formed. not even from the perspective of profession, but from the simple criteria of existing as an adult. in these discussions, i often find that not enough attention is placed upon parents who send out the teenaged-soon-to-be-adult soon to be parented by another parents’ adultified-people-pleaser-daughter, but that’s not the topic of discussion.

modern love is complex, and it is true that young women are often encounter young men who are not fully formed, but in my opinion, and that of the author, it’s not are duty to wisen them up. guide, gently, sure; but execute on their behalf? no. he can pick out his own couch and ask chatgpt to generate him a list of items he’ll need for his new apartment.

girlfriends are for courting, not playing house. but i digress.

what’s interesting about this part of the article, is that we begin to see the power that the author abdicated: the power that comes with knowing who you are, outside of external forces. this sticks out to us in her sentence, “at 20, i had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse.”

here, the worry seemed to have been both the journey of self-discovery and doing it alongside someone who would take more than he would give. she was correct to have that fear.

in continuing to read, we come across this passage with a a bit of teeth to it, “…adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. but his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on…by opting out of partnership in my 20s, i granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. i am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance…meanwhile, i took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. if each was a start-up, the other was the first hire, an intense dedication i found riveting. yet every time she called me, i hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time…i pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.”

the quiet part said out loud of grazie sophia christie’s essay is that she did not marry old (he was approximately 30 to her 23; mentally speaking, she was his peer), she married rich. generationally, it seems.

liquidity allows one to outsource tedious tasks and not concern yourself with minute details, allowing for creativity to flourish; and if one is principally preoccupied with entertaining one’s partner, as the author is (in her own words, “…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.”); creativity is one’s best asset when dreaming up and sustaining a fantasy world where both parties can get lost.

a dreamscape made real. that is what she provides. and that is her job. even if no one else sees it as such, or respect it as fact.

her job is creator of dreams, and curator of fantasy. i respect that.

but, to remain objective, we must point out that she willingly relented the pursuit of self discovery, through sustained effort (“at 20, i had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self…”) for ease (“i had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.”).

now, i am of the belief that anything can be a vehicle for self-discovery, especially relationships. so although she resigned from her corporate career in pursuit of martial bliss, one must assume life’s lessons do not stop coming simply become a marriage license was signed. being a wife does not exempt one from hard wife, i’d argue just the opposite.

staying married seems a job in and of itself. and your partner is a catch? well, well, well, how fun and exciting for you.

i mean this! relationships can be incredible conduits of growth. there is nothing quite like true emotionally intimacy and in reading her article, i feel this is the one thing grazie sophia christie does not acknowledge. there seems to be this implicit belief that to marry well is not to marry one’s best friend. that to have a “partner” is not to have a “provider.” that a partner is defective if they are not perfect; on paper at least.

i do not take this view.

i’m in agreement with grazie sophia christie that she should not work hard if that is not her desire. especially since the system’s idea of hard work creates environments for sycophantic workaholics to bully and try to intimidate beautiful young women out of jealously.

whatever wisdom i possess, and if i do, it’s fleeting at best, is the result of hard-won, and often times spectacularly lost, battles at the hands of life.

god watched as i was beaten; accused; mistreated; and humiliated. and after all that, he sat next to me at the hitchcock screening to tell me he’s proud of me; for i did not waver. and i got up, again and again and again. no matter the emotional bruises or trauma. nothing will stop me from getting to the top.

this is what it means to not be daunted by the project of becoming one’s ideal self. sure, you’ll take a couple of punches. you might even be thrown off a cliff. but even at rock bottom, you do not become disillusioned by the wall you must climb to get back to where you once was. and when you return, you do so from the position of having lived, and dead, then came back to life. you return from a position of strength, not fear.

it reminds of vincent cassel’s character who told natalie portman’s, “you could be brilliant, but you’re a coward.”

in this position, you would never accept a life where walking on egg-shells is the tenor of your marriage:

“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, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, you aren’t being supportive lately. it’s a frenchism to say, ‘take a decision,’ and from time to time i joke: from whom? occasionally i find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and i think what a long way i have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.”

if it frightens you to think of yourself as vapor, you should stop. you are not a cloud: susceptible to evaporation by penetrating sunlight. no, you are a vixen, a viper, a victor.

you climbed out of the uber because you saw who you wanted, and knew he would be yours. no self-doubt, no second-guessing.

it reminds me another thing the philosopher-king once told me, “class cannot be bought or sold. it is won: either though right of birth or right of conquest.”

you conquered. but you seem to have abdicated power somewhere between your coronation and your wedding: “…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, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, you aren’t being supportive lately.”

again, having a “provider” should not mean you cease having a “partner.” after all, the idiom once told to me is, “divine consort, not divine cosigner.”

jokes aside, the most haunting words from grazie sophia christie’s article is how she describers her husband:

“my husband isn’t my partner. he’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend.”

never a partner, rarely a friend.

it reminds me of how i used to conceive of men. in the month where the veil is the thinnest, i remember lightening a series of candles in my apartment and meditating on my love life. i reflected on my track record with men and it dawned on me: what i admired most about god, i was seeking to find it in a man.

i loved god as the father; as my shepherd, and there i was taking my undying love for the divine masculine principle, as seen through god, and transposing it on human men who could not tell me the first thing about the bible. nor the book of david. let alone ephesians 5:25.

it has been my experience that men often want things they have not earned. female submissiveness for starters. but that’s a separate topic.

the topic at hand is the abdication of power simply because one does not pay rent.

i find that thinking strange, and off. if you manage your own pot, and invest wisely, one would think you’d actually have a better hand. especially with no fixed expenses. but i’m getting ahead of myself.

what’s love got to do with it?

what i always thought deserved it’s own spotlight, if not a separate essay, from grazie sophia christie’s essay is her vision of a new reality for women:

“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.”

her point that the current system, and those who perpetuate, make women feel like personal failures for, ostensibly, not “having it all” is poignant. especially when sheryl sandberg’s “lean in” feminism was the lay of the land: career, marriage, kids. all at the highest echelons; all competing for your undivided attention. it’s ruthless, and requires a certain cunning and capital to truly pull it off. let alone thrive in it.

the author’s vision of, “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” is palpable in its appeal.

it’s a vision where women are not asked to simply become better men: endless work ethic, unrelenting loyalty to structures not built with them in mind, and having to navigate environments where their assertiveness and pride in their good work is not always appreciated. on top of that, being tasked with remaining maternal, amidst 9a tomorrow deadlines when the email came in at 4:30p when school let out at 3p, ballet is at 4p, and dinner happens at 6p. then 8p catch up calls to ensure final alignment when bedtime is at 9p and you already missed bathtime. no woman can remain maternal, sane, and rested with this schedule.

so, grazie sophia christie was onto something when she wrote, “…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.”

the abdication of power simply because he provides is interesting, but on the whole, it seems to have worked out for both parties:

“once, when we first fell in love, i put my head in his lap on a long car ride; i remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that i was so young, he feared he would lose me. last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.”

i’ll admit, i do not know what she means by real equality in the passage above, but in the article as a whole, my read is that she believes her “youth” was fair exchange for his “older wisdom.”

but again, it’s an odd way to position their story because not only do they seem to be in love, both with the reality and fantasy of each other, but the source of ease within their marriage is less his elder status and moreso the wealth that engulfs them.

it is very much possible to marry a hot, young, rich guy. why that isn’t seen, nor presented, as “the cheat code” but marrying some old, rich guy is, i don’t know.

but if one were to surmise why, one has to assume it’s because older men are presented as “easier” to lock down so to speak, and that it would be “easier” to convince them to provide as it were. because you happen to be “young” and “hot.”

but that’s not true.

the wherewithal it takes to convince a man that has lived 9 nines before you met him to give you everything, and then some, without you having to lift a finger is the same wherewithal it takes to reach the highest levels at your local, friendly private equity firm. it takes skill, cunning, and finesse. it’s not child’s play and why it’s presented as such, i don’t know. one has to assume it’s a psyop, but i’m being conspiratorial if not facetious.

the sprinkle sprinkle lady, shera, has made one of her platforms advocating for this route. but even shera, ever the cunning witch, never advises the abdication of power. just the receiving of materials you did not pay for.

but materials do not a relationship make.

emotional intimacy is what moves a great relationship into the realm of the sublime.

it’s what tethers you to another, no matter the external forces hellbent on severing you two apart.

it’s what makes you feel like the luckiest, most spoiled girl in the world.

not for the 30-carat engagement ring he procured for you, but for the fact that he allows himself to stand naked and unafraid in front of you; for the fact that when you call out, he always answers; for the fact that it is not his fealty that is his defining trait, but his willingness to consider that his greatest play might just be betting on you.

so, yes, materials are nice. and i insist on them. after all, don’t i deserve love…and jewelry?³

but more than anything, more than everything, we deserve men who feel like home to us, not just provide us one. men who take us just as seriously as we take them.

and men who change their entire life trajectory just to indulge our endless fantasies.

sweet dreams,
a diouana woman

p.s. truth or dare

you know how in your diary, you write something down then rip it out and place it in the tiny makeup bag you keep in your purse as a manifestation method? yeah, these p.s. truth or dares are the digital versions of my little ripped off notes.

truth: situational awareness. an insistence on being co-owners. never split the difference.

dare: live solely in the fantasy, at the expense of the reality.

disclaimer: the views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any employer, past or current.

1. as always, here is my treatise on corporate life: “there’s a real indignity to corporate life. a hollowing of the spirit so to speak. but in that hollowness, there are opportunities to gain resilience. and that’s what keeps me going. the idea that this, too, shall past. and i’ll have been made better as a result. not by the bullshit i endured. but the woman i became in being able to navigate egos, eccentricities, and the ego-death that comes with playing humble while you silently consolidate power.”

2. though i do remember a (black) friend of mine telling me during a catch up at tatte that i dress like a white woman. the jury is still out on if i do or do not look like gwyneth paltrow.

3. i absolutely love the addams family! morticia was indomitable. this sentiment, of deserving jewelry as well as love, reminds me of mary cosby from the real housewives of salt lake city when andy asked her if she’s in love with her husband. mary’s response is pure comedic gold.