On the one hand I get that it's hard to take me seriously when I say to discard marriage as a dream, considering that I have a fiancé. On the other hand, I had and have already done what I am advising other women to do.

I get why women love the idea of romantic love. In a way it's like a perversion of the social order, in which men range from being thoughtlessly inconsiderate to outright cruel toward women. Instead of being treated horribly by a man, he'll care about you instead :) How sweet.

But what I've always hated the most about this romanticization of romantic love is the way it suggests that other forms of love, especially platonic love between friends, is somehow insufficient. Implicitly I think a lot of women feel this too, like when they complain about their girlfriends no longer wanting to spend time with them after they begin romantic relationships with men. But still, very few women I know are willing to explicitly view romantic love as being on the same level with platonic love.

I recently tried to encourage my friend to consider marriage as something optional to her happiness, as in, she could be just as happy unmarried/uncoupled as she could be in a marriage/couple. The more I tried to make my point the more upset she became. Through the conversation, it seemed that marriage/couplehood represented something more than it was for me. Some sense of care and intimacy, more elevated and eternal than one could have with a friend? As though so many marriages between men and women aren't horrendous, slow-working death traps for the wives.

I do not think one can decenter men until one decenters couplehood and marriage as well. I get why people would want to be married. I myself want to be married. But that doesn't mean I need to believe that marriage/couplehood is a prerequisite to the best live I could have.

Having been friends with some of these people since we were in high school or college together, it is both incredible and sad to see that they seem to have lost the plot completely. A lot of my friends end up with these incomes because they didn't grow up with much (or at least...felt like they didn't), so they want themselves and their loved ones to experience less scarcity.

On the one hand, I understand. I didn't craft my dating guidelines the way I did for no reason. I like having money too! On the other hand, mindsets of scarcity and fear will not always be fixed by having more money. I think that's where people get lost.

Let me clarify that I am not a stranger to not having money. Years came and went where my family subsisted on congee, pickles, and Japanese curry cubes. Years where we didn't eat a single piece of meat. I've always lived in the middle class, but throughout many of the variations.

So I get it. Kind of, but not really. When I think about hypergamy, it's always as the means to a material end. That end is a life where I never have to worry about going back to a congee-pickle-curry diet ever again. Where I never have to worry about how to pay for my parents' eldercare or have to deny my children the opportunity to attend a private university. (Notably, all of these issues could also be solved with better social institutions, which I advocate for as well.)