When she was 20 years old and a junior at Harvard College, Grazie Sophia Christie had an epiphany. She could study hard and diligently pursue her “ideal existence” though years of work and effort.
Or she “could just marry it early.”
Christie chose the latter.
In a column for New York magazine’s The Cut, the Cuban American editor and writer extolled the value of marrying an older, wealthier man as a shortcut to the life she desired. Christie’s March 27 story went viral, topping the magazine’s “most popular” list and inspiring hundreds of overwhelmingly negative comments online and on social media. As Miami New Times described it, “The essay hit the internet with a virtual thud heard round the world.”
Readers were taken aback by myriad aspects of Christie’s florid essay, which runs nearly 4,000 words. Though she was an undergraduate, Christie lugged “a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School,” which she felt offered the best options for a suitable mate. “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,” she wrote. “Older men still desired those things.”
“My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend,” she writes.
She crashed an event at the Harvard Business School and met her future husband when she was 20, and they married four years later.
Many readers were struck by the fact that Christie had the benefit of an elite education — she also completed a fellowship at Oxford University — yet chose to enter into an unequal marriage. “My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend,” she writes. “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.”
Christie, now 27, writes that she enjoys time “to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles.”
There is, Christie writes, a downside to her monied existence: “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.”
By marrying so young — although as many social media users pointed out, her husband is only 10 years older — Christie was able to leave a “lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer.”
A recurring theme in the viral response to Christie’s article, ostensibly about age-gap relationships, is that it should have been titled “The Case for Marrying a Rich Man.”
Christie’s transactional approach to marriage and relationships resonated — negatively — with readers. An online parody of her original piece has already been posted by the literary magazine McSweeney’s. Her words have been dissected by a columnist at Slate, who called it “bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.”
Online, people who commented on Christie’s essay called it “an insult to women of any age,” “a sad piece of writing,” and “pitiful in so many ways.” Some readers wondered if the article was a satire or a joke. One of the kinder comments on New York magazine’s website said: “This is one of the most embarrassing things I have ever read. I am truly mortified for the writer.”
According to her personal website, Christie is editor-in-chief of a new publication, The Miami Native, “a serious magazine about an unserious city.” Her website’s bio page, which appears to have been disabled, previously stated that she was “writing a novel between Miami, London, sometimes France.”
Write a Reply or Comment
You should Sign In or Sign Up account to post comment.