Think not that it has escaped the attention of your author that in the two or so years since she left the Bay Area and cast off the mantle of “Bay Area trad girl,” it has been taken up, and in no small way–on the contrary, there seems to be a growing base of support for a sort of trad worldview among the Silicon Valley set.
The chief difference, I think, from the way that I was trad in my youth is that the thing I was reacting to was “hookup culture.” For whatever reason, that was big in the magazines and such at the time in a way that it isn’t today, accompanied by lots of hand-wringing. But more than that I actually experienced it some: not firsthand, but many friends were participants, and seeing its effects on friends and acquaintances was part of what pushed me toward trad at the time.
I think it’s not even quite that I came to think I was wrong about that part of trad (other parts, maybe) as much as it just became less salient to me as I got older and hookup culture became a less common feature of life.
The people involved are older, so it makes sense that the new Silicon Valley brand of trad would be older, too: the depredations it’s reacting to aren’t those of hookup culture but those of serial monogamy. Its tenets:
- contemporary dating culture encourages:
- serial, monogamous, multi-year relationships with no strong expectation of or timeline for marriage
- high expectations and a search for “the one”
- this is dumb
- you don’t need several years of dating someone to know if you’re compatible: if you’re optimizing for finding that out you can do so relatively quickly
- an excess of choices leaves people unsatisfied/always holding out for something better
- serial monogamy norms waste a lot of time and emotional energy
- people are better off, more secure, and more able to build stable connections in a relationship they know is intended for the long term
- therefore people should
- date with marriage in mind
- optimize for determining compatibility quickly and then either get married or break up
- plausibly use a matchmaker, or have arranged marriages
What do I think about all this? I don’t know; honestly it just feels a bit boring to me these days now that I’m out of my trad phase. But it seems probably at least kinda right.
in the same sense that BAP is feminism for men, default friend is the incel movement for women
“we need to bring back arranged marriages because i can’t get a man to commit to me” rhymes with “govt-issued gfs”