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Would You Rather Have Married Young?

Lena Dunham, Sally Rooney, and The End of Experience

Not only is the happy-ending romance genre undergoing a renaissance that seems directly aimed at young and queer people, but of course there are the secular-adjacent offshoots of the tradwives, those influencers who are not openly religious but whose lifestyles attest to the satisfactions of early marriage and motherhood. The opportunity to seek experiences that were previously impossible or destructive was the supreme — and the only — goal my generation inherited as the antidote to all those traditional lifestyles which were not “fit for purpose.” My mother, who came of age in the ‘70s, was an early adopter of the experience-object and it formed the bedrock of my sense of life. A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there… I know I was twenty-three, I had just started working at the magazine, you and I were living together in that horrible flat in the Liberties, and Kate was still in Dublin, and Tom, and Aoife.

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