I often see bluepill feminists claim that before dating apps, women mostly married unattractive men out of necessity. That's just as absurd as the redpill fantasy that teen girls marrying 30-year-old men was ever the norm.

Anyone who lived through the '90s knows it wasn’t “traditional” in the least: this was the era of grunge and Beavis and Butt-Head, not I Love Lucy. And pre-2012, plenty of women happily dated men who didn't check all the "build-a-partner" boxes that dating apps have normalized. Gen Z has never experienced sexual maturity in a world without dating apps, so it is understandable that their understanding of sexual attraction has been irrevocably shaped by them.

Boomers weren't prudish, either: they had plenty of casual sex in the '70s before AIDS ruined everything. My own parents (born in the late 1940s) married in their thirties, my mom earned more than my dad during most of my childhood, and she had no shortage of suitors before my dad (understandable, given that she looked like a mix of Sophia Loren and Suzanne Pleshette). So much for the idea that Boomer women had to marry the first man who proposed to them, lest they become destitute old maids.

The WWII generation may have been the last truly traditional one in the U.S., but even they married for love. My maternal grandma, a working-class Catholic Midwesterner, was devoted to my grandfather decades after his death, wearing a locket of them together into her nineties and making us promise to bury her beside him on the other side of the country. My paternal grandma, in her dementia, still longed to "go home" to my grandpa.

Arranged marriage hasn't been the norm in the US since the early 1800s, yet some online still speak as if our grandparents' marriages were purely transactional. Much of it feels like projection from people who never actually knew their grandparents.