Casual Dating Before Marriage Isn't a Luxury Belief
Many casual daters ultimately want marriage--and still obtain it. Alex Cooper is no exception.
In case you missed it, Alex Cooper of sex-positive podcast Call Her Daddy fame has announced her pregnancy, or according to one highly publicized accusation on Twitter from Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, “quietly got married and had a baby” despite hypocritically preaching the gospel of casual sex. (I won’t spend this article dunking on him specifically—he’s deleted the tweet so best not to pile on.)
But just to get one thing out of the way, none of this was done “quietly.” Cooper’s 2023 wedding was covered in Vogue, and her pregnancy wasn’t incidentally spotted by paparazzi, but announced by a PR team with professional maternity photos. She has openly mentioned her husband multiple times on her podcast. One must wonder if Brad Wilcox also considers Gilbert Gottfried “softspoken.”
But anyway, Wilcox wasn’t the only one to react with surprise or even anger at Alex Cooper’s baby announcement, given that she has made a public persona out of being a sex-positive woman who runs a podcast that basically consists of women’s locker room talk. Famously, she gets famous women to admit naughty details of their lives, such as Katy Perry saying that if her then-beau Orlando Bloom had washed the dishes, she would announce, “Get ready to get your dick sucked.” Well, at least we know Justin Trudeau is having fun!
The main accusation is that Cooper was “hypocritical” to create content that presented casual dating in a positive light while getting married and having a baby. By secretly choosing a traditional path for herself, she has apparently been living a double life and lying to all the impressionable women who consume her content.
But the people angry about Alex Cooper’s life decisions are not genuinely concerned for her fans. They want Cooper (and women like her) to suffer the consequences of playing the field and failing to settle down as young as possible—which, by the way, is the same revenge fantasy often used to shame age-gap relationships. But Cooper’s timeline is far from unusual, and her decision to date around and then get married to a man she met at the absolutely decrepit age of gasp twenty-six, is actually incredibly common. Many women who date casually, or who sleep around, still get married—some on a relatively typical timeline—not to “beta chumps” who don’t know any better, but to men who have lived similar lives, who had similar timelines in mind.
For many casual daters, often upper middle class educated young people in cities, marriage is still the goal, but they view their young adulthood as the time to date around—not instead of getting married, but before it. It’s not a luxury belief to enjoy casual sex and then get married. It’s just what lots of people do.
