EJ Dixon

They're making it work.

And marriage, at the end of the day, is about, like, making it work however the fuck you can.

Yeah.

So I still stand by that.

And I think I'm actually surprised in retrospect by how nuanced and sophisticated that insight was, considering how stupid I was.

It is about the Trump of it all.

But I think beyond the Trump of it all, it's reflective of a certain era of the Internet.

It was a product of an era of the internet that was very click-baity, I think, where every headline was kind of demanding as much attention as possible.

It was the era of the Facebook algorithm.

where all of the headlines were like, the one reason why you should care about Chrissy Teigen's postpartum depression or something like that.

And I feel like why I want Donald and Melania's marriage was very much in that tradition.

So it's a little cringe and embarrassing in that respect, that I was sort of playing the game.

But it was also an era of the internet that was very earnest.

And I write something in the piece that I wrote for The Cut that cringe is sort of – there's a formula for cringe, which is, like, earnestness plus vulnerability plus underlying insecurity equals cringe.

And at the time, like, I considered myself a very staunch feminist and a very staunch leftist.

And I was a little insecure about the fact that, like, I was about to get married and, like, enter this –

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I was and I was insecure about that.

And I was sort of like I could see myself like on the page trying to like justify it to myself because it was something that I was like insecure about.