Advice To My Daughter: Marry Young - Larissa Phillips on Relearning The Facts of Life

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the latest installment of Casual August, writer and educator Larissa Phillips joins the pod to respond to the August 2 interview with Vanessa Grigoriadis, who theorized that childless cat ladies were secretly happier than moms, especially moms raising young children while caring for aging parents. Larissa related to much of what Vanessa said, but she had several things to add, including her later-in-life recognition that early motherhood makes more sense than later-in-life motherhood — and, what’s more, single motherhood might not be as cool and easy as 1980s media made it out to be.

A GenXer who grew up steeped in second-wave feminism, Larissa now advises her 20-something daughter to marry and start a family early, which is pretty much the opposite of what her own mom advised. In this conversation, Larissa (who was a guest on A Special Place In Hell back in March) explores how her thinking evolved, why her friends were shocked when she got pregnant at 29 (practically a teen mom!), how divorce rates in the 1970s and 80s made an entire generation wary of the nuclear family, and why she invokes Jordan Peterson when she explains to her daughter that being “high value” has a lot to do with being young. She and Meghan also wrestle with whether the hyper-professional, hyper-independent feminist ethos internalized by Gen Xers and millennials will end up being something of a blip in time in the history of civilization.

Larissa also talks about joining The Unspeakeasy at its upcoming retreat in Woodstock, NY this October.

GUEST BIO

Larissa Phillips is the founder and director of the Volunteer Literacy Project, a NPO that teaches reading to adults using a phonics-based curriculum. She also runs an educational program on her family farm in Upstate New York. She can be found on X (@larissaphillip) and Instagram (@honeyhollowfarmstay) and Substack, where she writes about farming, animals, and life as a lapsed Progressive living in Trumpland.

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HOUSEKEEPING

✈️ 2024 Unspeakeasy Retreats — See where we’ll be in 2024! https://bit.ly/3Qnk92n

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women: https://bit.ly/44dnw0v

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell: https://aspecialplace.substack.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a dating market and like, and you're on the market and you're also in the market.
0:08.4	So, you know, and I would tell her, I'd be like, you're high value.
0:11.6	You know, you're attractive, you're smart, you're athletic, you're nice, you're a very sociable person.
0:16.2	You're like a good prospect and you're young.
0:19.7	And you can't overlook that fact. You have so many choices
0:22.6	because of just naturally your high value, but then you're also young. And your value is going to
0:27.7	go down as you get older. And the market gets tighter as you get older. So, you know,
0:33.1	you just don't think about. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dow.
0:40.5	Casual August continues.
0:42.9	Last week, I had a pretty free-ranging conversation with poet and artist Emily Russo.
0:48.4	The week before that, I spoke with my friend Vanessa Gregoriatis, a journalist and now podcaster, who had called me because
0:55.6	she had some counterintuitive things to say about the childless cat lady discourse.
1:00.9	Specifically, her theory that moms are so miserable that they're secretly jealous of
1:05.9	childless people. Some of you loved that interview and some of you hated it, which is pretty much exactly how I knew things would go.
1:13.8	Many of you had things to add, including this week's guest, Larissa Phillips, who, in addition to being a writer and an adult literacy educator, runs a farm in upstate New York where she offers an education program for city kids.
1:29.7	Larissa was also on my other podcast, a special place in hell, by the way, talking about an incredible piece that she wrote for
1:34.5	Quillette. So you can go check that out if her name rings a bell. That's why. Larissa is also a mom
1:40.5	who once lived in Brooklyn, just as Vanessa does. But unlike Vanessa and unlike many of
1:47.1	her friends, Larissa had her first child at 29, ridiculously early by the standards of her peers.
1:53.4	And unlike her own very second-wave feminist mom, she now finds herself advising her own daughter
1:59.2	to get married and even have kids early.
2:02.1	This speaks to a question that I've wrestled with a lot, both on this podcast and on the other one,
	...

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