Madison Cawthorn is getting divorced 8 months into marriage

[Crumpets]

Speaking as someone two years older than Cawthorn who worked in DC, I know literally zero people there my age or younger who are married and work in anything government or government-adjacent. It's just not a thing to be in the DC policy sphere and get married in your 20s. Unfortunately for Cawthorn, he found this out the hard way.

[Crumpets]

Speaking as someone two years older than Cawthorn who worked in DC, I know literally zero people there my age or younger who are married and work in anything government or government-adjacent. It's just not a thing to be in the DC policy sphere and get married in your 20s. Unfortunately for Cawthorn, he found this out the hard way.

I'm curious, how diverse were your social circles in terms of geographic origin and politics and levels of religiosity and the like? It may be that what you describe is specific to "the DC policy sphere", but I think that it's more generally true of white people from the professional/managerial class, particularly if they're not from the South, which means that for people who don't check all of those boxes things can be different. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that that's true even for people who live and work in DC.

I recall that when I lived in Georgia I was once driving a (very drunk) friend home when she started crying because by her age her brother and sister had both met their future spouses and she didn't have anyone yet. At the time she was 23.

Yeah, I think you're right and it does probably extend outside DC. On the diversity point, it was a pretty stark case of just how stratified the US (and I'd argue especially the eastern half of the US) is racially when I was working two jobs in DC. There was about 9 months when I would work my think tank job 9-5 and then work as a barista 6-midnight. In my day job, there were usually two or three non-white people in an office of 20-30, and about the same number of people who grew up in the DC area. In my evening job, I was usually the only non-Hispanic white person on staff and the only one who wasn't from the general DC-MD-VA area.

[Crumpets]

Speaking as someone two years older than Cawthorn who worked in DC, I know literally zero people there my age or younger who are married and work in anything government or government-adjacent. It's just not a thing to be in the DC policy sphere and get married in your 20s. Unfortunately for Cawthorn, he found this out the hard way.

Curious, is there a reason for this?

A couple, at least based on my personal experiences. A big part is the middling salaries combined with a very high cost of living and long hours that make it so most people don't really have a lot of extra time or money to spend on being social or spoiling your date. But I think there's also a lot of people in that particular sphere who had pretty nice upbringings thanks to the 90s tech economy and want to be able to have a family and raise kids to the same standards their parents had for them - so, single-family home in a nice neighborhood, private school, maybe even a second house. And now they see that that's just not going to be a reality unless they win the lottery. This probably wouldn't apply to Cawthorn specifically, but I think that's at least why even people with a steady income living on their own are still putting off marriage and family-making.