"It used to be you wanted to marry up"
About this Quote
Nostalgia does a lot of work in that one line, and it does it with a shrug. Victoria Principal’s “It used to be you wanted to marry up” sounds like cocktail-party shorthand, but the bite is in the verb tense: used to. She’s not just describing dating habits; she’s marking a social order that felt stable enough to be taken for granted, and unstable enough to miss once it starts slipping.
“Marry up” is bluntly transactional, the kind of phrase polite society pretends it doesn’t use. It assumes marriage as an economic ladder, a reputational upgrade, a life raft. Coming from an actress whose career peaked in the glossy, status-obsessed ecosystem of late-20th-century celebrity culture, it lands as both insider observation and quiet indictment. Hollywood sold aspiration as romance: the right partner as the ultimate accessory, the happy ending as social mobility with soft lighting.
The subtext is less about individual greed than about a changing market. If people no longer “want” to marry up, it’s because the ladder is wobblier: women have more financial autonomy, class boundaries blur and harden at the same time, and the fantasy of a single marriage curing precarity feels quaint. Principal’s line hints at the awkward truth that modern love narratives have had to pretend harder that they’re pure. We still optimize; we just call it “compatibility,” “ambition,” “values.” The old term is unfashionable, which is exactly why it’s effective: it yanks the curtain back on what romance has always quietly negotiated.
“Marry up” is bluntly transactional, the kind of phrase polite society pretends it doesn’t use. It assumes marriage as an economic ladder, a reputational upgrade, a life raft. Coming from an actress whose career peaked in the glossy, status-obsessed ecosystem of late-20th-century celebrity culture, it lands as both insider observation and quiet indictment. Hollywood sold aspiration as romance: the right partner as the ultimate accessory, the happy ending as social mobility with soft lighting.
The subtext is less about individual greed than about a changing market. If people no longer “want” to marry up, it’s because the ladder is wobblier: women have more financial autonomy, class boundaries blur and harden at the same time, and the fantasy of a single marriage curing precarity feels quaint. Principal’s line hints at the awkward truth that modern love narratives have had to pretend harder that they’re pure. We still optimize; we just call it “compatibility,” “ambition,” “values.” The old term is unfashionable, which is exactly why it’s effective: it yanks the curtain back on what romance has always quietly negotiated.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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