Instead of regaling our children at bedtime with awkward tales of barfly hookups and enough inter–friend group dating to make your head spin at the sexual connections, we’ll be sharing our Tinder profiles and screenshots of texts. It’ll be a bit more of an interactive experience than Ted Mosby’s (interminable) tale of how he whined his way through half the women in New York.
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But when the kids ask, “How did you know they were the one?” the millennials will have some pretty unique answers:
He could pay half the rent on their "affordable" burning trash can in the city
Sure, Daddy’s apartment was about the size of his infant crib, but it cost as much as three credits of his liberal-arts degree per month. So, yeah, Mommy and Daddy shacked up a little early — skyrocketing rental prices demanded it. It gave them more quality time to bond without having to commute between Queens and New Jersey.
She only owed the price of a crappy house in student-loan debt
Listen, the days of superficially holding out for a rich spouse were over. The best she could hope for was someone with a bit less student-loan debt than she had. After all, one of them had to be able to qualify for credit somehow.
They came together at a craft-beer meetup for Bernie Sanders supporters
It was love at first sip of hops. She called herself a socialist, and Mommy was a bathtub beer brewer. Together they caucused for Sanders in Iowa and perfected their “Feel the Bern” ale.
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After five years in the workforce, she finally qualified for an entry-level job
Mommy graduated in 2008, when generational unemployment levels were at nearly 16 percent. She spent the next three years overeducated and underemployed, but it finally paid off. She got a low-paying junior level job in an opposite field from the one she studied in college and hated her life, but she was finally living the bootstrap American dream!
He had similar values of Wall Street paranoia
Daddy showed Papa the nice waterproof hole where he’d buried his meager savings. He knew then that his partner was fiscally responsible and had seen Wolf of Wall Street as the warning it was meant to be. His money wouldn’t go for questionable (and often illegal) recreational purposes or the tax hike for the government to bail them out.
Together they were a social media super-couple
She had 10,000 YouTube followers for her legendary contouring how-to guides, and he was Instagram famous for his shirtless man-bun photos of him cuddling with dogs. When they cross-posted, their followers tripled, and it was a perfect branded marriage.
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His parents had a garage apartment with a separate entrance
The free-love baby-boomer in-laws were totally chill about them living together rent free in the garage apartment while they worked 60 hours a week in low-wage jobs. Sure, there was shag carpeting, it smelled like gasoline fumes, and it shared a wall with the parents’ bedroom, but the separate entrance was wonderful.