It’s Monday at 7:30 a.m., and I’m in line at Saxbys, waiting on a green smoothie that’s supposed to carry me through a three-hour 8 a.m. class. I’m scrolling on TikTok as I wait when my phone, volume unforgivably loud, blares that the girl in the video has been upgraded to fiancee.
The word screeches like a tire on marble. The girl on screen slowly turns her outstretched hand, her ring held out like a trophy. I fumble the volume down, cheeks hot for disturbing the quiet line and walk to class where I spend the opening minutes thinking about that word. An upgrade? Interesting.
I try to name why it makes my eyes do a full 180. It isn’t the love aspect. Love is gorgeous, and I am embarrassingly susceptible to it. Yet, I roll my eyes at the way “fiancee” lands like a new rank pinned to a blazer. You aren’t married yet, but you are no longer a girlfriend — you’re somewhere in between, like a probation period at a new job.
Later that week as I’m hunting for a bedtime video, my feed offers a video titled, “a week in my life as a 24-year-old fiancee!!” It’s from a YouTuber I’ve followed for years, so I give it a try. Maybe there’s a secret syllabus for adulthood. Do fiancees buy special pens? Do they get discounts on skincare?
Instead, it’s an ordinary routine — just with the word “fiancee” tacked onto everything. I watch as she gets coffee as a fiancee, answers emails as a fiancee, does pilates, runs errands and eats pasta as a fiancee. Every so often, the camera lunges at her hand, shoving the fact that she’s a fiancee into my face through the screen.
Nothing about the errands had changed. It felt like pouring sparkling water into a glass and insisting it’s champagne. I wasn’t mad, just baffled. What exactly got upgraded besides the label?
It’s hard to ignore how neatly the “fiancee upgrade” slides into today’s shift to conservatism in America. The fiancee focus has risen alongside the trad-wife aesthetic, complete with cooking in puffy white dresses, and the “feminine energy/high-value woman” gospel that swears it’s about centering women while still dangling a male as the prize.
Maybe the jokes are meant to be cute, but they rub me the wrong way, especially alongside a very unfunny reality. Millions of women study, work and hustle precisely so they don’t have to depend on a man or be reduced to a housewife, Mrs. or a plus-one to their own lives.
Calling engagement a promotion reminds me of that old arithmetic that measures a woman’s worth by proximity to a man.
There’s the asymmetry, too. I have yet to see a man proclaim he’s “upgraded to fiance” and then narrate his errands like the groceries acquired more meaning because of his new title. Men are congratulated, patted on the back and life goes on.
And can we talk about age for a second? Once I started noticing them, the shiny rocks were everywhere. They seemed to be on every hand gripping reformer handles in my pilates class, on girls who looked barely older than me. Online, the engagement “season” trend skews young, often around 25. Maybe I’m stubborn and refuse to grow up, but what I’m witnessing is what I thought was a 30–35 storyline seems to have moved to 25.
Of course, when to marry — if ever — is a personal decision. I don’t mind if you’re 25 and writing a registry. But we’re too young to crown this as the only goal. There are chapters some of us haven’t even glimpsed yet. There are still cities to try, friends to meet and skills to learn. There is still a future self who knows which medication to take and how to cook a steak without googling it.
I mind the narrative that says a bare finger is a failure and a shiny one makes you morally adult. A marriage isn’t an achievement. It’s a beginning, something that happens to you someday when you let life unfold how it should.
When you get married, you don’t ascend a class — you choose a person, and they choose you. Accomplishments like completing a degree, starting a company or moving across the world are climbs.
None of this denies how moving it is to choose someone. Tying your life to another human is unarguably beautiful, and relationships require work — ugh, yes. I’m not anti-cake. I’ll clap for love until my hands hurt, and I already have a few ruthless lines ready for my sister’s future toast. I just want our categories straight.
Celebrate loudly, but refuse the upgrade story. Let’s stop telling young women that adulthood is a ring ceremony and that everything else is just pregame.
