the common thought is this: jackie married onassis for his money.
and that was totally ok. because she was scared after the assassination of robert kennedy and so it’s completely understandable and almost commendable that she would be desperate for the security onassis’s money could provide.
this notion- this idea that she married for money- is preferable to the opposite. it’s easier to swallow. it was totally acceptable if she married for money. it was morally reprehensible if she married for love.
dear world, that makes no sense.
that she would be forgiven her avariciousness but not her poor choice in men.
this bizarre inversion of the moral code perplexes me to no end. it’s massively important and, as is usually the case with massively important things, i don’t know what to do with it.
sometimes the process of writing doesn’t involve actual writing. this is hands down the most frustrating part. because when you’re writing, you’re moving forward. when you’re not writing, it’s hard to view the situation as anything other than, at best, a stand-off and, at worst, a standstill.
jackie and i are in a stand-off. it’s gonna go one of two ways.
the whole morality business is either indicative of the general messedupness of jackie’s relationships or the general messedupness of the world’s relationship with her.
my money’s on the later.
an alarming life 
Mine too!
I love your takes on how the rest of the world views/ed J. Keep it up!
Why did she marry Onassis? That’s what everyone wants to know. Keep struggling: you’ll come up with something, if only the dissatisfaction of your generation with the older generation’s answers to that question.
Here’s my take. Women in 1968 were not that liberated. They didn’t often work. In the 70s and the 80s they started to be able to have careers, but it wasn’t so in the 1960s. JFK’s death made Jackie discover that there wasn’t as much money as she’d thought. Much of it was tied up in trusts for her two children.
Second I think she kind of liked Onassis. He was a rogue. She had a wicked streak. He was her type.
But I think the most plausible answer is what one of her friends told me. Jackie didn’t want to be the martyred president’s widow for the rest of her life. She wanted to break out of that stereotype in a big way. She was only in her 30s. Too soon for her to give up on fun. A man with a yacht and plenty of cash promised to be fun.
What I think is a little less nice is the fact that she kind of took him away from her sister. How to justify that?