From my own positionality-as they say- as a straight white dude, here's what always made me crazy regarding Cathy as a character and as a strip:

1) She was never allowed to really grow, change, learn, find any sense of self-acceptance or personal peace as depicted- she always seemed to be stuck in the same repeating frenzies about HAVING to get a man to commit, HAVING to wear precisely the right clothes or hairstyle and never managing to, HAVING to obsess about her body, HAVING to obsess about getting married and having kids. I know it's a common thing for comic strip characters to be limited in their capacity for growth or change or at times utterly forbidden to change, but it seemed to me that, if she represented the sensibilities of a movement for change(feminism), should have been allowed at least SOME personal change and growth;

2) If she HAD to be obsessed with getting married and having kids, why did she have to be specifically bound and determined to marry Irving? Why could she never move on from Irving once and for all?

Irving was established early on as a hopelessly unchangeable sexist dinosaur, someone who would never really listen to what Cathy or any other woman or, really, any other character in the strip had to say...so why did THAT GUY have to be her destiny?

She was seen getting other male attention during the strip, so why couldn't she end up with somebody else? Or, for that matter, why couldn't she decide she wasn't going to base her life on whether or not she was involved with a man?

It was as if the guiding anti-principles of Seinfeld- "no hugging, no learning" were also the guiding principles of Cathy.

Cathy could be funny, and at times could be insightful...but why did she so often have to be frozen in time to the degree she was?