In Anthony Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her?, Alice leaves the kind, stable and honorable man she loves to throw herself at a manipulative degenerate for whom she feels no passion. She believes that she’s made for greater things than staid and quiet family life, and hopes that the degenerate will let her make a mark in politics since he’s running for Parliament. Sacrificing even a deep feeling of love for another man on this altar seems like a good idea to her.
Alice’s cousin Glencora got exactly what Alice dreams of. She married the future Chancellor of the Exchequer and can dedicate herself to assisting his political career. Instead, Glencora is eager to throw herself at a loser degenerate of her own and be content with making no mark on anything.
The paucity of life paths that constrain Alice and Glencora is a thing of the past. Women no longer have to attach themselves to this or that husband in order to have a career in politics or anything else. But the topic of female fascination with bad boys is evergreen. Alice and Glencora have a supporting cast of aunts, cousins, grandpas, and other relatives who work together to prevent them from bestowing themselves on the first passing loser who winks at them. These days, on the other hand, we don’t brook any outside input into our personal lives. The cat of individual choice was let out of the bag and there’s no bringing it back in. It would be mistaken, however, to believe that today’s Alices and Glencoras don’t pay a price for their fascination with bad boys.
Clarissa's Blog 
“a supporting cast of aunts, cousins, grandpas, and other relatives who work together to prevent them from bestowing themselves on the first passing loser who winks at them”
Pretty sure that young men had a cast of older relatives to keep them from proposing to inappropriate women as well. They certainly didn’t want young Thadeus to bring home a buxom barmaid of uncertain past (and he very might well if left to his own devices).
Both sexes have terrible, terrible basic instincts about partner choice and it takes a lot of culture and education to nudge them away toward better choices.
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Yes, absolutely, both men and women are guided by relatives in these novels. It’s a complicated, beautiful machinery that maintains social norms and ensures transfer of generational wealth and preservation of families.
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Watching my younger relatives… they’ve been methodically, and deliberately, wrenched loose from the family networks and community contexts that would have protected them from… exactly this. It is so, so painful to watch, and we are largely powerless to help. Let us help you figure out how to get a better job, please. Let us tell you about our collective experience of men like that one, please. Let us help you avoid the soul-shredding that you are diving headlong into, please.
No.
Gotta do *all* the dumb things, because family means nothing, and you’re all just a bunch of churchgoing Trump-voting bigots anyway so why would I ever listen to you? (because we’re family and we’d like to see you make it to age 30? Maybe have a stable adult life?). TikTok says…
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…and yet, that circle of family protection was still largely intact, even in my own youth. The cracking up has happened in the last twenty years. I clearly remember my own mother being one of the go-to people, when relatives had wayward daughters they couldn’t talk sense into. We’d get a panicked phone call about cousin so-and-so who was dating a muslim fellow, or Niece Nonesuch who was torching her relationships with her whole family over a worthless boy she met at a club… and mom’d call them up, spend some hours on the phone, or drive over to the next county to have lunch with the offender, and tolerably often the situation would resolve. Probably she wasn’t the *only* phone call in there, but… there was a system. It worked tolerably well. And it’s completely broken now. No amount of love and heart-to-heart lunches is having any effect whatever on the current crop of idiot 20-year-olds, because they’ve been coached, relentlessly, for their entire adolescence, that family is oppressive, family can’t be listened to, anybody who deviates the slightest bit from the officially accepted opinions is a hateful bigot, and if family thinks you’re wrong, you have to just stop talking to them.
We have convinced an entire generation that the people who love them most, and who have the most vested interest in their happiness and success, can’t be trusted or listened to. How did we let this happen??
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This is horrifying, I imagine that most teens go through a phase where they think they know everything and that their parents are lame, but this beyond that. My aunt tells me that her grandchildren watch shows on Disney and Nickelodeon where the kids openly disrespect the adults and her grandchildren think this is cool, they only want to be on their tablets and think visiting family and going to church is lame and uncool. She’s concerned that her grandchildren will hook up with losers and do dangerous stuff, but her daughters only care if the kids are quiet and out of their hair. I’m glad I grew up in the 90s, while we had the Simpsons and Bart was a little brat, he didn’t hate his family
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Yeah, the Disney/Nickelodeon parents-are-lame programming is just the early-childhood 101 class in Breaking Up Organic Social Support Networks. It only gets worse from there.
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In the mid 60’s the family and church still largely influenced teens, and older female members helped curb girls’ wilder behavior. But that became old fashioned and hence unfashionable. My wife had some temporary imfluence, me, far less. But us guys did have one successful intervention when we suggested that if he returned he might be planted “on the lone prairie”…and there was some chance that her dad was not fooling ;-D
But that was decades ago, I now have a niece, a high scool teacher and a Guidance Counselor no less, proudly announcing her fourth divorce!
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At least she got as far as getting married?
We just had to deal with cops and a missing persons report for one of the younger relatives. The 12 hours spent wondering if she was dead in the river were not great. Still alive, and OK, this time.
So I remember y’all wondered why in hell anybody would put a GPS tracking app on their phone and give all their friends access? I just learned why! It’s so when you pop a few pills and go out partying, and you fail to return home in the morning… your friends can give the cops a last known location. Now you know. You’re welcome.
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methylethyl
“At least she got as far as getting married?”
Yeah, there were four invitations, but I only attended one, having the personal failing of taking vows seriously ;-D
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