The “one big happy family” ideal is pretty tough to achieve in practice. Most of us cope by just metering down the amount of time we spend with relatives and carefully calibrating how close we live to extended family rather than by being best buds with our in-laws.
Interestingly, my own mother was friends with her future mother in law long before she saw my father as a prospective spouse. However, the same could not be said for the relationship between my father and his in-laws, or specifically, one of his sisters-in-law. My mother’s mother was sickly for a while, and her oldest sister apparently had a quasi-motherly role in the family. She did NOT like my father at all and even quit speaking to my mother for a while because of that.
So yeah, if “one big happy family” had been a requirement then my parents would never have married.
Edited to add: The “big family ideal” as you explain it kind of sounds like a cult. And that’s what some of these families are–really small cults.
Well certainly the freejinger types will claim that the ATI followers are essentially a cult.
However, I don’t want to get too bogged down in discussing them because it is certainly NOT just followers of ATI who find courtship appealing.
Some of it is understandable, as a reaction to the excesses of “modern dating” and the idea that there is nothing really special about marriage.
Many people really
do see the wedding as more important than the marriage, for they see marriage not as the start of a completely new chapter in life for a couple, but just an affirmation of a committed relationship that already exists. And certainly, early physical involvement, even if it doesn’t actually involve sexual intercourse, can cloud people’s minds about whether a particular suitor is actually appropriate to marry.
However, many of the courtship advocates really do seem to idealize past courtship practices in an unhealthy way. I’ve also seen many on CAF look at arranged marriage longingly as well.
Also, regarding the Jane Austen references, many of the characters essentially DID have nothing else to do but chaperone young lovers because not even the men of the social class she depicts, had to actually work for a living, at least not the way most people do today. (Of course a member of the high gentry such as Mr. Darcy would still have had to run his estate, manage investments, etc. but he didn’t have to worry about getting fired if he took ill and missed too much work.)
Interestingly, the way some courtship advocates frown on “prior attachments” reminds me of Marianne Dashwood’s attitudes about “second attachments” at the start of
Sense and Sensibility. And certainly, Harriet Smith in
Emma “falls in love” with quite a number of gentlemen, although she never actually “dates” any of them.
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