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The short leash and overprotective brothers thing doesn't seem to work though. It didn't work in your example your cousin still ended up a single mom and it didn't work in among the kids at my high school. The girls end up sneaking around anyway and half end up pregnant out of wedlock. The girls from middle and upper class liberal families whose brothers don't care who they date seem to have much better results. And you might say it's a class thing and sure maybe it is but still that's the half of it I can't imagine a family of respectable doctors and engineers getting together to force some disreputable boy to marry one of their relatives.
Does it work in every case? No. But it worked an overwhelming amount of the time. They're still married to this day and he walks around in fear of retribution. I don't see any logic that gives way to the notion that the situation improves further by a complete withdrawal of that attitude.
Does still married matter if they are separated and your family will beat him if he ever shows his face at Thanksgiving? That doesn't seem like a successful outcome to me. And I don't think that attitude has much effect. Middle class American young women and girls tend not to have family with that attitude and they don't get pregnant out of wedlock or indeed get pregnant much at all anymore.
A lot of lowerclass and working class young women with protective family attitudes like that do end up pregnant out of wedlock because single motherhood is excepted in their social milieu.
To us it does, yes. Catholics are prohibited from divorce. He doesn’t just not show up at the holidays, he doesn’t show up anywhere near the neighborhood. Our friends know the places he likes to go.
Per the tagline by the username. If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t. It’s worked for many people we know because that attitude meant that most of the women in our lives growing up didn’t end up as a feral, serial dater from the get go; like you find in the big cities today. Dating was a serious matter from the very beginning that was usually initiated in small ways between the parties interested but was largely handled through intermediaries.
That model was nowhere near as dysfunctional as the dynamic between people is today by a mile. It’s not even close. Almost every couple I know in my peer group that followed that system (which is to say remained obedient to their parents and peers) is happily married with kids to this very day.
Incidentally the man in question that my older cousin got with, she picked herself. Her brothers didn’t pick him for her.
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