Very interesting discussion. As someone who was a teen in the seventies and who unfortunately shaped many of my expectations about relationships from those romance novels, it’s important to recognize that the tropes and expectations didn’t just reflect societal conditions, they also created them. Girls and young women who read those books came to believe that “this is how marriages and relationships are.”
Especially if your parents didn’t have a good relationship-- you were just resigned to the fact that men were emotionally unavailable and there wasn’t any reason to believe things could be different.
Very interesting discussion. As someone who was a teen in the seventies and who unfortunately shaped many of my expectations about relationships from those romance novels, it’s important to recognize that the tropes and expectations didn’t just reflect societal conditions, they also created them. Girls and young women who read those books came to believe that “this is how marriages and relationships are.”
Especially if your parents didn’t have a good relationship-- you were just resigned to the fact that men were emotionally unavailable and there wasn’t any reason to believe things could be different.