New Year's Resolution: Bring Back The Aunties

A new year is upon us. My New Year’s resolution: interfering constructively in younger friends’ love lives. 

There are several reasons for this, but they all boil down to a single, central one: middle-aged married women are the only group that can do this without the incentives being wrong. Therefore, I’ve concluded that it’s my duty to meddle, where I can do so in a way that’s genuinely welcomed. And if you’re a middle-aged married woman, perhaps you should, too.

Let me explain. Firstly, I think we can agree that something has gone very wrong with relationship formation for younger generations. People aren’t meeting so much; often, they aren’t even hooking up. “AI Boyfriend” is now a thing. When people do get together, there are so few social rules that no one knows what they’re doing and you get years-long “situationships” and a lot of pain. 

The upshot of all this seems to be that the proportion of people who just don’t find their Someone (or haven’t yet, well into their having-kids years) is rising steadily. Never-marrieds are a swelling cohort. Some are fine with this, of course, but others are deeply unhappy and don’t know what to do. I don’t think this is a social challenge with a magic-bullet answer, but my New Year’s resolution, and related proposal to any older married women reading this, reflects my belief that specifically the often-overlooked, invisible, and sometimes even maligned demographic of middle-aged women (“Karens”, “TERFs”, etc.) may be part of the solution. 

It’s time for us to step back up.

Historically, peoples across the world have always understood that family formation is hugely important, socially, politically, or economically. That’s why many cultures arranged marriages for their children, and in premodern times aristocratic families treated their marriageable offspring like political chess-pieces in forming or consolidating alliances. Anglo-Saxon England, too, had the concept of “freoþuwebba” or peace-weaver, which is to say a woman married into a previously enemy clan, in order to promote peace following a period of conflict by having children who bring the bloodlines together. There are whole libraries of anthropology on “the exchange of women.” 

I'm not saying that’s how we should do things. But we’ve gone all the way to the opposite extreme. In the modern, liberal, developed world, we choose to believe that no one at all should do the managing, except the individuals in question. Everyone should be free! In practice, though, this doesn’t seem to be working. And as cultural memory and practice for how to facilitate couple formation declines, each bare individual seems (inevitably) less scaffolded in their efforts. The result is a predictable decline in our collective ability to form happy relationships, and to perpetuate our communities.

Aunties, assemble! We have nothing to lose but the next generation’s loneliness. 

People sense that nothing good can come of this. They hear their friends lament the resulting loneliness, and efforts of various kinds are emerging, to try and address this increasingly desperate situation. But think about how important couple-formation has historically been; now think about the incentives for different groups in assisting with the process. Not every remedy is created equal. 

Can you get your peer group to help? Perhaps. But really your peer group is too entangled in the field themselves, to be reliably in your corner. Maybe they won’t introduce you to someone you’d love, or it’ll be complicated by envy, competition, or previous romantic entanglements with that person. Maybe it’s an ex. Maybe they fancy them too! Anecdotally, I hear that some zoomers view dating within your friendship group as a complete no-no for this reason. 

So then what do you do? Can you get the internet to help? Again, yes, in theory. These days, there are plenty of happy marriages out there, in which the couple met online. But there’s also the litany of laments about how the apps encourage endless optionality, messaging, hookups and “situationships” but seem calculated to deter people from coupling up and logging off. And this is hardly surprising, given that most such websites make their money off subscriptions. Again, the incentives are wrong.

Can you get fathers to help? In theory, again, yes. But in practice, I saw one such effort where a Catholic Patriarch Beard type was bro-moting his address-book of ‘young, pious Catholic virgins’ and honestly? it was the creepiest thing since Foucault’s defence of children’s capacity to “consent” to sex. Older heterosexual men are still heterosexual men! There’s no way I’d entrust the fortunes of an innocent, pretty young woman to even the most reputable older man; sorry, but there are just too many horror stories out there. And even where the patriarchs are not themselves pervs (which to be clear I’m sure they mostly are not) by virtue of being men, they simply aren’t best-placed to distinguish between an Elizabeth and a Lydia Bennett. Again, the incentives are all wrong. 

Now it becomes clearer why it is so often older married women who end up doing most of the arranging, facilitating, tinkering, and meddling as regards family formation. As a group, we have life experience, and more information on which to judge character and assess a good as opposed to merely showy potential mate. We have an interest in weaving social bonds: there’s nothing nicer than seeing two young people from families you know form a relationship and deepen the ties across a social group. We have a vested interest in our adult children flourishing, which means encouraging them to choose a spouse that will help them do so. Most of us enjoy exchanging news about mutual friends and acquaintances. And most of us would like grandchildren. Taken all together, we have a vested interest in seeing the next generation of families take shape within our circles, and generally encouraging deeper social ties in our immediate network. 

And older women are also the most disinterested, in the sense of not having personal skin in the game. If there’s a dividend, it’s mainly the delightful one of more people to talk about with other middle-aged mothers, and perhaps more people to send Christmas cards to (a mixed blessing, arguably, but still a blessing). And, importantly, someone needs to do it. Someone needs to be facilitating young couples meeting and falling in love. This “auntie” role is a time-honoured one; I made the case back in 2023 that it is desperately missing from the modern social fabric. And I submit that it has to be us, the middle-aged matrons.

So much so, in fact, that if we don’t make it our business to meddle in our younger friends’ love lives, we are neglecting a vital social duty. Very upper-class women still get this, as well as understanding the subtler economic, political, and social nuances of strengthening your own circles. Hence the header photo, from a 2016 debutante ball in New York City, organised by the kind of matrons who still grasp that no one can meddle as effectively and (probably usually) constructively as they can. As for the rest of us mere mortals: we don’t have to meddle clumsily or overbearingly, and it doesn’t have to be in the form of elaborate deb dances. But my New Year’s resolution is to keep younger, single friends in mind and - wherever it can be done gracefully and without fuss - make it my business to introduce them to one another, if I think they might get on. 

We have a lot of frayed social fabric to make up. Literal weaving has historically always been one of women’s core skills; I firmly believe the metaphorical kind has, too. So if you’re a middle-aged matron, and especially if you’re feeling a bit invisible or under-valued, maybe consider meddling a little as well? Your younger friends might be annoyed - but they might secretly or even not so secretly appreciate it. And even if the success rate is only 10%, that’s still 10% more love than the world would otherwise have enjoyed. (Also, for better or worse, perhaps 10% more Christmas cards.) That’s got to be worth a go, surely? 

Aunties, assemble! We have nothing to lose but the next generation’s loneliness. 

Editor’s Note: This article appeared first on the author’s Substack. It has been lightly edited and reprinted here with her permission.