The Missing Aunties

It's high time we started meddling again

Around 15 years ago, I remember an Indian-heritage work colleague describing the efforts of his extended family to find him a suitable wife. In a process he referred to as “doing the Jane Austens”, he spent most weekends on formal visits to one young woman or another, coordinated and supervised by his parents and assisted by a network of older matrons he referred to collectively as “the aunties”.

I was at the time in my free-wheeling commune-living queer radical days, and found his stories fascinating and bewildering in equal measure. Today, though, his thickly networked and socially scaffolded experience of courtship seems to me an order of magnitude more conducive to happy ever after, than the predicament faced by ordinary young men and women in the 21st century.

If I had a quid for every attractive, pleasant, well-educated, right-of-centre twentysomething who has asked me for advice on how to find someone to marry, I wouldn’t need to invite reader contributions on Substack. My friend and fellow reactionary feminist Louise Perry (whose podcast I heartily recommend to you all) reports the same phenomenon. And essentially, what Louise and I find ourselves being asked for is aunty input, in a world where this social role no longer exists in the cultural mainstream.

In the case of my ex-colleague, “the aunties” weren’t meddling for the sake of it. Their goal was to help form new families in which the parties were well-matched in terms of wealth, class, culture, and extended family. To that end, they used their social connections to look for matches, vet their character, assess their families and stage-manage the introductions. This subtle piece of social weaving has, across many cultures, traditionally been the purview of married matrons (which is what “aunties” in the broadest sense means). For while some of the aunty-ing role can in theory be done by single peers, already-married aunties have the advantage not only of more life experience, but also the right mix of beady-eyed pragmatism and personal detachment that comes with no longer being on the hunt for a partner yourself.

Why did the aunties stop auntying, in the mainstream West? A while back, I wrote about women’s distinctive three-part Hero’s Journey - from maiden, to mother, then matriarch - and about how liberal feminism seems to centre the maiden and treat the others as problems to be solved. And I wonder: did we stop aunty-ing when we embraced the idea we’d all be better off as young, fresh, independent maidens forever? Done well, after all, aunty-ing results in the formation of new couples - and thus, more often than not, new mothers and eventually new matriarchs. The essence of aunty-ing is moving the heroine along her journey.

And when liberal feminism says there is no three-part journey, just an individual quest for self-actualisation (or perhaps eternal sexiness) then a helpful aunty who is trying to move you on from Maiden to Mother is likely to meet a sharp rebuff. Perhaps as a consequence, aunty-ing is now done covertly if at all, and there are few formal rituals that mediate it.

But filtering and introducing potentially suitable partners is perhaps the central coordination problem in what Chris Williamson calls “the mating crisis”. Today this is done by algorithms rather than middle-aged women; so it’s perhaps not a coincidence that, absent interference by the world’s aunties, there are no longer any rules, and very little except residual social convention encouraging people to seek stability. The result is a free-for-all: hookups, casually dating multiple partners, or “situationships” that drag on for months or even years, in the tacit understanding that it is a social no-no even to raise the question of sexual monogamy, let alone profess romantic attachment. As for marriage - forget it.

Louise and I are a generation apart age-wise, but we both reached escape velocity from the so-called “sexual marketplace” before it took on its current quality of jaded, porn-addled, transactional hyper-liquidity. Both of us wince in sympathy at the travails of our younger friends. Both of us agree that there’s something deeply broken about the incentives and framing at work in most online dating apps, which seem largely geared to fostering the illusion of endless optionality, and sexual partners as consumable products one can scroll and order like a takeaway meal. We also agree that family formation is a prosocial cause, for a great many reasons. As I’ve argued, a less liquid society is also very much in women’s interests.

So does this mean it’s on us to think about how we can rebuild an aunty role that might be more conducive to seeing relationships form? Perhaps. Of course I’m not suggesting we could just re-synthesise ex nihilo an extended network of aunties such as my former work colleague enjoyed, overnight. Social fabric, once unravelled, is difficult to re-weave. But even if we’re not going to get the aunties back overnight, I see efforts popping up all over to synthesis something aunty-like, in clear recognition that this is a central coordination problem that needs urgent attention.

For example I wrote last week about Keeper, a ‘family formation’ web service that sets out to apply AI to matchmaking, and only gets paid when you find a partner. In the book I described an attempt at brokering arranged marriages by the social technologist Justin Murphy. A friend recently launched herself as a matchmaker. And next week, Louise’s inaugural Maiden, Mother, Matriarch singles event will take place in London.

These are all somewhat boutique: there is a sense that they are specific to their particular milieu, and as such not very scalable. But I think it would be a mistake to criticise any variant of aunty-ing on this basis. The essence of aunty-ing is leaning into and deepening existing social networks. And this means efforts at aunty-ing are are by definition specific to their social context, and not scalable beyond a certain point.

So perhaps an open question for my readers could be as follows: what can we do, at the smaller or larger scale, to help restore the missing aunties to our social fabric? There are a great many lonely young people who might appreciate their help.

***Marriage Survival Stories***

Another byproduct of abolishing aunties is that almost the only publicly available information about the ups and downs of marriage now comes from divorcees. The reason for this is straightforward. Sharing intimate details of your relationship will affect the relationship, and mining your domestic ups and downs for public content is unfair on your spouse and children. So while people who are divorced are often happy to publish the gory details of their experience, those who have weathered a rough patch and survived are unlikely to want to expose painful memories which implicate a loved one to public scrutiny.

But this means it’s difficult in the extreme to find first-person stories of experiencing, and weathering, rough patches in a long marriage but still staying married. And yet I also meet so many young men and women who know that social media ragebait and misery memoirs are not the whole story, any more than “happy ever after, without any complications ever” is usually the whole story. But for many, real life is short of aunties who might be willing to share a more nuanced personal story.

So I’ve been thinking about how we might combine and re-circulate some of the accumulated wisdom that’s out there. I know from the rich contributions to the comments on this Substack that many of you have been married for a long time: would any of you be willing to share (anonymously) a personal story about weathering a rough patch and staying married? What happened? What went wrong? How did you fix it? How do you think about it now? If so please reply to this email, and let me know in your message if you’d be willing for me to include your story anonymously in an essay.

Thank you for reading! See you again soon. M