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cahnIn the previous post Charles II found AITA:
Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?
Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?
Re: Agony Aunts (and Uncles)
Date: 2022-03-09 03:39 am (UTC)Me too! But I forgot to mention it, so thanks for being *on top* of it!
Re: Agony Aunts (and Uncles)
Date: 2022-03-09 01:43 pm (UTC)Q: I, f, am contemplating marrying my daughter to a foreign noble, but I'm not sure whether that's the right thing for her immortal soul. What if he's - shudder - of THOSE? Then she might never have children and will never love!
A: Rubbish. How clueless about the world are you? If you'd only go for guys who don't like sex with men, there's be only ten people left here, and yet, the species survives. If I were you, I'd be more worried about my daughter having to convert and be forced to live as a bloody Papist for the rest of her life!
Q: I, m, widower, CEO and family man, am considering a second marriage to a woman my own age, also widowed. She has professional child raising expertise, and I value our conversations which help me relax from my very stressful and high ranking position. However, I sense that my family might object to this second marriage due to our somehwat stark differences of rank. What do do?
A: Don't mingle mice shit with corn, say I. Encouraging gold diggers set on marrying into high ranking families never goes well. Especially if they're scheming bitches who think becoming papist bigots in their old age makes them respectable. Excuse me while I vomit.
Q: I, f, am the wife of a future CEO. We have a strong partnership, and I work hard earning the goodwill of his future employees. Unfortunately, the current CEO has a hate-on for my husband, and family get togethers are increasingly stressful. I'm not looking forward to the baptism of my latest baby, is what I'm saying. Old CEO and husband can't even agree on the godfather. Any tips of how to relax the situation?
A: Have you tried a farting competition? I didn't always get along with my late husband, but he and I and our son did that at a family meal, and we all cracked up. Just make sure that everyone participates! No exceptions!
Re: Agony Aunts (and Uncles)
Date: 2022-03-12 06:16 am (UTC)If you'd only go for guys who don't like sex with men, there's be only ten people left here, and yet, the species survives.
:DDDDD
Don't mingle mice shit with corn, say I.
! :D Okay, this one I don't remember --?
Old CEO and husband can't even agree on the godfather.
Man, these guys really belong in AITA/advice columns, don't they.
Have you tried a farting competition? I didn't always get along with my late husband, but he and I and our son did that at a family meal, and we all cracked up. Just make sure that everyone participates! No exceptions!
LOL FOREVER. I had forgotten about the farting competition!
Re: Agony Aunts (and Uncles)
Date: 2022-03-12 10:31 pm (UTC)! :D Okay, this one I don't remember --?
Okay, so remember that Sophia of Hanover and Ernst August were big on consolidating the family holdings into the hands of a single brother, and instituting primogeniture, instead of the normal German practice of splitting up the inheritance so all the sons got something?
And Ernst's older brother Georg Wilhelm promised not to get married so Ernst could get all his stuff? But then he fell in love with his mistress, Eleonore d'Olbreuse, and married her. And they had a daughter, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, who was all set to inherit Celle. So she was married off to her first cousin, future George I, in a move to kept Celle in the hands of future G1, son of Sophia and Ernst.
Okay, you know, this probably explains it better:
The inaccurate part is that I had to swap the birth order of Sophia and Karl Ludwig in order to show the intermarriages without squeezing him in and cluttering up the tree. And of course, I didn't show Eleonore because I didn't predict we'd be having this conversation. :)
Anyway, Eleonore was "merely" lower nobility, and she wasn't considered by class snobs like Liselotte to be a good match for Georg Wilhelm. Nor was her daughter Sophia Dorothea considered by Sophia or Liselotte a good match for G1. Eleonore was called "Mausdreck" by Liselotte (Horowski).
To quote from Andrew Thompson's bio of George II:
In March 1698, Liselotte commented that George's temper must have been inherited from his mother, because his paternal relatives were all so well mannered. When Sophia reported that George had been spending a considerable amount of time with his new wife and shutting himself away from court society, Liselotte tartly responded that this was yet another example of George's failure to understand the necessary ‘grandeur’ with which he, as an Electoral prince, had to act. The source of this failure was genetic – he had too much of his grandmother Eléonore's ‘noble’ (as opposed to royal) blood. The final example of Liselotte's emphasis on nurture being unable to overcome nature can be found in a letter of 1710. Liselotte was comparing the characters of George and his cousin (and future brother-in-law) the crown prince of Prussia. While the crown prince came from a pure bloodline, with George the ‘mouse droppings had been mixed into the pepper’ so although seemingly the same, it was little wonder that they behaved so differently.
...Liselotte's final dramatic denunciation of George's genes was prompted by a report from Sophia that George had left the dinner table to spend some time with Eléonore.
Re: Agony Aunts (and Uncles)
Date: 2022-03-14 05:14 pm (UTC)She wasn't, but in addition to snobbery, there was another element here which you didn't mention, and that was that Georg Wilhelm didn't offer to stay single and childless out of the goodness of his heart/because Sophia and Ernst August bullied him into it. Georg Wilhelm had been engaged to Sophie and then changed his mind, and offered her a trade of fiance to get out of it, to wit, his youngest brother. Who, being the youngest, was also the one who had absolutely the least inheritance of all the brothers to expect. This was a significant downtrading and status losing, and I suspect that if she hadn't a) already been in her later 20s, and b) herself the youngest (and twelfth) surviving child of the penniless exiled Winter Queen, she might not have gone for it. As it was, she didn't agree until he offered, in writing, the promise that Ernst August's and her kids would inherit from him because he'd stay single. So basically Eléonore and her daughter were the walking, talking proof of Georg Wilhelm first dumping her and then pulling a fast one on his written pledge. Given that Liselotte was partly raised by Sophie (escaping the non-stop marital war between her parents for five solid years that way, remember, Karl Ludwig's wife was the one who bit into the finger of his mistress in one big scene Sophie describes in her memoirs), I'm not surprised she was 100% Team Sophie here and absorbed all the attitude.
Which isn't to say she'd have been non-snobbish if Georg Wilhelm had never made that pledge, but it did play a role. The interesting thing is that Liselotte while being anti- bastards and anti higher rank/lower rank marriages as a rule made a big exception for all her own half siblings. (Karl Ludwig since his wife refused to divorce him and refused to move out did a Henry VIII and said since he was the head of the Palatine Protestants, he was divorcing himself. But the legality was regarded as questionable by the rest of the German princpalities, and so Liselotte's half siblings didn't get the titles they otherwise would have - they were "Raugräfin" and "Raugraf", respectively, with the "Rau" indicating the questionable legitimacy. And they - who were many - are the significant exceptions to the Mausdreck rule for Liselotte, since she loved them dearly, and one half brother, nicknamed Carl-Lutz by her - Lutz is short for Ludwig - was her favourite relation other than Sophie.
Anyway, in that Q & A I combined two things - Liselotte's "Mausdreck" snobbery as documented apropos the Celle branch of the family, and her (very much requited) hate-on for Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's mistress and morganatic wife who had started as the governess of his children. (Louis is the questioner.) Liselotte despised her for many reasons, some valid - certainly Maintenon was a case of "convert becomes more Catholic than Catholic and encourages fanaticism thereafter" - , and some not (regarding the quondam Francoise Scarron as lowborn, etc.).