Classic Romance Trope: Bring the Unsuitable Suitor Home

Is she his sister? Really?

Agatha Christie's "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" includes a classic romance trope--bring the unsuitable suitors home and the son/daughter will realize how unsuitable they really are. 

Frasier, in fact, used this trope with one of Frasier's last girlfriends. She is SO awful (rude, dismissive, inattentive to others' news), Frasier realizes what a mistake he has made. 

However, the approach only works if the son/daughter isn't (1) smitten; (2) looking for a way to tell off the family; (3) thrown into the unsuitable suitor's arms because the family is worse. 

In Clouds of Witnesses, Dorothy Sayers includes dialog between Mary and Mary and Peter's mother. Before the War (World War I), Mary was dating George Goyles, a Communist agitator, who turns out to be so entirely self-involved, he leaves Mary to face a corpse on her own. Mary is eventually disillusioned by him. But not until she actually thinks he didn't care about her getting murdered. 

My image of Peter's mother.

Early on, George Goyles invited himself to the house to meet the family. Mary's mother, the Dowager Duchess, reports the event:

"He invited himself down one weekend when the house was very full, and he seemed to make a point of consulting nobody's convenience but his own. And you know, dear [to Mary], you even said yourself you thought he was unnecessarily rude to poor old Lord Mountweazle."

"[George] said what he thought," said Mary. "The present generation does."

"But all I remember saying to Peter was that Mr. Goyle's manners seemed to me to lack polish and that he showed a lack of independence in his opinions."

"Perhaps you didn't say much about him, mother, but Gerald said lots--dreadful things!"

"Yes, he said what he thought. The present generation does, you know. To the uninitiated, I admit, it does sound a little rude."

Despite George being rude and Mary's mother unimpressed and Gerald, her oldest brother, outraged and disparaging, Mary didn't change her mind. In part, she was too smitten. In part, her brother George's pompous behavior only made George look not so bad (and rather underscores the idea that people date what they are used to, making it lucky for Mary that Inspector Charles Parker decided to pursue her). 

On the other side, the unsuitable suitor can learn and change. So Tom Selleck's Elliot in Mr. Baseball doesn't turn into a Japanese man but does adapt to Japanese cultural expectations during a visit to his girlfriend (and boss's) home.