The Royal Family is incredibly dysfunctional

[babsanderson]

They are an incredibly dysfunctional family with lots of internal rivalries, poor parenting and a strange culture of stay silent and we will protect you from actual crimes, but speak out and we will destroy you.
They really are a mess and I suspect they are so dysfunctional, they do not realise just how messed up the family dynamics are.
But maybe such a dysfunctional family is inevitable within a hereditary monarchy where your accident of birth means you have access to more money and power than your siblings and other close relatives?

But no interest in protecting a Prime Minister? The man who holds the most political power in the country well beyond what the entire RF has?

Correct.

Seeing as the PM is a temporary office held by a different person seemingly every five minutes or so.

I think i know what the poster meant with her 'riddle'! Didn't Princess Anne have an affair with Andrew Parker Bowles?

is surely why we defer to them?

I keep reading about this deference but I don’t recognise it. They do their job, people are nice to them and show respect. I don’t know anyone who looks up to them or defers to them. It’s a republican trope.

"Dysfunctional" is such a lazy, overused word. A bit like 'toxic'. Noone knows exactly what it means. Do we ever speak of families being 'functional'?

Anne went out with Andrew Parker Bowles before he married Camilla. What is wrong with that?

The boring cliche words. When the word 'dysfunctional' was first used it was probably by one journalist in the 1990s and it's been done to death, along with 'unprecedented', 'lived experience', etc.

"My truth".

Nearly everything that Harry complains about is not unique to either him or the Royal Family. He should spend a bit of time reading the relationships board on Mumsnet!

Apparently Parker Bowles put it about a LOT before he was married.

He continued during their marriage too.

Pretty dysfunctional. Most people do not keep it in the family like that.

You really don’t understand anything, do you? They were entirely free agents in the 1970s. A princess has a relationship with an army officer who goes on to marry her brother’s ex. There’s nothing dysfunctional about it except in your mind.

What do you mean by 'keep it in the family'?

And is something automatically 'dysfunctional' because 'most people' don't do it? The upper classes 50 years ago moved in pretty tight circles, so some 'overlap' was always going to happen. That doesn't make it 'dysfunctional' although it seems 'dysfunctional' is so poorly defined it can mean whatever someone wants it to man.

@Blossomtoes I don't agree with you. That does not mean I do not understand.
And yes I would be horrified if my brother married my (ex) partner's ex wife.

OK, I personally wouldn’t give a shit but then we’ve already established that my family’s dysfunctional by your standards. I also think calling Parker Bowles Anne’s ex partner is a bit of a stretch, they seem to have had a casual liaison for a few weeks/ months.

Why? People often meet by association. It doesn’t mean that anything was going on previously. My cousin married a good friend of her late DH. After her DH died, they grew closer, fell in love and married. Still happily married many years later. Nothing wrong with that.

Actually, when I was a young au pair in France, I worked for a family where both sets of GP’s were divorced, and his father had subsequently married her mother. No one had a problem with it. It was just the way things turned out

"I'm a RF apologist and grudgingly realise that they are fucked up beyond belief so I'm going to argue semantics as a distraction"

😁

I think lots of families are functional and some are very healthy.

The idea that anyone who challenges banal, vague terminology is somehow an 'RF apologist', whatever that is, is as lazy as trotting out the undefined 'dysfunctional' at every opportunity.

Here you go, it really wasn't too taxing to find a definition, even for such a lazy article as myself

Right.

But how does that rather general definition apply to the 'royal family'? Are the Wales family 'dysfunctional'? The Tindalls? The ones stewing in Montecito, telling the world about ongoing or at least very recent drug use, and isolated from almost all family on both sides?

You think raping a sex trafficked teenager and then your family covering up for you is normal behaviour?
Or accepting a million pounds in cash in a suitcase for charity
Or defending a convicted paedophile publicly.
Or getting someone like Jimmy Saville to provide marriage guidance.
Or not to even hug your own child when they have just found out their young mother died.
Or for heavy drinking to be very common amongst various family members.