Hi everyone! I'm new to this thread (I can't tell you how life-changing it's been) so I hope I'm not breaking any unspoken etiquette by posting. I just wanted to share an observation I made when I was thinking (obsessing) about all this stuff again yesterday.

The FDS approach to dating/love can be applied to every one of Jane Austen's stories. It fits perfectly. And she was writing over 200 years ago.

Take Pride and Prejudice, Austen's most popular book. Lizzie Bennett is undoubtedly a high value woman. She is from a relatively poor family, and she lacks many of the accomplishments that men (and other women) of the time judged women of her age by. She cheerfully admits that she is skilled at neither music nor painting nor embroidery, and her family connections are not high society ones. But all the same, she knows her own worth. It doesn't matter that she doesn't measure up to societal standards for women, because she measures up to her own. She has a quick wit and a keen sense of honour, she reads voraciously, and she has a warm and affectionate heart for anyone deserving of it.

Neither does she suffer fools (scrotes) lightly. In the early scenes with Mr. Collins (AKA Scrote Supreme) she is the EPITOME of the Dumb Fox. She roasts the rude, patronising little man; right to his face! And she manages that without ever being the slightest bit impolite or indiscreet. Then, speaking of knowing her own worth, she refuses to bow to the INTENSE financial and familial pressure put on her to marry him (he will inherit her family home once her ageing father is dead.) It's worth taking a minute to really appreciate the magnitude of this. The man could turn her and all her other female family members out into the street just a few years from now, but she still finds the strength to say no. Some people have called her selfish for this (because of course they have 🙄) but they're wrong - she's strong. She understands that a match with Collins would be physically and intellectually degrading for her, that it would destroy her life and wellbeing even if it saved her and her family from financial ruin. So what does she do, ladies? She refuses to be a martyr. She refuses to believe that her mother and society know better than what she knows, viscerally, in her bones. She rejects him.

And where does Darcy fit into all of this, you may ask - doesn't he famously insult Lizzie the very first time they meet?? (Not to her face, but still.) If Jane Austen is a FDS-er, why oh WHY would she pair off her heroine with someone exhibiting such NVM behaviour? The answer is that Darcy is not an NVM - not at the beginning, and certainly not by the end. As Darcy puts it himself, "I was given good principles but left to follow them in arrogance and conceit." At the beginning of the story he is admittedly pretty low value - he is self-indulgent and overly proud and he allows his shyness to make him appear rude. By the end of the story, he is a HVM.

Now, crucially, Lizzie does NOT fix Darcy. This is important. If she had, then P+P would just be another pickme story about a ""misunderstood"" man being given a load of emotional and mental energy by a nice woman that he absolutely does not deserve. When Darcy first begins to pursue Lizzie, he does it so clumsily that she doesn't even notice. When he first proposes, she knocks him back with the fury that such barefaced audacity deserves. And then she goes her own way. She gets on with her life. It's only by chance that they are thrown back together, and in the meantime Darcy has been working tirelessly on his flaws. The rest of the book is about Darcy proving to himself (and consequently to Lizzie) that he will never allow laziness or self-indulgence to rule his behaviour again. He is kind and considerate to her relatives (even the ones he has no real respect for), and he no longer tolerates disrespect towards her from anyone in his social circle. He secures two of her sisters' marriages and the continuing respectability of her family, by facing up to Wickham (the NVM who was once his best friend) and he lays out the modern equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. All in the belief that Lizzie will never find out that he was responsible for saving her family from ruin, and for no other reason than that he wants her to be safe and happy.

When he finally proposes again he does so with no expectations or sense of entitlement for anything he's done - he makes it clear that if his attentions are unwelcome then they will stop immediately, but that equally he will do anything he can to earn her trust. That's why it's an enduring love story - not because of the pretty lace ribbons or regency era aesthetic. It's about a woman who refuses to settle, either for a relationship where her partner doesn't respect her, or for one where she cannot respect her partner.

TL;DR - the idea that Darcy is some brooding, irresistible anti-hero is, frankly, LAUGHABLE, and Jane Austen would be turning in her grave at the lessons that some modern Pickmeishas take from her book. It's not a story about overlooking a man's flaws in case there's a better, more respectful one inside, it's a story about a woman who values herself enough to reject any man who doesn't respect her for who she is.

P.S. similar lessons can be derived from her other books, particularly Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, my own personal favourite. (Ignore what they did to it in the 2008 adaptation, where they made the heroine literally chase the hero through the streets of Bath, tears and snot running down her face. AUSTEN WOULD NEVER.)