She’s in love with a bad boy.

Secular historian Callum Brown investigated British Christian literature and found that around 1700 a new narrative appeared, where women were “the angel of the house”.   As he explained in The Death of Christian Britain

…women’s spiritual destiny was virtually never portrayed as a battle with temptation or real sin; fallen women did not appear as central characters, and none of the usual temptations like drink or gambling ever seemed to be an issue with them. The problem is the man, sometimes the father, but more commonly the boyfriend, fiancé, or husband, who is a drinker, a gambler, keeps the ‘bad company’ of ‘rough lads’ and is commonly a womanizer. The man is the agency of the virtuous woman’s downfall; he does not make her bad, but does make her suffer and poor. She is not always portrayed as having undergone a major conversion experience, but to have emerged from childhood into a disciplined and natural ‘goodness.’

Brown explains that one of the most common literary structures regarding men was what he called “The Husband Structure”:

A. Husband lives with virtuous wife
B. Husband is a drunkard/gambler/wife-beater
C. Wife and children suffer in poverty
D. Chance event (often an accident to husband)
E. Wife nurses husband in Christian way.
F. Husband converts
G. Family happier, if not richer

This is of course the plot-line of pretty much all Kendrick brothers movies.  But we can also see a modified version of this structure in movies that add on the fantasy of Christian women piously chasing after sexy bad boys:

Related:

• She was trying to fix* men.
• Bad boys, single moms, and the love of a strong independent woman.

H/T Nick Mgtow