The Importance of Bonds Extending Beyond Families
By Arhon Strauss
Family: the people I’m spending every hour of every day with during quarantine. I would like to say that we are using this time to strengthen our already unbreakable bonds. It’s what I should be saying, right? Yet, for everything my family has done for me, for all that they mean to me, I cannot help but wish I was stuck in a house with my friends instead. I miss the 3a.m. talks in the common room, the crazy antics at D-Hall and even the six hour study sessions. Yes, even those. But shouldn’t my family be the most important thing to me? After all, blood is thicker than water.
We are supposed to value our family bonds, which were gifted to us, as the greatest bonds we have. But I think that this mentality makes no sense. Why are we taught to value such bonds so much, even though we had no say in them? Why are the bonds that we form through life’s trials and tribulations treated as weaker than those that were just handed to us? This is not to say that familial bonds cannot be strong, but is our current way of looking at them justified?
Family, as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “the basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children” (it does not have to be an actual blood relation). This is the definition I will adhere to. I am going to focus on the relationships between an individual and their whole family, contrasted with their connections to friends. Why should we choose one over the other?
As I mentioned earlier, we are always told to value our familial bonds over others. I cannot speak to all the reasons behind this (they seem to be quite primitive and foundational), but I think that there are two main factors here. The first is the expectation that families are the only ones you can depend on when challenges arise, and the second is that living under the same roof should cause us to know them better than anyone else.
To an extent, both of these are valid. Families usually understand and support their members. But this is not true in every case, nor does it justify a blind trust in the strength of familial bonds. Families can break apart, hate each other and even hurt each other because—as with any bond forced upon us or not—it is entirely dependent on the people involved and circumstances they are in.
Our connections to others are not immutable. So, in the case of our families, a large factor in how well we bond is luck.
The same holds true for bonds of friendship; they are dependent on the people and the situation. Yet, we have control over this process when looking for friendships, because we choose to actively seek friends out, and we evaluate their personalities before we engage with them.
Now, this begs the question: what makes a familial bond stronger than a bond of friendship, if they are actually dependent on the same things? Well, to put it simply, a familial bond is not necessarily stronger than a bond of friendship. Your friends can be there for you more than your family, they can know you better than your family and they can be closer to you than your family. Yet, as I have stated before, the opposite can also be true.
Ultimately, what I am trying to say is that our familial lifestyle has been idealized to the point where it is expected that families should have this unbreakable bond, regardless of the special circumstances potentially at play. This is a lie—in many ways, familial connections are similar to those we feel in friendships. Perhaps, this is a reminder that we need friends just as much as we need family, but regardless, we shouldn’t just assume that one form of connection is inherently superior to another.