This thread about how often adult children talk to their parents got me thinking–I think my older brother and I are unusual in that we rarely talk to each other.
He’s older by four and a half years (currently we’re 41 and 37), and we have just never spent a lot of time together. Because he switched to private school in eighth grade, we only spent three years in the same elementary school. We went to different high schools (not that we would have been there at the same time, of course, but there was no shared history there), and he was a jock while I was a drama/chorus/band geek.
We do share a sense of humor (especially if something involves making fun of our parents), and aside from the usual older-brother-terrorizes-younger-sister crap of our youth, we don’t even dislike each other. Yet we only actually speak to each other if we happen to be in the same room (a maximum of three or four times a year), or it’s somebody’s birthday.
Sometimes I regret not being closer, because my brother is a cool guy. But then I think that he never picks up the phone either, so it’s not entirely my fault we’re not any closer now than we were twenty years ago. There was never any huge rift or mega-argument that drove us apart, we were just never really together in the first place.
So, is this unusual? Do you talk to your siblings on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? Is it weird that my brother and I have so little in common that we can’t find anything to talk about if it doesn’t involve what movies we’ve seen recently?
My sister and I are a little more than a decade apart from one another in age. We speak infrequently: perhaps 2-3 times a year. We get along very well; we’re just not close.
My brother and I have lived 3,000+ miles apart almost continuously since I was 6. We’ve never spoken often via telephone. However, we make the effort to visit each other once a year if we can (him more than me since he moreso has the money and leisure to travel) and jabber incessantly when we’re together. He’s the only one in my small family I share confidences with.
Our annual-ish ritual of sitting around and drinking a dozen bottles of wine (first with my sister-in-law and nowadays with my wife too) is the high point of my year in some ways.
I’m the youngest of four with two brothers and a sister. My brothers are both drug addict shitbags and I avoid them when I can. I’ll be cordial (in the barest “not actively hostile” sort of way) if I run into them at my parents’, or whatever, but that’s the best I can manage. The younger of the two was my very best friend in the world from childhood until our late teens though.
My sister and I had a falling out 7-ish years ago and didn’t talk for quite some time. We’ve since repaired that relationship and speak, on average, a couple/few times a week. I get out to her house occasionally to hang out or have dinner but probably not as often as I could just because she has more small children than I care to be around all at once, even when I don’t bring my own two with me, and her house is basically chaos all the time.
Oh, ages. My mom had four kids between Oct. '78 and Feb. '83 so none of us are all that far apart. Oldest brother, sister, older brother, me.
My brother and I are very very close. We lived together then worked together so we spoke every day. Now he doesn’t work with me so I don’t see him that often but he calls me once or twice a week to tell me something. We’ll email funny stuff every so often. We don’t live too far apart so I visit him and his family about once week.
I have four older brothers. We don’t talk often - in fact, we don’t at all now. We had a “talk when we’re in the same room” sort of relationship before I moved out of my parents house. We see each other on christmas (if we’re all there) and that’s it. The only one I’ve had a good relationship with is the one closest in age to me. He’s 8 years older than me. The rest are even older than that - one was old enough to have moved out of the house before I was born. Combined with complicated sort of family going-ons, I didn’t even see two of the older brothers until I was about 5, and they never lived in the same house as me. So I’m not exactly in a similar family situation to most.
My one closest-in-age brother and I made a passing effort to get to know one another a couple years ago via a pen-pal sort of snail mail system but it petered out. We see each other maybe once a year outside of the holidays. I feel a little guilty about it, honestly. Maybe I’ll try writing another letter.
It’s kind of telling that they’re all my brothers but when I say “my brother” instead of “(name)” I’m only talking about one of them. That pretty much says what you need to know about our relationships.
I am very close to my sister and communicate with her almost daily, and we see each other weekly or so. We are less than two years apart, and our children are the same age. My older siblings (6, 8, 9, and 10 years older) and I are not that close : I see them on average once a year or so. We are friendly, but not close.
On other other extreme, my mom is one of 12 and 11/12 of them are thick as thieves. They all have this constant phone circle, as well as a family message board. I think my mom talks to a sister or brother at least once a day, and since they all do that, information diffuses pretty quickly. What’s interesting is that as they’ve aged, the age differences have mattered less: there’s 20+ years from the oldest to the youngest, but the opposite ends, if you will, have grown closer over time.
They go on these extended backpacking trips together still, and a lot of what they do during the year is plan those. It’s really neat.
I have one sibling, a brother who is 19 months younger than me (he turned 40 in April; I will be 42 in September). We aren’t close at all, due to the host of psychological issues he’s had since he was a pre-teen. We only email or talk on the phone when it regards one of our parents (e.g., “What are you getting Mom for Christmas?”), and I only see him when he’s visiting one of them at the same time.
I rarely mention him, and in some ways I feel like an only child. It’s not unusual for me to hear “I never knew you had a brother!” (or “I forgot you had a brother!”).
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a “normal” sibling – whether we were close or not.
I have two sisters. They both live in Indianapolis. One works in the same building I do. I see her at least once a week, and we talk. The other I usually talk to 3-4 times a month.
I talk to my sisters a lot more than I do my parents. They’re both women in my peer group with similar upbringings, so we’re sort of friends. I love my mom and dad, but I wouldn’t go drinking with them if we weren’t related. My sisters, I totally would, so I talk to them as often as I do my friends. I wouldn’t hang out with my brothers if we weren’t related, though, so I hardly ever talk to them. I’ve had this phone since March, and there are precisely zero phone calls between my brothers and me, and four text messages total. Texts between my sisters and me are in the hundreds.
Me (40) and my brother (33) are very close. We probably either talk on the phone or via Xbox Live while gaming at least a couple times a week, and we email more often than that.
We were fairly close growing up, or at least as close as siblings separated by 7 years could be, but once he hit about 18-19, he went from being an annoying kid to being an adult, and someone who I found that I actually really liked, and we became good friends as well as brothers. We actually share a lot of the same friends (my friends have become his, and vice-versa, with me even playing a sometime big-brother advisory role to a few of his friends without older siblings)
I consider myself extraordinarily lucky in that respect- I know too many siblings who either aren’t close, or who are close, but not really friends.
We do not talk or see each other often, and are scattering further and further across the country, but my two younger sisters and I get along great and we manage to catch up, and make visits, every so often. We don’t do the whole ‘home for Christmas’ thing so it’s whenever one of us can manage to travel to wherever another happens to be living. They get along less smoothly with each other, that’s always been the case. I haven’t lived with or near them since we were 19, 14 and 11 and we are now 28, 22 and 20.
My sister and I are 11 months apart. As children we were very close and did everything together. We grew apart gradually as we both gravitated towards opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of our lives.
We haven’t talked since the day of my mother’s funeral and I don’t see that changing.
I have a brother 2 years younger, and we were never close as children and still aren’t close as adults. When we have to be together (say for a holiday) we get along fine for a few hours at most, and then relations deteriorate. It’s always been a source of grief for me that we don’t have a better relationship because he’s my only sibling, but we just don’t like or respect each other very much.
My sister and I are 3 yrs apart. She lives in AZ and I’m in CA. We talk, text or email at least once a week. When she lived here in town, we saw each other at least once a week and spoke even more often.
My brother and I are nearly 11 yrs apart. He live in TN. We text once or twice a month stuff like, “Hey how are ya?” We have a decent conversation a couple times a year.
I get along with everyone in my family perfectly well and enjoy myself when we are together… but when we are apart, I can go months without talking to them. I feel vaguely bad about it but it just seems to be the way it is for us.
My brother and I are twenty months apart - I’m the oldest - we talk from time to time - sometimes not for months, sometimes two or three times a week. It just depends.
My husband talks to his sister once in a great while, and doesn’t talk to his brother at all (there was a falling out.) He’s the youngest of the three.
I am the second-oldest of five siblings, we are all roughly two years apart from each other (8 years total between the oldest and youngest). We were never “close” as kids - the usual sibling fighting of course, but we didn’t play together, we each had our own friends.
I keep in touch with my sister a few times a week (texting, email, etc.) but my brothers and I rarely communicate unless there is a reason (invitation to a birthday party for the kids, etc.) I don’t know if my brothers communicate much amongst each other. Nothing wrong, we just all have our own lives, like we did as kids.
When my parents were alive, we got together more frequently for holidays and such. We still enjoy each other when we do get together, but my mother’s passing seemed to remove the “anchor” among us, and we have really gone our separate ways.
This, pretty much. We got along great when we were in high school (some people thought we were dating)! Since then, I’ve been married twice, had two kids, and gotten to a decent place financially. He’s stayed single and seems to be much the same as he was twenty-five years ago, smoking pot with his buddies and living in abject poverty. I think he’s an awfully nice guy, but doubt if he’s ever going to find that right girl and finish growing up.
We live in the same town, and he has a standing invitation to come eat at my house any time, but in reality we only see each other around Thanksgiving and Christmas.