All happy families are (supposedly) alike according to Tolstoy.
But do you really know any families that you would consider truly happy? By truly happy, please understand that I’m setting a pretty high standard. I don’t just mean reasonably contented and all members independently sufficient.
I’m not sure I can think of a single family that I know, that doesn’t have at least one black sheep, or at least one issue which creates tension among the members. Where members can simply get together and interact openly without at least SOME strategizing as to what topics to avoid, or what past actions might have an impact on current interactions.
I guess a large part of my premise reflects my belief that you really don’t know what goes on inside of most peoples homes and minds. Your neighbors might appear wonderful on the outside, but then you overhear that she has been estranged from her sister or something…
So, does the Norman Rockwellesque family exist? And if so, how common is it?
How big a unit must it be? Would a nuclear family of a couple and their one or two children count? Then I can think of at least a couple of my relatives famlies that would fit. But they are outnumbered by the number of my relatives who had divorces or unhappy marriages.
Go to extended families and no; not one springs to mind. Go more household and throw in the kids and grandkids and I can come up with a couple. The first two that spring to mind are very unlike each other in almost every respect; one poor and one rich, one several kids and one a single kid, one in perfect health and one always battling something. The one thing they seem to have in common, to me, is communication; open and honest communication. The saying is ignorance is bliss but they seem to dispel that one.
But, based on what I can see for myself, the B family is pretty happy. Mom is ~31, a 3rd grade teacher at a local school, Dad is ~35, works in the mines like almost every last adult man in this area does. Their daughter, 13, is from Dad’s first marriage, she’s as smiley and happy as I’ve ever seen a kid that age. They thought they couldn’t have kids, so they fostered a little lad, S, with a view towards adopting him, and they recently ticked off Step 7 or 8 of the 50 or 60 steps required to adopt a foster kid in Missouri. Then, against all thinking to the contrary, they got pregnant, and the little girl, M, is about 11 months old now. She’s kind of a pill, but she can be cute too.
As far as I can tell, they’re happy. But again, closed doors.
My own family and that of my best friend are perfectly happy. Sure there are some philosophical differences, so I won’t discuss how dumb I find some family member’s mild belief in higher powers. But considering that a disqualifier for happiness seems unreasonable to me.
If you’re asking for examples of perfect happiness, of people who never have any disagreements and never have anything go wrong with their lives: I don’t think the problem there is families. I think the problem there is that that’s not how life works. Nobody, even taken on their own without any relatives, has a life that goes so perfectly that nothing ever makes them tense.
If you are asking if there are any perfect families, No. If you are asking if there are any happy families, Yes.
Obviously my answer is going to be shaped by my own experience, so I am just as likely to over-estimate the number of happy families as someone else would be to under-estimate. But many of my family members are verging on, or in some cases well past, the point of eccentricity, all of us have some kind of issues, but we can get together and nobody is excluded and we don’t have to walk on eggshells. Some of my relatives I’m fonder of than others, but they’re all family. It helps that none of them have ever done anything unforgiveable.
There are multiple threads on the SDMB about truly unforgiveable family issues - we don’t have any of those. No molestation or abuse, and the only member who actually did anything truly horrible (he murdered his wife) is long since dead.
There are also threads about how people can’t get together with family because they voted wrong/are bigots/that sort of thing. Those seem odd to me. Some of my family voted for Trump, some very much did not, most of us are Christian and a couple are atheist. We can get along, if for no other reason that we all have practice in being frozen dead in our tracks by my mother’s disapproving glare and “let’s go on to more pleasant topics” over the years. Does that make us a more happy family? Well, it certainly makes family get-togethers a lot more pleasant.
Heck, if they can put up with my foibles, I can put up with theirs.
One of the things that I like in the kind of relationships I consider good is precisely being able to acknowledge stress (from toothaches to “my boss has been riding me all day” to what-ever-else is stressing you) without other people either taking offense for it or trying to drive your life for you; they may or may not be able to help you in further ways, but simply having someone to whom you can tell you’re stressed and they acknowledge it without freaking out is already a big de-stressor.
I’m not super sure what the OP’s standards are here but it appears that any unhappiness in the extended family is a disqualifier, in which case no, I do not know a family that is happy by that standard, and I suspect it’s impossible.
But there there’s this line:
“Where members can simply get together and interact openly without at least SOME strategizing as to what topics to avoid, or what past actions might have an impact on current interactions.”
In my family there’s none of this. I can’t think of any area in which we have to actively avoid a topic of conversation. So maybe we’re happy. But then I’m defining my family as my nuclear family, plus grandparents, and our siblings and their kids; do I need to go beyond that? We don’t hang out with any other family often enough to think about it.
Not sure how far extended has to go. But speaking for my wife, myself, my three kids, their spouses and six grandchildren, I would say we are all happy in our lives. My oldest grandchild is trying to break into theater and that is problematic life choice, but still he is happy. One DIL has to face the fact that her father, stepmother, and half-sister are trumpists, but that affects her only when visiting them 800 miles away. And that is the only source of egg-shells in the family.
I am old enough to have witnessed several happy families, through the years, and now I’m watching as their numerous offspring, are making happy families of their own!
My sister and her wife have the best relationship of any two people I know. They are happy, support each other and present a united front to the rest of the world. Their four daughters are all living happy, productive lives.
From my perspective there are a lot of happy families out there, and I always wondered why my family when I was a kid was so unhappy. When I was a kid I always wished that I could have a Dad that was like the other fathers, not getting drunk every night, beating my Mom, and in a state of constant narcissistic rage.
I think the amount of dysfunction is going up these days with things like the opioids crisis, money stresses, etc.
My wife was not at all a fan of punk as I was. She always thought it a pleasant song based solely on the chorus, until one at she heard me singing the verses!
I’m glad to hear of so many happy families. I’m not keeping track, but it seems to me just about every family I know well has one or more of:
-at least one “black sheep”
-a couple of members who pretty much prefer not to be together, making family get-togethers stressful
-topics of conversation of past actions that just are not discussed - or expected to give rise to unpleasantness
-long periods of estrangement
-lengthy perceived slights/grudges…
Just went to a funeral where the stories told by the Deceased Dad’s kids and grandkids all told a story of a happy, affectionate family.
One grandson said he had to warn his friends if they were stopping by: “Look, this house is going to seem like something out of an old sitcom. I’ll be hugging my folks and grandparents, and you might even get hugged if I don’t stop them. Oh, and they’re going to be actually interested in your life. Let me know if it creeps you out.”
My friend’s family. He and I were classmates in high school. He father was a professional and mother was a stay at home mom. Pretty typical for the times.
He is one of six kids. He’s a scientist, the oldest is a doctor, and the other kids all are high achievers.
His parents rarely fought and modeled great behavior.
I asked him once if he had ever given his parents any grief. He thought about it for a while but couldn’t recall anything.
Then after all of that, he and his wife had a bad luck of the draw and really struggled with their son. Those were some tough years for a while, but once the son went to college, he matured.
Ours kids have routinely commented on what a happy childhood they had. Literally don’t remember anything bad happening within the family.
There was stuff going on. After all, people close to us died, problems at work caused job changes, etc. But the kids weren’t really affected by that stuff.
They thought all this was common until about high school when they started to notice the dysfunctionality in their friends’ families. As they saw more and more of that they grew to significantly appreciate what a good family they had.
