That is a sweeping generalization. Sometimes it’s harder, sometimes it’s easier.
It would be a piece of cake to cut my cousin off. One text - “I can’t in good conscience associate with you because you voted for Trump” - and all done. It’s not like I’m going to have awkward moments bumping into him at the Post Office; he lives a two-hour drive away and half the time he’s not on island anyway.
Here’s something to think about:
I have a friend whose parents were emotionally abusive to him in ways similar to the way my parents treated me. He cut them out of his life completely, to the point of changing his name so it would be harder for his parents to track him down. It cost him dearly in many ways.
I chose differently - while I distanced myself from my parents (the fact I lived outside the US for most of my adult life is no coincidence), I maintained some contact, and when my mother ended up widowed, bitter, and alone, I made some very difficult choices to help her. (And I don’t just mean the decision-making was difficult; providing the help was really hard too.)
Once, when our parents were still alive, that friend said to me, “You know, I really admire you for having the guts to maintain contact with your parents. It was a morally defensible choice, but I personally just couldn’t do it.”
And my response was, “That’s funny, because I really admire you for having the guts to cut off all contact with your parents. It was a morally defensible choice, but I personally just couldn’t do it.”
And you, BigT, have no way of judging either us, or what decisions we made. These matters are deeply personal. A dismissive, “Cutting people off is much harder than keeping them in your life” as if every person on the planet had identical circumstances, is absurdly simplistic and lacking in insight.
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