If someone you know is related to you genetically, say a cousin or whatever, how does that affect your relationship with this person as opposed to them just being a friend? Do you treat them differently? Do you expect them to treat you differently? What?
(Inspired by ZPGZealot and the thread about paternity)
I do treat them as I would family vs. if they were a stranger.
Cousins get diff. treatment than strangers.
Now good friends and all? That’s almost equivalent to a blood tie in my book unless I’m familiar with the Relative. If it’s a random relative I’m introduced to and I’ve never met them before, I’m polite and nice to them and I will try to establish a bond of friendship. However, they are not more so special than those with stronger ties to me.
Those within 1-2 direct blood linkage though (ie:Sister/Parents/Grandparents/Uncles all within 1-2 jumps of me)- that’s PURE Family to me. They probably go to the top of the list.
I would do almost anything for my parents and my siblings. Then my Grandparents, then my uncles/Sisters all related to my Parents. My cousins who I am familiar with and have ties with (ie: the ones I grew up with in an extended family when I was a child) are not considered “cousins” but stronger than that, they’re equivalent to siblings in my book, w/ only my own pure sibling as being higher in status than them, but they’re all equivalent and I would look after and help each and every one of them (there’s only like 3-4 that fall into this category). All my other cousins and such who share equivalent ties to but have not grown up with then fall under the next familiar status/heading. Ie: the cousins I’ve had in far off locations and only seen every few years. That’s still kin and I will support them (with the respect that the closer they are to my own parental units the more preference is given to them). If they needed help and I could do so, I would try and help.
My closest friends I consider equivalent to 2-3 links of a blood tie away from me, so my best friends get treated just under the “relatives who I’ve grown up with” bond, and then comes the “Relatives I know and have seen occasionally”; followed by “Friends” then all the rest of the family ties fall in (ie: relatives I’ve seen in passing/ know of and have met at least a few times), then acquaintances that I know/colleagues in school and work, then “Family who I don’t know but meet” followed by “People who are nice to me” then “People who i’ve seen but not formally introduced myself to but interacted with” then “People” then “Total Strangers”.
There’s sorta a zig-zag between family and Friends with family tending to get a bump just by existence, that requires strangers and such to work to earn the next level up in status. Of course, interaction with me will also shape how i feel. I will bump down those who actively dislike me, or those who hate me but while strangers/freinds can totally fall out of the group, there exists a basement level of family members who are still higher than that, but just simply will not receive any interaction from me, but I still know of them but I will not just be jerks to them or something as drastic as disowning them. But simply they will be at the bottom of the family pool, while there would still be a separate pool for friends/unknowns and such.
I am a believer though in Genetics. My genes are favored, and the closer you are to my genes the more preference you will be given- so humans are greater than monkeys and so on down the line if you want to get speciesist or something. Though I don’t own a pet, so I can’t answer any ridiculous “Would I save my pet or a random human life” sorta Qs, but I can say I would probably save a Random human over a random animal and so on upwards following this genetic chain. So I’d save my parents/Siblings over a best freind and such in those ridiculous scenarios, but anything after that it gets dicey and who really knows what’d happen.
Jack and shit. If somebody who I didn’t know came up to me and said they were related to me and wanted a favor (say, my paternal cousins) I’d tell them to piss off. For that matter, there are some relatives (my sister, one of my cousins) that would get about the same response (there are good reasons for this).
I have friends that I consider family. I’d do anything for my parents, because they’d do anything for me. I’d drive six hours to help some of my friends. I’d drive six hours to help my grandparents (I’d kind of have to, since they live that far away, but that’s not really the point). But it’s not based on blood, it’s because they deserve it and I know it.
I don’t think they have any particular relevance outside of biology, genetics, heredity, etc. I don’t believe there’s any mystical ‘connection’ between close relatives that is caused by their biological relationship - at least, not significantly in humans.
Family is a social concept - facts of nature happen to make the social construct of family superimpose closely with the biological machinery of relationship, but that doesn’t make the one thing absolutely dependent on the other.
With the exception of my mother (with whom I have a relationship because she is related to my brothers, not because she is related to me), zip with nothing on top. Meeting distant relatives is a bit like 99% of museum visits, “oh that’s nice” but it won’t change my life. And that other 1% can happen with people whose degree of genetic relationship to me is unknown, too.
I know that someone who grew in this or that sector of my family is likely to lean this or that way in behavior or ideas, but in the same way as I know that someone who grew up in a cowfarm is prone to leaning a certain way and someone who grew up in a mansion with three live-in servants, a different way. The company they kept when growing up is much more relevant than the genetics.
The only reason blood ties mean anything is you need to have someone at your back through life and you grew up with these people so you know who to trust with what. Somebody that comes in out of the blue gets no special treatment on the trust route.
Very little, except that relatives can be embarrassing in ways that friends simply can’t.
What do genetic blood ties mean to you?
Absolutely nothing. Personal relationships are all that matter, not something as nebulous as sharing some genetic codestrings or historic accidents of whose grandmother slept with which grandfather.
My teenage stepson is every bit as disrespectful and obnoxious as any child of my own could be.
I don’t think I can answer this, because I’m not genetically related to my family and I can’t tell whether you’re asking about genetic relationships or family relationships versus friendships. Could you clarify?
Since the OP is basing this on the reactions of ZPG Zealot in the “Adoption: Why Say Mom And Dad?” thread, I’m assuming he means genetically related.
They don’t get any special treatment, as far as I can avoid it. Non-blood ties have always been much, much better to me.
I found out at 28 that I had a half sister (6 years younger) that I never knew about. She contacted my Dad, wanting to establish a relationship.
Besides, reopening a wound with my mom and hashing through that for several months, and making sure that my Dad made some acknowledgement of her in his Will, I really do not have a relationship with her. I did meet her about a year later at a family funeral.
I don’t have any negative feelings toward her, I just don’t have anything in common with her. My full siblings and I shared a common upbringing growing up in the same house together. My half sister happens to share the same DNA with me, but that’s about it.
I’m going to treat my cousins, even the distant ones or the ones I don’t particularly like, better than random strangers off the street, but part of that is because I’d treat anybody I actually knew better than your average random stranger. I’m not going to treat cousins I see a couple times a year better than my friends who are there for me every day, no.
In my case, though, talking about my family is most likely not talking about actual blood kin. Daddy’s side of the family is…well, my grandma once said if they made a movie about our family, they’d call it Yours, Mine, and Theirs: They’re All Ours. We have a big, fairly close-knit family, but only 2 of them are actually any blood kin to my father. The rest are a mishmash of halfs and steps and step-steps and inlaws–it’s what happens when your grandfather is widowed twice and each time marries someone with kids and then his widow remarries to someone in a similar situation.
So I don’t know that I’m really answering your question at all. I would feel far more of an obligation to the guy who is my cousin because our grandparents married each other and has been part of my life since we were 4 than to a blood cousin I’d never laid eyes on. Basically, blood means doodly-squat compared to mutual love and support.
I have so many cousins I wouldn’t know most of them if I walked by them on the street. Grandma had 13 children who went on to reproduce like rabbits, having first distributed themselves evenly across the continent. Do I feel any special connection to these, literally hundreds, of genetically connected people? I do not.
I have a younger brother with whom I was very close, when he took a wife we were as close as sisters. When his marriage broke up he was a 1st class jerk to her and his kids, refusing to give them any financial support whatsoever. I’m supposed to side with him because we share DNA? No thanks. Her and I are still as close as sisters, I’ve had contact with him only twice in 20 years, at funerals, very 'Hey, how are ya." Sorry, but a genetic tie doesn’t mean I have to ‘have your back’ when you’re behaving in a morally criminal fashion.
I was primary caregiver to my bedridden mother in law for many years. A task so challenging that people were stunned that I would give so much of myself when she wasn’t my mother. I refused to take on caregiving for my own mother, as a matter of fact, at the end of her life, because she was toxic to me. I felt she had the potential/inclination to destroy the life, and healthy relationships, I had built for myself. As you can see, for me, blood is not thicker than water.
It seems to me, there is the tribe you were given and the tribe you create. Personally, I am much more bound to the tribe I’ve created than the one I was given. The one I was given was riddled with dysfunction and toxic.
I would have no difficulty donating an organ to a perfect stranger, to save a life. At the same time, I feel no obligation to do so for someone just because they are a genetic link to me.
I’ve always believed that you can choose your family. I have some relatives who I’d be happy to never have to see again.
I couldn’t care less about family. People who might share some DNA with me get no more respect then any other random person off of the street. On the other hand the time spent with people means something.
I’ve got one cousin my age who I’ve seen a dozen or so times over the years and I was willing to pick her up at the airport that is twenty minutes from my house rather then her waiting at the airport for her boyfriend for a couple of hours but I’d do that for any one who I didn’t mind spending a couple of hours with.
I think some family gets a bump because you spend more time with them then most of your friends but even then i think the bond formed is more of a friendship bond then due to DNA. But for my family that I dislike being with I treat them just like anyone else I don’t want to know and for the family I haven’t met I wouldn’t drive 5 minutes to meet them.
Family ties certainly mean something to me. They’re among the few things in this world that approach permanence - my family will always be my family, no matter what.
I have a fairly large extended family, and I feel a connection to my relatives even if I see them only once a year or every few years or I’m meeting them for the first time, even if they live in different states or in different countries. It’s as if part of me is whispering “These aren’t strangers - they’re your family!”, and I immediately feel comfortable around them. If I was to spend three hours crowded around a table with half a dozen random strangers I’d feel distinctly awkward; but when I spent three hours crowded around a table with half a dozen second cousins (most of whom I didn’t know), I had a blast. If I needed help I’d much rather turn to a relative than a friend, and if a family member came to me I’d do anything I could, within reason, to help them out.
However I’m not sure how much of this, if any, is based on actual genetic ties. I feel the same way about aunts and uncles by marriage as I do aunts and uncles by blood. If I get married, I expect that I’ll probably feel a similar link to my in-laws. One of my aunts has been seeing a man with two children from a previous marriage, and if things get serious between them I’d be delighted to call the girls my cousins. The bond I feel with relatives probably exists simply because I think of these people as my family, not because we share genes.
In summary: family ties matter to me. Genetics are part of those ties, but love is a far more important part.
Okay, so I guess I could relate this to my birth mother/father/family members whom I’ve never met.
Ain’t no hope in hell that I’d ever put them ahead of my own family members, who aren’t genetically related to me.
So I guess in answer to the OP: Not much! 
Not a lot. My step-family means more to me than my biological father.