Over the years, I’ve noticed a dichotomy in the world. The first group of people classify family as those that share chromosomes with you (spouses and their chromosome carriers too). These people are the ones that say to their step-parent, “You aren’t my real mom/dad!”. They’re the one who will always pick a blood sibling over you no matter how destructive it is because, “They’re my brother/sister.” and ultimately, you’re not family.
Some people consider family to be the people you choose. The obvious is of course step kids/parent/sibling but there is also good friends, an adopted brother/sister. This also works in reverse in that you can exclude people that share chromosomes from your “family”. For example my dad was not family the last 10 years of my life.
So which are you? Or is their a third option? Military buddies? Prison cell block neighbors?
I’m afraid I disagree with your premise, that this dichotomy exists widely. Also, to the extent the “family over everyone” attitude does exist, I think it’s mostly culturally inherited and only persists where that culture is dominant and people in that culture who don’t feel that way are afraid to express their difference.
In my opinion (contrary to such genealogy shows as Finding Your Roots and Who Do You Think You Are) personality traits, including those that affect emotional attachment, are not inherited. You may learn certain attitudes from your parents or guardians growing up, but wider exposure tends to blunt their impact. If you don’t get wider exposure, you may be stuck there, even if you find it unsatisfying.
The people you grew up with, whether parents or siblings or step-relationships, have a better chance to have a close relationship due to long-shared experiences and intimacy, but that can certainly change over time. That many people are close to their immediate family members is not compelling evidence that these people belong to your first group (i.e. “family over everyone”).
My mother refers to one of her friends as a sister from another mother. For her, this other woman is part of her extended family.
I also have people that I consider family, even though there is no blood relationship. I would also consider them part of my extended family. They are people that I can depend on, just as much, or even more, than those I am related to. Most of these people I’ve known longer than my husband.
One of my friends has the exact same sense of humor as her father. She’s adopted, as are her brothers, but she’s the only one that picked that up.
At the end, family is what each person makes it. There may be those who still do “blood over all”, but this seems to be the minority.
My family are the people I choose - my parents and grandparents are gone, if we have aunts/uncles/cousins, they have not been in contact for longer than I can remember. I don’t have much of a relationship with my surviving sibling beyond being friends on farcebook.
Family to me is the group of friends I like to be around, the folks I go to gigs and music festivals with, and are a much bigger part of my life than any blood relations.
You share chromosomes with all humans; in any case, as you point out, close kinship is not necessarily crucial as you could be estranged from a father or close to an adopted son. The rest of it is essentially cultural, for you could be organised into a “nuclear family” or a group like a clan.
I use more than one definition of family, depending on context. My family means my wife and our dog. It can also mean my close ancestors, siblings, aunts, uncles, nephews-nieces, my first (and some of my second) cousins. It can also include their spouses and my in-laws. It can also be my closest friends.
I have close friends that I consider family. On my wife’s side there’s plenty of people, she can pick and choose who she wants to keep close. I had a very small family to start with and now very few left alive. I have a 2 cousins and 1 brother I consider family by blood and rarely see them. My friends are close with my wife and kids also but they haven’t ever felt the lack of a family as I have. We get invited to all their family events, and those have become special to me.
I’ve was raised in a world with a large number of biological and step-relatives. Almost all of the later were wonderful people who treated me quite well from the get-go. But here and there were people who just didn’t make the cut, to say the least.
My rule of thumb: family are people you are somehow related that act like family.
Unrelated people who act like family are really good friends.
I don’t think there are just two types, because I think there’s some gray area in how you draw distinctions. For example, who exactly is saying
These people are the ones that say to their step-parent, “You aren’t my real mom/dad!”
and what is the context ?
Is it a child who the stepparent raised from the age of 2, or a kid whose stepparent married the parent when the kid was 16 and the kid has only two tickets to graduation or a 30 year-old who is objecting that their relatively recent stepparent expects to be treated exactly the same as a parent - I once read an advice column where a stepmother who had been married for 5 years or so was complaining that when her stepdaughter gave birth she would be the last to hold the new baby after both sets of bio-grandparents.
I agree with everyone that “family” means the ones who are related by blood or marriage, plus extremely close friends have always been “family” as well.
My husband’s family has many related by blood, and at any one point in time, half of them are fighting with the other half. You’d need a chalkboard or dry mark board to keep track of the feuds. I got tangled up in their games once, and I swore I’d never play that way again. What makes me laugh hard is when they start saying to each other, “I disown you.” That is a completely nonsense statement because NONE of them have rwo nickels to rub together. “Disowning” has to do with inheritance, and the only thing that family possesses are grudges, insults, and lies.
I have three very close friends I grew up with. Around the time of what could be considered an anniversary of the first meeting of each one, I sent them each a gorgeous flower arrangement to commemorate fifty years of being my friend.
Family is people who are related to me and whom I am close to. For me, that includes in-laws and step-relatives and people whose blood connection is so distant that it’s ridiculous.
I have relatives whom I don’t consider family, but I do consider friends: people I like that, for one reason or another (usually geography), weren’t really around consistently and didn’t make / respond to any effort to bridge the gap. (Edit: a lot of these are people I’ve gotten to know as an adult on social media, but hardly knew before that.)
I have close relatives (I’m an only child, so aunts, uncles, cousins) who loathe or are indifferent to me for a variety of reasons (religion, politics, personal issues). I am cordial to / friendly with some of these people, and out of touch with others, but I do not consider them family.
I have very close friends of long standing. I don’t consider them family (and one became an ex-friend when that line was crossed: long, complicated, and rather boring story). I have a few friends that I think of more or less the way other people seem to think of their siblings, but because those are individual relationships without a larger group to hold them or a history beyond us as individuals, I don’t really consider them family.
Third option. (There are probably more like thirty, or three hundred.)
My genetic family is my family; even the one who hasn’t spoken to the rest of us in forty years is still my family. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to favor them over friends, just because they’re family: if there’s a disagreement I’ll favor the one who I think is right. And I am considerably tighter with a few of my friends than I am with almost anybody in my family. Plus which, I don’t even know the names of some of the cousins-removed, let alone what they’re up to – and, as DPRK pointed out, all humans are related; just some more closely than others.
Whether to call the closest friends family even when there’s no genetic or formal marriage or formal adoption relationship I think is entirely up to the people involved, and has little or nothing to with the strength of the relationship.
I consider anyone related to me by blood or marriage part of my family. (For the record, if were adopted, I would use “blood” in the obvious sense of including my parents and their relatives). My wife’s parents were divorced and each remarried and she considers all four as family. In fact, the one we were closest to was her stepmother, at least after her father died.
My extended family is: my uncle and his wife, my sisters, my stepdad, my mother, and my grandmother.
For the record, there are other people living that are genetically related to me; being “related” to me through accident of birth confers no special status in my estimation of them.