what makes a family a family?
Let’s try on a few ideas for size. Maybe a family is a group of people who form bonds because they live together — because they share a home. Cohabitation is important enough to the idea of family that Maynes includes it in her formal definition of the term: “Families are small groups of people linked by culturally recognized ties of marriage or similar forms of partnership, descent, and/or adoption, who typically share a household for some period of time.”
But according to a 2008 Pew Social & Demographic Trends survey: “Home means different things to different people. Among U.S.-born adults who have lived in more than one community, nearly four-in-ten (38%) say the place they consider home isn’t where they’re living now. . .26% say it’s where they were born or raised; 22% say it’s where they live now; 18% say it’s where they have lived the longest; 15% say it’s where their family comes from; and 4% say it’s where they went to high school.” These widely varying perceptions of home make clear that cohabitation is not fundamentally what makes family family.
Could it be that family is defined by mutual responsibilities? Parents take care of their children and, when they grow up, children take care of their parents. Maybe. But one booming industry begs to differ. In January 2014, a company called Care.com went public after raising $111 million in venture funding. As the preeminent “care marketplace,” Care.com “offers solutions to help families make informed decisions in one of the most important and highly considered aspects of their family life — finding and managing quality care for their family.”
Whatever feelings it may stir to think about hiring someone to care for your loved ones, the reality is that we now have the opportunity to outsource many of our traditional family duties. We don’t have to look out for one another in the same way we once did — there simply aren’t the same consequences there once were — and I’m convinced that simple obligation is not what makes a family a family.
My belief is that family is fundamentally a feeling . . . and that feeling is closeness. Closeness is what makes family feel like family. Without closeness, our relationships with our family members feel just as bad (or even worse, owing to our heightened expectations) as any other set of relationships that lack knowing and caring.
In the introduction, I mentioned that most people think there are many different kinds of relationships, but in fact all relationships lie somewhere on a single spectrum from distant to close. This means any relationship can be close, but it also means any relationship can be distant. Just because someone is your mother, father, sister, or brother does not mean your relationship with him or her will not be on the distant end of the spectrum.
No relationships — regardless of title — are intrinsically closer than others. All require the efforts of knowing and caring. Family members certainly can feel close, but only if they put in the effort.
That being said, family does have some unique advantages in creating closeness, particularly in the area of knowing. Your family members have the potential to know you well because of your extensive shared history and shared experiences. There are few people outside of family with whom you will spend as much time over the course of your life, especially during your formative years. This access to one another over long periods of time (and at different stages of life) is a real opportunity. If the opportunity is seized on and used in the efforts of deep knowing, family can be an excellent source of closeness.
But family also has one great disadvantage: complacency. Family members, more so than any other people in relationships, tend to think they don’t have to do anything to maintain the relationship. “Family is forever,” right? While this can be a deeply comforting thought, don’t let it become an excuse not to try. Don’t let “family is forever” get translated into “I don’t have to be nice to you because you couldn’t get rid of me even if you tried.”
Family may be forever, but the feeling of family — closeness — is not forever without active, sustained effort.
Myth 2: Some types of relationships are inherently closer than others.
Myth 2 reframed: Any relationship can be close, and any relationship can be distant.
Myth 3: If You’re Lonely, Just Be Around People
Of all the myths about what reduces loneliness, this one is the stickiest. Does it feel good to be around others when you’re lonely? The answer is a resounding sometimes. If you go to a social gathering and make a spontaneous new friend, it’s the best. If you go and feel out of place, ostracized, or just . . . awkward, it can be the worst.
So let’s just get this out of the way: the obvious reason why having people around isn’t a good solution to our contemporary loneliness is that it’s terribly, painfully unpredictable.
But why is it so unpredictable? Why is it so unlike the stale loaf of bread vs. the fresh one — both of which achieve the same goal of reducing hunger? What I’ve found is that we make a subtle but important mistake in our quest to be around people: we don’t distinguish between people who are around us for us and people who are around us because of the situation.
I use the term situational proximity to describe the experience of having people around you because of the context, not because you necessarily want to be around one another. This can mean living in an apartment with four roommates, sitting in a class of five hundred people, or working in an office of thousands. Situational proximity means there are people (often lots of people) around you physically, but they are there for reasons other than being near you.
Situational proximity is a big — and little acknowledged — part of why being around people is so unpredictable when it comes to reducing loneliness. If you and another person haven’t gotten together for the purpose of being together, it’s totally up in the air how that person will make you feel. If you start chatting with a girl in class with the goal of feeling less lonely, and she chats back with the goal of understanding the class material better, you’re likely not going to walk away with your goal met. These difference in goals — differences in intentions — can be highly discouraging for someone looking to be less lonely.
That being said, there is always a chance that meeting up with someone who is there to meet up with you won’t make you feel all that great either. But it’s much more likely that the other person will try. At the very least, your intentions are aligned. It’s much more likely she’ll put in the effort and be engaged with you — usually making for a much more satisfying interaction.
And it’s that feeling — the satisfying feeling of being with someone who wants to know you and who cares to engage — that alleviates loneliness. As you’ve probably guessed, the feeling that makes being around people pay off is closeness.
This difference between situational proximity and the experience of closeness can be seen most clearly in working environments. Working environments are inherently situational — everyone is really there to work (and to get paid, of course), not because they like everyone around them. This begs the question “Does having people around at work generally make someone who struggles with loneliness more or less lonely?”
It would stand to reason that a larger work team would mean more opportunities to create closeness. There would be more people to try on for size and see whom you’re drawn to as a potential closeness partner. But does this actually pan out?
I was particularly curious about this question because Silicon Valley has a very strong inclination toward keeping work teams small. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, famously said that when you can no longer feed a team with two pizzas, it has gotten too big. I wondered if this was simply the technology mind-set coming into play, since smaller teams are often more efficient. But this bias toward smaller teams seems to be about more than just efficiency. Research supports the idea that larger teams make people feel worse — specifically, more alienated from one another.
Psychologist