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Your family life must be simpler!

All relationships are built on trust.

I mentioned this in a previous blog, where I focused on all relationships outside the family and romantic / sexual domains. In this blog, I want to cover family relationships — and, you guessed it, these relationships can be simplified too! 

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary on Unsplash

I’m Indian. I have an extensive network of aunts, uncles, grand-aunts and other relations I barely understand myself. In fact, I even know the life stories of scores of people I have never met who are related to me in some obscure way. This whole network is just “one big happy family”.

This is in sharp contrast to the concept of “family” in the West, defined as just parents and their non-adult children. There may be other relations in your broad family, but the family concept mostly centres around parents and young children.

What distinguishes a “family relationship” from a “non-family relationship” is that there is an obligation with family. They can’t just be cut off.

If I dislike a friend, a colleague or a teacher I can always choose to disassociate myself with them and cut them out of my life. With family relations it’s not so easy.

But that doesn’t mean you should have fewer family relations!

The positive spin on the same is that with family, there is no need to pretend to be someone else, they can’t cut you from their lives either and you are allowed to be yourself. This might not be the case with “non-family relationships” where there may be a need for pretence to “fit in” to the group dynamic.

This fact makes family relationships work slightly differently to others: because of the obligation to know family, you need to go beyond trust.

To simplify family relationships, we need to consider three factors:

  1. Trust. Trust is relevant, but the appropriate level is typically defined in the culture you are in. For instance, because Western families are smaller, highest trust lies within that smaller unit. In the East, bigger families mean trust also lies more widely
  2. Generosity. You need to be generous with your time and money when it comes to family or the relationship will never blossom
  3. Acceptance. Accepting your family for who they are is important because you’re in this together. Lack of acceptance can only lead to unnecessary anguish in a situation from which you can’t escape.

To repeat, the family relationship is different to others because it is obligatory. Being generous, accepting your family for who they are, accepting yourself for who you are and building trust to the required level will make these enjoyable regardless of the relation: be it your husband, daughter, an aunt or your second cousin’s wife’s sister’s nephew.

And making family relationships (actually any relationship) enjoyable is one sure way of having a satisfying social life.

Thanks for reading my blog. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Sukhi

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