A little back story first.
I was raised by JWs. My mother was born in Steinbach. Her father was part of that Mennonite community. Her mother was an American citizen, and we don’t really know how she wound up there as a teenager, pregnant, married, and producing a first child who has two different birth certificates (same month and day, different year, different country). My mother’s parents divorced when she was very young, and her mother subsequently remarried, abandoned her second husband, who divorced her after she left, remarried again and then divorced again (after a half-brother was born, and my mother had connected with her step brother and sister). A few years later, my mother married my father, at around the same age that her mother had gotten pregnant with her first child and gotten married.
My paternal grandparents converted to JW before it was JW, and the religion caused a rift with family. By the time my sisters and I came along, we grew up almost exclusively surrounded by JWs outside of attending public school. My mother had two brothers who were not JW, but we saw them only a handful of times while we were children. When a JW family member quit being JW, our contact with them ceased. So when my sister left when she turned 18, I didn’t have contact with her again until I left about five years later.
Many decades later, I learned that the Mennonites that my maternal grandfather was born into were Holdeman Mennonites. Prior to that, they had picked the Kleine Gemeinde side of that split, and you can trace how my ancestors picked the Nutter side of Mennonite splits going back literally hundreds of years.
You may know Mennonites. You may think of them as lovely, peacable, admirable folk who value family. Mine were the ones who cut themselves off from those Mennonites. The Mennonites you know think of my Mennonite ancestors as culty.
I tell this backstory not to gain your sympathy or pity, but to clearly depict how implausible it is to expect that there could be healthy parenting or healthy family relationships in the context I grew up in. I wasn’t allowed to have friends at school. We weren’t allowed to be friends with our neighbors. We were discouraged from being friends with other JW children, because turnover in JW congregations is high. Okay, now this part I do want sympathy and pity for: also, one of my older sisters engaged in extensive sexual abuse of me and my younger sister. Parental response was to warn about the dangers of masturbation. That sister stayed in the religion and extensively gatekeeps contact between our parents and my younger sister and I (not that there is much, but this is why I didn’t find out my mother had died until a cousin who attended the funeral reached out to me in sympathy).
I exited this situation, not through suicide (the direction I was headed) but by developing friendly connections with people I met through an electronic bb in college, and ultimately became intimate with one of them and got divorced and disassociated myself from JWs and was shunned by my JW family members. It was not a great time, but the family of the friend I was intimate with was welcoming and I had people to (newly) celebrate holidays with which was pretty cool for a couple years. It was very stressful to be dumped (twice) by that person. I didn’t _have_ to lose his family (they wanted to maintain the connection) but I was like, no, that’s wrong, and I can’t do that. Given the politics of that person’s parents, it really saved us all a lot of arguments.
As that relationship was imploding, I spent a lot of time talking to another friend, who I had met when we were coworkers at Spry. He was a supportive listener, and I wrote my advice book at that time. I also devised my Portfolio Theory of Adult Relationships. But I don’t think I necessarily talked about that with anyone.
When I was dumped the first time, I was absolutely miserable (and working at a startup with the person who had told me he didn’t want to live with me anymore and was moving into his own apartment right after I’d closed on a condo expecting to split the costs with him)[ETA: this was not a hidden expectation. I had put a contingency in the offer that he had to get a look at the condo and be fine with it. He went along with very explicit planning discussions about what we wanted in a condo. He got the apartment right when he knew I would be moving into the condo. He waited to tell me because he “knew I’d get mad”. I did not get mad. I was sad and confused and I helped him move, and negotiated our relationship going forward on a no-longer-living-together basis.]. Very little in my life was working well, but work was going well, and also, startup, so I focused on that. I overachieved on Just Work and retired at 29, which gave me the time to figure out the rest of my life. I was thinking about how to manage a pile of money so that it wouldn’t run out and I’d have to go back to work (at the time, the pile was much smaller) and reading lots of books about investing and being frugal. At the time, there was a school of thought around investing that involved having about 20 stocks across a variety of industrial sectors, as a way of diversifying within the then standard 60/40 allocation. Obviously, this is before Vanguard and other low-load broad market index funds took off. There are a bunch of reasons why managing a bunch of individual stocks isn’t a great idea for individual investors, but I took that theory and decided that I needed about 20 people in my life that I was close to, and that I could have reciprocal, enjoyable relationships with. That way, if one relationship did poorly, I wouldn’t be so far in the hole, as when I built my life around one person and their family relationships.
Somewhere in this same time frame, a friend introduced me to the concept of polyamory, and I read The Ethical Slut and all of this kind of came together in my mind. I also read some Gottman work, and something about Love Maps, and started to absorb the importance of being forthright and communicative about positive feelings. ETA: the person who provided my path out of JW and then dumped me twice had been very opposed to verbal expressions of affection, and undoing the effect on me was difficult, particularly since I had zero interest in expressions of affection in my family of origin.
Found family is something that appears in all kinds of wonderful cultural works — books, movies, TV shows. It is broadly appealing as an idea, altho it may be the case that the alphabet crew is more open to the idea, because they have more space in their 20 slots than someone whose parents and grandparents and siblings are all alive and loving and supportive. Because I was working all this out in my 20s and 30s, and because I had had such a detailed and extensive network through my family of origin, and then the family of a partner, and lost both (the first without recourse, and the second because it seemed like such a damaging idea to maintain that degree of involvement in the life of someone who had already clearly indicated twice that what they wanted from me was not at all what I wanted from them), I felt a pretty strong aversion to trying to plug new friends into traditionally defined family roles. Ultimately, a few people slotted into those roles, in part because I became sufficiently embedded in their family networks that my existence and relationship to them really needed a culturally legible tag. So, J. is my brother. As my friends had kids and I was involved in their lives, I existed as an Aunt, with the implied Sibling connection to a parent or the parents. The Aunt who is not biologically related or married to a parent is a pretty common theme in many people’s lives.
But for many of my friends, even when I know their kids (siblings, cousins, parents, aunts, uncles, etc), I’m not a Defined Family Member for, to or of them, in my mind or their minds. We are close, but we are the close of True Friendship, the person who can call with a knotty problem, the person who won’t get the wrong idea if you happen not to be in contact for an extended period of time, the person who will be glad to see you if you’ve been away a few years. At this point in my life, my 20 slots are filled with people I see very regularly, and we say I Love You reciprocally in an uncomplicated and sincere way. We are genuinely interested the the minutiae of each other’s lives and thoughts and feelings and we do not demand that they perform for our benefit or our needs but we do what we can to be present and supportive for each other.
Sometimes, a person who was in one of those 20 slots, passes away, or moves away, or becomes so involved in other commitments that they slide down to a less frequent degree of interaction, but the feeling of emotional closeness is still there. There will only be more people over the coming decades who have passed away, but who I still feel emotional closeness to in my heart. The memory of these people is a true blessing that comes only with time. The transition of grief is a difficult one, but the heart full of memories of loving and being loved is a heart filled with joy.
Sadly, sometimes a person who was in one of those 20 slots, starts to feel like someone I don’t feel the degree of trust that I once felt for them. That is harder, and I generally try to reduce intensity and type of interaction to allow time to make clear what if any future relationship could thrive between us.
As I’ve been reading about “estrangement”, I am confronted over and over again about how different my way of thinking about being in relationship is from the adults who are angry at their children for setting boundaries and limiting contact. AND from the adults who are suffering from intrusive, damaging and unwanted parental demands, while simultaneously being unable to come up with a frame for thinking about adult relationships that is more expansive than family structure and/or romantic relationships.
Look, I just decomposed relationship into its component pieces: talking, sharing a meal, walking together, working together, listening, expressing love. Poly gets a lot of this right, but comes from a sexual perspective (and there’s nothing wrong with that!). Plenty of couples get into all kinds of pickles because they expect a sort of emotional intimacy monogamy to go with the physical intimacy commitment of fidelity. I’ve opted for a marital relationship that is monogamous physically, but which is emotionally open.
I sort of wish we could talk about this more. But then, that’s what I say about everything.
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