Dear Carolyn: We’re told from magazines, television ads, webpages and more to get connected with others because it’s good for us. Meeting up with friends is its own reward. I crave time with them. But getting together with some extended family members is torture. We have little in common, and the topics we do share interest in were used up long ago.
If getting together with people who interest and amuse us is good for our mental health, does time spent with the boring or unpleasant drain us of something? (They make me crazy but only figuratively, as far as I can tell.) — M.
M.: They drain us of hours, certainly, that we’re never, ever, ever getting back. Ever. (Sorry, unnamed relative I have in mind.)
But with family, as with all things, some work is good work. Our lifetimes are dotted with things we didn’t want to do and hated doing but are glad we did. The chore I most resented, for example, and would have dropped forever within a nanosecond of receiving permission to, was writing papers in school. Ha.
So those dreary relatives may represent far more to any of us than good or bad company. Each one contains a portion of your history, if nothing else. Each provides context for your lifetime through small moments and momentous events. Each may be putting up with you, too, because the institution of family is a valid shared interest.
And in combination, these conversational black holes may represent, as they do for so many of us, the social equivalent of catastrophic insurance. Will those more sparkly people you love and crave agree to meet as a group to figure out how to make sure you’re loved and cared for, or at least just off the street, when life goes haywire, leaving you with dementia or addiction or without a dime to your name?
Maybe they will. I hope they don’t need to, obviously, but I hope they do if you need it.
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More likely, though, it’ll be a relative or three stepping in to catch such a precipitous fall.
Not always, of course. There are families who cause the problems that friends step in to clean up. And there are families who step in strictly out of duty and feel no love doing it. I’m not romanticizing anything here.
I am representing, I hope, the reality that peeks out from so many hard-luck and end-of-life stories: The people there for the worst of it are typically related somehow. It’s Mom or Dad on camera for the local news, or following up with doctors or detectives. It’s the grandparents taking neglected children in. It’s the siblings or niblings bickering over whose turn it is to handle their elderly mother’s/aunt’s bills.
In my experience, family members disproportionately make up the ranks of people who realize either they step up for a person in need or nobody will.
If you want your friends to be that insurance policy for you, then great. I regard families of choice as equal to families of origin. You just need to nurture those kinds of friendships — which includes being “family” to those friends. Which, irony alert, involves sticking by them long after they, too, grow too sick or addled or cranky or familiar to interest you anymore.
So, yes, connection is important. Connections, plural, are important — of all kinds, to meet many kinds of needs. Think of your part in such a reciprocal web before you go cutting the threads.
