Padma Viswanathan’s latest book is Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime.
When do friends start to feel “like family”? Usually when they fill roles vacated by biological kin or are as devoted as kin. The expression “you choose your friends but you can’t choose your family” is another way of saying that friends tend to share our values and interests, while families are a crapshoot that way. And when family ties break, they often seem to do so on politics, morals or mutual obligations – say a parent who was neglectful or abusive or couldn’t accept a queer child.
In fact, the term “chosen family” originated in a groundbreaking work of social anthropology, Families We Choose, by Kath Weston, about the ways queer folk build family equivalents. The coinage is now ubiquitous, but Dr. Weston, in 1991, was not simply talking about replacing broken kinship ties and reifying old systems – she was examining what family might mean.
In my life, family is ubiquitous and under constant reinvention. My parents came to live with us when our first child was born. They helped raise our kids, but I recall once telling my mother, half-jokingly, “I’m the mom in this house,” and seeing the relief in her eyes at knowing the buck now stopped with someone else. We have a large extended family that spans the political spectrum. I also have very close friends who say we’re like sisters: mostly women about my age who are also close with their own parents, sisters, cousins. We map our bonds onto those others.
Dr. Weston affirms that chosen family tend to share not only values but demographic markers: sexuality, race and class. Apparently, we adopt friends who already seem like relatives. They also tend to be physically proximate – they’re the ones who water your plants when you’re on holiday, or who pass by to borrow a tool and end up staying for dinner. They can set the table because they already know your kitchen. I suspect that while we’ve always constructed such kinship networks, they’ve become more crucial now, when most of us live far from our natal communities and our culture encourages us to end toxic relationships.
Twenty-five years ago, I made a friend very different from me, where difference was perhaps part of the attraction. Phillip (not his real name) was a generation older, working-class but aesthetically refined, a single gay man, estranged from his family. Despite distance, we grew attached, to the point where he started calling me “little sister.” I enjoyed that, and he felt sort of like a cousin – someone I loved, enjoyed and made sure to visit whenever I was in his part of the country, but not someone I would go to in times of need. There was a lot about my ways of being in relation to family that he never really got: the kind of care I feel I owe my parents or kids; how I live with deep, continuing disagreements that both irritate and invigorate me; how refreshing it can be to have a fight and make up. It was only in retrospect that I realized how this asymmetry in our ideas on family might threaten our friendship.
Phillip was raised mostly by a stepmother; his biological mother had left the family when he was small. He and his stepmother had a deep, telepathic connection, though, he told me. “You’d just have to think, I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea about now, and the other would get up to make it,” he recalled. “I always thought, if I married someone, it would have to be like that.”
But when is it like that? Once, I made an offhand comment to Phillip about how hard marriage is. My husband is wonderful – sensitive, fun, responsible – but with two careers, two kids and multiple aging parents, maintaining harmony takes a lot of effort, care and, occasionally, brutal honesty. Phillip was bewildered: “I thought you just fell in love, and that was it.” I shook my head: nope. Not for me, anyway.
Four years ago, I did something Phillip didn’t like. I would tell you what, but I’m honestly not sure. We were on a trip together – in Cuba, doing research toward a book I was writing about his family. Phillip was an inexperienced traveller, destabilized and dependent on me, but we had a fun week until the last day, when something I said or did (or was) set him off. After a stiff goodbye, he wrote that he wanted nothing further to do with me. I apologized, bewildered, but he wouldn’t return my e-mails and hung up on me when I called. We haven’t spoken since. In my life, such a rupture was unprecedented. In his, it was almost a matter of course.
When Phillip angered his father, his father cut him off. When his brother angered him, Phillip cut him off. They seemed to have no practice of forgiveness or reconciliation. And was it a coincidence that Phillip never found a long-term love, though that was what he wanted more than anything? His stepmother cut him off when he was 20, saying he was coming to look too much like his abusive father; it was triggering. That clearly wasn’t the whole story, but they parted ways. By the time he broke up with me, I might have been his oldest friend.
An aunt of mine once remarked at a gathering that you can tell it’s family because of how loud the house is. I don’t think it’s just that we’re Tamil, though that’s part of it. (My white husband’s family is a lot quieter.) It’s that sense of being unedited: raucously building on each other’s jokes, shouting from one room to another. But permanence surely is part of that: the safety of knowing these relationships might fray but won’t break.
Maybe the term “chosen family” is vexed for me because I don’t think choice factors in beyond a certain point. A friendship may originate in affinity, but once it takes root, it takes work, just like family. Is it because of my origins in a culture where people don’t choose their spouses, but rather approve or disapprove of a spouse their parents choose for them? I find it funny that Westerners don’t refer to spouses as chosen family, even though they’re the most common literal family member we choose.
As with marriage, chosen family requires us to confront unspoken assumptions about what family is or does. I remember my shock when a close friend and neighbour declined to feed our cat when we were pulled out of town by an unexpected death, saying he was too busy. It was a bright line to me – family/not family – but if ideas on maternal or marital obligations have changed, why shouldn’t chosen family also be another site for redefining family functions? Depending on our criteria, we might say some failed marriages last a lifetime, while some successful ones end in divorce.
I had 20 fun years with Phillip, full of conversation and adventures. Our friendship was a lens that allowed both of us different ways of seeing. Its ending was a kind of death, and as painful, but I still cherish the memories, like snapshots in a family album, their colours dating them as their edges soften.