There an interesting cultural narrative I’ve long noticed but never commented on. The identification of friends as family (or family substitutes). Obviously, the narrative of lonely, lost, and dislocated people finding a home has a long history. Even the ancient story of Ruth from the Bible runs along these lines, although she substitutes an actual family (her in-laws) for her original family. And there have been lots of close friendships in many ancient stories that were equated to family closeness.
So there’s really nothing news about the narrative, per se. So it never seemed worth noting. But it seems to have grown lately. As the idea of actual familial solidarity has waned, the idea of “found family” has risen, and friendship has taken on a larger and larger role of actually defining what family is, not merely supplementing or substituting for it. I recall watching Spaced, where they made the argument quite explicitly that this motley collection of friends was the modern family. And lots of kids TV shows preach a similar value system. As Phineas and Ferb said “Friends are also family, I’m not talking just blood relations”.
All of this is an interesting, but I would argue necessary shift. Human need a family. We need a pack. We’re not just social, we’re hyper-social. Our way of being requires more than one of us for our selves to be adequately expressed and our lives lived. A human baby requires an enormous amount of social investment and interaction to become a functioning adult.
The problem is, if you glance around at a lot of our narratives about the traditional family structure, our packs have fallen apart and become fractured and separated. The people in Spaced have to seek family in their friends because their actual families are far away, indifferent, or even hostile to them. So they go looking for family in their roommates, friends, neighbors, even landlords.
This is, I think, is a necessary move by all humans, to seek community. But I think one way in which it has changed is how much more necessary it has become because actual family has become such an unstable value to base human community on these days.
The problem is, as inadequate as family often is, friends and acquaintances are also a somewhat unstable foundation for community. At least the sort of friendships we tend to have these days are, mediated as so many of them are by things like social media, coincidental nearness of work or living proximity, or shared interests and hobbies. Realistically, how long do you expect your relationship with your roommate to last? People live very unstable and changeable lives. We don’t stay in the same towns or jobs or houses for years and years any more. We’re always reinventing ourselves. It’s very normal and expected for young people to write things like “best friends forever” in each other’s yearbooks, but the experienced eye of adulthood knows those are the platitudes of youth and lack of perspective and experience. You have no idea how far your life will take you from where you are, and even from yourself as you are, in the years to come.
Ironically, stable long-term friendships are actually more a characteristic of the older generations like the Boomers and Greatest (who also had more family solidarity and continuity) than for the following GenXers and Millennials who came after them. My father in law still goes back to all his high school reunions in his home town every five years and keeps in touch with his old classmates and cares about what happens to them. I haven’t even been to one reunion, and I’m probably more connected to my hometown than a lot of people.
The thing is, friends aren’t family. Yes, they are important to our lives, yes, they add so much, yes, they can even function like a family for us, yes, they can and often must fill an important void for us. But you can’t simply say that they “are” family and the two are equivalent. What makes you think, if you can’t maintain the integrity of your relationships and closeness with the people most innately prejudiced in your favor to do so, that you can maintain it with anyone else? Your family is literally part of you, and you are part of them. And you all know each other intimately and have had to live with one another and share an immense amount of significant experience. If that can’t keep you together, what makes you think something else will, in the long run? What makes you think that will provide a stable, long term basis for your function and value and connection as a human?
I’m not saying that it can’t, just that the odds were already stacked in family’s favor, so if that’s not stable, then what makes you think anything else will be (apart from your deep need to believe it)? It’s hard to care about other people. It’s hard to be a good family member even for people who are actually in your family. And what unites you in the case of an actual family is far more tenacious and unchangable and fundamental than many of the other connections between us that come and go.
Saying that friends=family is a bit like saying that zoos=habitats. It’s not that zoos can’t be amazing, that they can’t provide wonderful care and safety and provision and an enriching environment. But it takes a special effort to pull it off. It’s not the same as the ideal natural environment. A group of giraffes in a zoo may be very happy together. But it’s not the same thing as an actual herd of giraffes in the wild. We shouldn’t dismiss the value of the zoo and the experience of the animals there. Of the herd that they enjoy (now I’m thinking of the herd/family concept from the Madagascar movies). But saying that all relationships have value is not the same as saying that all relationships are equivalent.
Relationships differ. Family and friends differ. They have different qualities. They are not indistinguishable substitutes. Humans need family, and humans need friends. And we have a wonderful amount of flexibility in how we can fill those needs. There’s something truly special and unique about both of them. And we can do either of them poorly and may turn to the other to try to fill that void. I would always argue that the most complete human life should ideally seek friends as well as family, and acknowledge that seeking the function of outside friends entirely within the family can actually be a problem and can have some limitations and disadvantages.
But the family is a remarkably complete and flexible social structure. It provides both commonality and difference within itself. It’s a complete microcosm of a society. It is the fundamental functioning cell of complete human life. It’s not easy to replace or substitute for, if you’ve lost it or if it’s ceased functioning. Family isn’t just some generic social connection you can substitute with government or coworkers or roommates. I’m not saying those things don’t matter or that it won’t often be extremely necessary in practice to actually make those substitutions to help make up for what we lack. The point is that there is a real lack, a real loss that must be compensated for, because family really is something special. It’s not easy to replicate.
For all that Vin Diesel preaches about his group of coworkers are a family, for all that the characters in Spaced argue that they’re a family, and in a way they are, it’s still not quite the same sort of thing as the original, fundamental unit that all such associations are an extension of and reiteration of. You may need it desperately to function that way, more and more if you lack stability in that original, fundamental unit. And I think that’s something we see more and more in our cultural expressions. The desperate need to fill the void of the family. And we very much want to to convince ourselves that we haven’t lost anything and aren’t missing anything, that we aren’t diminished or more alone that we should be, that friends or coworkers or even government and society itself can fill that role just as well, that all such provisions are equivalent.
It’s just not entirely clear, as much as it hurts to admit it, that it’s true. And it’s also not clear that deconstructing the idea of the value of the family so we don’t know what we’re missing, substituting a belief that all significant relationships and social structures are equivalent and interchangeable, will actually help us in the long term. I don’t think the best way to survive the loss of the value that family provided is to deconstruct our belief in it. I don’t think that’s the best approach even to replace it. After all, if you don’t even understand or value what you’ve lost, how can you replace it? You won’t know how. You won’t even know what it is that you’ve lost and will just go on in hungry searching, devouring whatever you come across isn’t he hope it will fill that need. Watering down the idea and identity of what value the family had going for it won’t actually make it easier to find what we’ve lost, and it certainly won’t make it easier to fix it.
Instead were creating a generation of young people who feel that something is broken or missing and are hungry and searching to find it, but have also been denied the knowledge of what it is that they’re looking for, or even the ability to admit their loss openly to themselves. They should be just fine, according to our modern theories. There shouldn’t be any difference, any unique loss. They should be doing and feeling just as good as anybody.
But they don’t. And they don’t understand why. And that eventually that leads to anger and resentment. Because they don’t get why they should be feeling any differently, why they shouldn’t be just as complete as anyone. The results should have been the same, they’ve been told. The inputs are equivalent, so the outputs should also be equivalent. So if they’re not coming out that way, then somewhere there has been a betrayal. Someone has cheated. Someone has stolen something.
And they incorrectly misidentify who has actually robbed them. It isn’t the people who are feeling or doing better, it’s the people who made them the false promises. That it made no difference, that it want a big deal to let that go, that there wasn’t a need to cherish and care for that kind of relationship, because it wasn’t really that special or unique. You could easily make an equivalent facsimile and have whatever you wanted and be unconstrained and unaffected and have it all.
Real life doesn’t really work that way. Try as you might, good as it might be, an animal in a zoo is never going to be exactly the same as an animal in the wild. The inputs are different, and the outputs will also be different. There will be limitations endemic to each situation. This shouldn’t be a reason for despair or for abandoning all efforts. But it also isn’t a good reason to lie to ourselves. That won’t actually help us. Zoos didn’t succeed at providing for their species by simply denying or ignoring the qualities and value of the animals’ lives in nature, or by arguing that there’s no difference between life in captivity and life in the wild. Zoos got as good as they have by learning how to recognize the value and contributions and conditions of the environment in nature. They work with those innate structures rather than against them, rather than ignoring them or taking them for granted.
Family is the society nature gives us. Friends (and to a larger extent communities and even states) are the society we build ourselves as a further extension of that unit pattern. Both of them are treasures. But they’re not the exactly the same treasure, and you don’t value them better by flattening them or rendering them generic and interchangeable. It might hurt to realize what we’ve lost and what we’re seeking, but it won’t help find it or avoid losing it if we act like it never happened or doesn’t matter.
Making Nobody Happy 