To think that “family is not everything?”

Sunshineismyfavourite · 21/08/2025 15:20

I put YABU as I don't think that anyone would suggest you must put toxic members of your family above everything especially our own health and peace of mind. If someone tries to make you feel guilty about this then I'd just chuck them into the toxic pile along with the others!

I agree that just because you are connected by blood, say parents, like siblings, it doesn't automatically mean you have a positive and valuable connection.

For me, my immediate family are everything! My DH and DCs and DGCs I love unconditionally and their happiness truly is my happiness.

JurassicPark4Eva · 21/08/2025 15:21

Agree.

You don't get to choose your family. But you do get to choose who you spend time with a an adult.

givemushypeasachance · 21/08/2025 15:25

I mean there are cases of "family annihilation" seemingly every few weeks, where someone usually the husband/father murders their wife or their ex-wife and their children. No one remotely sensible would sit there and say well yes, but he was still their husband/father, even if he did murder them in cold blood, so he should be forgiven as he was family...

MrsTerryPratchett · 21/08/2025 15:26

I have a lovely friend. No DH, no DC, doesn't get on with her (pretty awful) birth family.

She's fun and interesting and has a million friends and speaks languages from Inuktitut to Polish! Travels everywhere, makes the world a better place. I'd take her over my brother any day.

MrsTerryPratchett · 21/08/2025 15:31

givemushypeasachance · 21/08/2025 15:25

I mean there are cases of "family annihilation" seemingly every few weeks, where someone usually the husband/father murders their wife or their ex-wife and their children. No one remotely sensible would sit there and say well yes, but he was still their husband/father, even if he did murder them in cold blood, so he should be forgiven as he was family...

In every time, in every place, the most dangerous person in a woman's life is the man she's been in a relationship with or still is.

Shocking but not really.

Airworld · 21/08/2025 15:38

Very few people have the emotional intelligence to realise that family is not necessarily everything and judge those who are NC. I have experienced this first hand and it is like friends and other family enforce the idea that I should be put up with abuse because my DM is ‘family’ and have said some awful, insensitive things to me, and particularly when DM died.

Please people - think before you speak and if you can’t be emotionally intelligent then say nothing at all, because you literally know nothing about someone else’s situation and how they truly feel.

PsychoSyd · 21/08/2025 15:54

Armistead Maupin put it brilliantly in his Tales of the City series. You have your biological family and your logical family.

SylvanianFamiliesBalcony · 21/08/2025 16:54

On one hand I agree, if you're referring narrowly to blood relatives.

On the other, I consider my close friends to be my family, and they really are everything to me.

outingouting · 21/08/2025 17:40

I massively value and prioritise my friends. Love them. Would far prefer to see them than family any day.

that’s said, I’ve supported family members with long term health conditions for more than two decades. It’s been brutal, harrowing and exhausting.

I don’t think I would have supported my friends to the same degree. Supported - yes. But at the expense of everything else in my life (as I did with family members)? I don’t think so.

so I think it’s a bit more complex than that.

cruisingqueen · 21/08/2025 17:45

You choose your friends not your family.

Elsvieta · 21/08/2025 19:21

SnappyPlayer · 21/08/2025 14:48

I get that society often pushes this idea that family is the most important thing but honestly, they’re just people we happen to share a biological connection with. It doesn’t mean they automatically deserve priority in our lives over friends, partners or other chosen connections. Sometimes family can be toxic and prioritising them over our own wellbeing doesn’t seem healthy. Why is it that we’re made to feel guilty for not placing family above everything else?

Yep, "friends, partners and other chosen connections"; and, indeed, things that aren't people at all - ideas, art, nature, religion, books, pets, work and whatever else matters to you. We all get to decide what's "everything" (or something) to us.

sammylady37 · 21/08/2025 19:34

Agree. In my darkest moments, it was friends who were there for me. In my happiest times, it was friends who celebrated with me. In the day to day mundanity of my life, it is friends who share the ups and downs, the small wins, the mindless trivia, the annoyances, the laughs, the normal ebbs and flows of life.
My family have been at times judgemental, resentful, begrudging, with inconsistent levels of support and also inconsistent with sharing the joy.

I know who I want at my death bed, and it’s my friends, not my family.