BENGALURU: Whether you are a single person, a couple, a few adults living together in a myriad set of biological or other relationships with each other, bringing up one or more children, or pets, or any other combination of circumstances, what does it take to make a family? In the traditionally held sense, family was a term held for a certain set of people in a very particular arrangement alone.
One was single, then coupled, then a family when children were involved, and then became an extended family, and then an empty nest. Family did not mean much else both under law and in general society. However, if we ask people, in whatever form of domesticity they lived, what constituted a family, one would bet that the answer was a much simpler one.
Love, they would say. Love made it a family whoever was living in that unit, and the only thing that broke a family was the love that held it together breaking – not the end of a relationship, or a legal marriage. Only the end of love breaks a family.
Families merge to make bigger families, and move apart to form smaller ones, but they are each a family as long as there is love for oneself and for the ones we choose to have. Considering the question we started with today: Are you a family by yourself ? If we say love is what makes a family, then if you are living by yourself, loving yourself and your life, you are a family by this definition, isn’t it? When we discount certain forms of love and hold others up loftily declaring such and such forms of love only are family, and get the benefits and rights associated with being a family, we are not really being “family friendly,” but maybe we are a bit biased, even prejudiced, about what makes a family. We often hear people bringing around someone saying, “They are like family to me.”
We might just think of it as them being really close that they are as close to each other as members in a family, but really, what if we drop the ‘like’ there and accept that we all make families all the time? Every family we make may not last forever. Maybe this person who is “like family” will be family for a few years or maybe just weeks, but that doesn’t make them lesser, does it? After all, even biological families don’t necessarily mean they are closely bonded forever.
Every other soap opera on TV is about feuding relations across families. So, why do we discount families we make, and honour only families we are born into or marry into where it is legally possible to do so? We are family is not just a popular Sister Sledge club anthem, it is a reality. To state for the record, if we give love like a family does, or should, we are family. Love makes it family – not genetics alone.