KOCHI: Whether you are a single person, a couple, or adults living together in a myriad set of biological or other relationships, bringing up one or more children, pets, or any other combination of circumstances, what does it take to make a family? In the traditional sense, the family was a term for a certain set of people in a very particular arrangement. One was single, then coupled, then a family when children were involved, become an extended family, and then an empty nest. The family did not mean much else both under the law and in general society.
However, if we ask people what constituted a family, one would bet that the answer was a much simpler one. Love. Love made it a family. The only thing that breaks a family was the love that held it together. Not the end of a relationship, or a legal marriage, only the end of love.
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. 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, you are a family by this definition, isn’t it?
When we discount certain forms of love and hold others up, declaring such forms of love can get the rights associated with being a family, we are not being “family-friendly”. Maybe we are a bit biased, even prejudiced. We hear people bringing around someone saying, “They are like family to me.” We might just think of it as them being close — that they are as close to each other as members of a family. But really, what if we drop the ‘like’ 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 so for a few years or 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?
‘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.