[Wutang]

From the majority of what I hear, people tend to have either hot or cold relationships with their siblings. Either they're friends or even best friends or they can't stand each other. My case is different since with my sister there simply isn't a relationship. This wasn't due to us constantly being at each other throats or having a falling out. The former would mean that we had a relationship even if it was a hostile one and the latter implies that we had a good relationship that turned sour. In my case, once my sister and I exited childhood we just simply never really interacted. We didn't fight but neither did we hang out or really have any sort of bond. When we are around each other during family gatherings we simply just don't communicate with each other. No exaggeration, we haven't had a full conversation for over 15 years now. It's not out of spite it's just that we're basically strangers that had nothing in common that happened to grow up in the same house and you aren't going to be talking to someone who's a stranger.

Anyone else in a similar situation? I was wondering if this sort of relationship is more common then I thought only people tend not to talk about it or if my circumstances is truly uncommon.

[LeeEnfield303]

I have a brother. If we weren't related by blood, I would never speak to him again.

[HankMoody]

I'm close with mine. Little bastards.

[CaptainChardonnay]

(04-11-2016 08:58 PM)LeeEnfield303 Wrote:  

I have a brother. If we weren't related by blood, I would never speak to him again.

Same here. We are polar opposites

[Captainstabbin]

I talk to my brother at least twice a day. We usually talk about things I read here. Today we got a laugh out of that gamer whore who's into kiddie stuff.

[samsamsam]

(04-11-2016 09:40 PM)Captainstabbin Wrote:  

I talk to my brother at least twice a day. We usually talk about things I read here. Today we got a laugh out of that gamer whore who's into kiddie stuff.

What is his username? Captainstabbinsbrother?

[Neo]

Pretty distant with both of them.

A lot of this stems from family issues, but to make a long story short a lot of my family are just negative people. When I broke away and kept them at a distance my life improved immediately.

It is a little disheartening because family bonds are supposed to be the strongest, for me it just wasn't the case. My thinking is on a totally different wavelength. I'm simply not able to keep my optimistic and go-getter outlook when I'm around them.

[Cr33pin]

I have a sister and growing up were not that close but still civil.. Then at some point in my early 20's I couldn't stand to be in the same room with her for more then 5 or 10 minutes. As I got older we ended up becoming close and I would go visit her and have a good time. Even ended up moving to the state she was in and living in the house beside her for a year and it was great, she is a feminist and works at a "rape prevention" center so I would push her buttons a lot and we would have civil debates all the time but we still got along great.

However we haven't talked a lot sine I have been out of the country and back in December she posted a article about some 50 year old lady redefining beauty or something on Facebook and for the picture in this article the lady is giving the middle finger... I posted "Classy lady" under it and she came back with some smart remark. So just to troll I posted a status on my Facebook wall that is someones signature on here that says " Women are like sandwiches. All men love sandwiches. That's a given. But sandwiches are only good when they're fresh. Nobody wants a day old sandwich. The bread is all soggy and the meat is spoiled."..... An then my feminazi sister messages me and says something along the line of "What about our grandmother, was she just a soggy sandwich" Now our Grandmother (Who is an will always be the person I loved the most in this world) had just died the week before this whole Facebook fiasco. We argue a bit about that remark nothing to serious..... then like 20 minutes later I get a message from my mom asking me about my post... So my sister called my mom to tell her about my Facebook post and how wrong it was... I'm 35 years old bruh... I still love my sister and she posted some old pics of us and a happy sibling day thing on Facebook the other day and I liked it and told her I loved her, and I still do... but I still have a sour taste in my mouth for her dragging my recently deceased grandmother into her argument about my post.

[Captainstabbin]

(04-11-2016 09:48 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  

(04-11-2016 09:40 PM)Captainstabbin Wrote:  

I talk to my brother at least twice a day. We usually talk about things I read here. Today we got a laugh out of that gamer whore who's into kiddie stuff.

What is his username? Captainstabbinsbrother?

Ha. He's not on here. He thinks it would make him unable to tolerate his wife...he might be right.

[RoastBeefCurtains4Me]

I'm not close to my sister. I'm closer to my brother. It's hard to say why. My brother's a really good guy. Hard working, successful, someone I can relate to. My sister's always been kind of a mooch and a screw up. She's not attractive, and she married a serious loser. Had a couple kids and eventually kicked him out. He really is the kind of hardcore alcoholic day laborer guy who's not going to be able to keep a woman long term.

Anyway, when I talk to her, she can talk forever. She's fairly intelligent, so she has no excuses for the screwed up life she lives. I don't have any anger or grudge against her. I just don't have any motivation to seek contact with her. If she's home when I visit my parents, I visit with her, but I'm just not close to her.

I feel bad about it. Not terribly bad, but I feel like I should make more of an effort. She does make an effort to initiate contact with me.

[Adonis]

I have 2 younger sisters. One is a year younger and we align very well politically and socially now, although growing up we had some bitter rivalry. The youngest is 6 years younger and she is on a different fucking planet. Single mom, useless degree that mommy and daddy paid for, moved back in with my mom, no direction or purpose in life, and hell bent on blaming "the system/corporations/patriarchy" for her woes.

Her M.O. is typical SJW/feminist/socialist. I keep dinner table conversation to family related topics to maintain things in a cordial frame and prefer to talk about the controversial stuff afterwards over a coffee or drinks. She will inevitably bring up the -ism du jour, after which I will use knowledge and reason to nuke her from orbit. She then gets emotional and withdraws.

Its sad because my nephew is a cool little dude but she is raising him to be beta as fuck. Her telling me that she will raise him to be nothing like me has actually made me reconsider not having kids which is a huge change in perspective for someone like me. Honestly I am not terribly close with either of them and would gladly trade them both out for one brother.

[Thomas the Rhymer]

Haven't seen my older brother in person since 1995, and haven't communicated with him for about 10 years now.

He just sort of decided he wanted nothing to do with the family and just wandered off the radar. He dropped out of college and basically became a bum. Every now and then he'd get a job in some factory and after a short while he would just stop going to work and check in back at the homeless shelter.

No idea where he is now, what he's doing, or if he even is still alive.

Before he disappeared from my life, he was my hero. He was seven years older than me and it seemed that everything he touched turned to awesome. That may just have been because I was so much younger and everything he did seemed so cool. It's sad that he decided to end things.

[Disco_Volante]

My brother is a homeless drug dealer. I quit my job in the oilfield to start a business. We really have nothing in common, yet oddly enough there are similarities between us in the big picture. I think real men simply go different directions, the need for affection and the comforts of family aren't necessarily essential for certain types of men. Some men enjoy solitude. It's not personal.

[CleanSlate]

Hard to answer that question with my siblings. I have brothers who are older and we often go months or even years without talking to each other, and when we do talk we just pick up right where we left off.

I used to go skiing with them both and we bonded over that. Now as adults, the bond is still there and remains strong even with distance and lack of communication. I actually turned to my brother for advice right before I decided to divorce my ex wife - I was in the lowest point I'd been in my life and we texted for over 4 hours... from midnight until 4 am! We both had work the next day, but he still made the time to talk to me when I was struggling.

Now, my sister. We have a strange relationship. We are very important to each other and are very close, but sometimes we cannot stand each other. We seem to cycle between being best friends and hating each other's guts. Back in college, we attended the same school, and we hung out every now and then because we members of the same student-led club. But one day, I fucked her roommate (she gamed me, not the other way around). We kept it secret until the end of the school year, when my sister finally found out. She was so pissed she came at me with a pillow and smacked my face with it. Wouldn't talk to me for a year. Then it seemed we'd forgotten about that incident and became friends again.

She's a feminist and a lawyer, so I know better than to argue with her. Arguing with her is always a losing proposition, so I don't bother. Lately she's been getting on my ass for supporting Trump. Instead of giving her rational reasons why I support him, I just clown around with her by saying "I'm voting for him because I like his haircut... I want to meet his hair stylist and have my hair done that way." She laughed. Tensions defused. She also helped me through the divorce, gave me lawyerly advice, and I stayed at her place to avoid my ex wife's manipulative head games. Honestly, if it weren't for her, I might have ended up in bad shape.

Sometimes we are distant because we are very different people. If I met her on the street as strangers, we would never click in any way, shape, or form. We're just too different. Growing up in a strong family unit with my parents staying together for their whole marriage helped us form a bond with each other that lasts through any distance or time without talking to each other.

[WalterBlack]

Reading this thread makes me sad...I've been in the US for nearly 10 years and all of my siblings live in the UK. I call them most weeks and I visit them every year.

Unless one of them had done something really nasty or unforgivable to me, I couldn't imagine not talking to them for years on end.

[Veloce]

I've got a half sister that's polar opposite to me.

We were raised by a loving but essentially dysfunctional single feminist mom. She was as hardheaded and difficult as they come.

My sister reacted to this by becoming the opposite of my mom. My sister had 2 boyfriends in her life, married the second one, bought a house and had kids in her mid 20s. She has a beautiful family and I love and respect her more and more the older I get.

I turned out more like my mom. A long history of dysfunctional relationships, partying, drug experimentation/abuse, trust issues, lack of father figure, etc.

I see my sister once or twice a year and I do love her, it's just that we have nothing in common. I agree that if we weren't related, I'd probably never be in contact with her.

Interestingly, I made peace with my mom before her death and my sister didn't. It was a very moving moment in my life. After I moved out my mom and I became great friends but my sister never patched things up with her. On the way up a hill to spread my mom's ashes, my sister broke down (an extremely rare sight) and confessed to me that she was still angry at our mom for some of the stuff we went through growing up.

The lesson is to do your absolute best to clear any grievances you may have with your loved ones. I understand some people have truly awful relatives that can't be bargained with, but you should at least try. My sister still feels awful about it, that our mom passed away and she was still pissed off at her.

[Quintus Curtius]

This is the bravest thread I've seen all year. Much respect to Wutang for starting it, and for the other guys who dared to bare their experiences for us.

Familial antagonisms are much more common than people think. Even those who try to put a pretty mask on for the world have their own secret torments. Scratch below the surface, and you find that everyone is carrying family burdens of one type or another.

Which one of us, if his personal or family life were revealed for the world, would not feel a sense of unease? I know I would.

The sad thing about becoming distant from a brother or sister is that there seems to be no precise place (at least for me) where you can point to where things began to unravel. There seems to be (from our perspective) no real reason for it.

You just get older, and people go their own way. And if you talk to one of them years later, you feel like you're talking to a stranger.

Maybe the problem lies with our own expectations. I think that's the source for a lot of our disillusionment. We tend to believe that just because we share some genetics and environment with someone, that they will always behave in predictable ways. But they don't. Sharing the same genes is no guarantee of future intimacy. I wish it were. But my own experience tells me it is not.

Our brothers and sisters are also products of their choices and their environments. And as we get older, some of them adopt different worldviews. They become different people. In some ways it's inevitable. It happens in every society, all across the globe.

In the end, we're lucky in life if we can even have a few people to be very close to.

And family wounds can cut deep. It's very hard to get past the real, actual hurts. But the imaginary hurts, the ones that fester in your brother or sister's minds for years?

Those are nearly impossible to heal.

[General Stalin]

I have a brother who is 10 years my senior. We've never been close.

When I was young I was just the annoying little brother. Him and his friends would bully and tease me, and he was always stuck baby sitting me when parent(s) were away. He was already out of the house, married, and had a kid by the time I was a teenager.

As we got older and our age mattered less as our relative maturity became closer, we were more civil and had more in common, but were still mere acquaintances really.

That's the way it is to this day. We talk seldom and typically when we do their isn't much to talk about. My brother is kind of socially awkward at times. Moody, impatient, and bad tempered sometimes. He's distant from the immediate family in general, and I sort of am too. We aren't a very tight knit bunch.

I would have liked to have been closer growing up, but he was just so much older than me. Him and I didn't have the best upbringing either. Now we are at points in our life where it is honestly just too late to forge a close relationship.

[Lime]

One brother lives very close by and is starting a venture with me, so I have a very good bond with him. The other one is into other things but we're on good terms and I think the three of us are very clever, intelligent, ambitious and we will conquer this century together.

[Glaucon]

My sister is 6 years older than me, we were never close. She is so different than me, there is not much to talk about really. She majorly fucked up her life and I am kinda angry at her, but it is partly my father's fault as well, he was never tough enough with her.

Its a strange feeling when you are an adult and see the mistakes of your parents.

[philosophical_recovery]

My sister acted out quite a bit as a teen, and I barely understood what was going on because I am a lot younger than her, and was extremely socially unaware/awkward.

Even during highschool, she jumped around and dated a lot. She then went for an extremely nerdy guy. This guy played D&D. I remember thinking that he was awkward, so he must've been a real winner. Something snapped in her brain after him and then she began dating complete losers just to see if she could piss off my dad, and she even told me so.

During college, rumor has it she got with an instructor, some kind of scandal happened, my dad tried to stop her but he was helpless it seems. She probably screwed a bunch of guys, then bounced to the other side of the country.

Lost any sort of semi-regular contact then. Years later, she moved back home, as apparently the guy smelled what she had been up to, and put a keylogger on her computer. She went from about to settle down and get married to fuck-that-I'm-out.

She expressed how cool I was, when I was a clueless, ignorant college kid that was struggling to get laid. We'd talk a few times, and she'd ask me if all guys were assholes, if all they were after was sex . I think I reassured her, or something, as like I said, I was clueless.

Then, she doubled-down on her career, surrounded herself with a lot of drinking buddies, discovered hardcore liberal beliefs, probably feminism, put on somewhere around 100 pounds (where she used to be pretty attractive), and shacked up with a garden variety tattoed-hipster-support-rug that could be walked all over.

I like him more than her now, even though I can't really respect him that much.

As she cannot tolerate opposing views and lives in a self-reinforcing little enclave, she shut herself off from all familial contact.

Makes me hope that if I ever have a daughter, that never goes down that way.

[H1N1]

This is an amazing thread to read through. I think this is more common than most let on. I know very few people from my own peer group, particularly nowadays, who care that much about their family. I have been extraordinarily privileged with mine, and I love them intensely. It is an uncomfortable truth to say that I would do extraordinary evil to protect them from harm. I do suspect that my little brother probably feels less strongly for me than I do for him, but I think that is partly a function of me being the elder brother and having more protective instincts. My brother is also much more likable and popular than I am and has flashier friends, and there is a softness that comes with that which I suspect insulates him from certain aspects of introspection.

[Dominance]

My sister is 4 years younger. We barely even talk anymore, we didn't get along well as kids... then we got along way better but she went through this phase of hanging around idiots and really dodgy people and getting into all kinds of trouble. A couple of times I helped her out and it had the potential of getting me and even my dad hurt. She let these dodgy idiots drive her car and my dad seen them and pulled them over and they were threatening him. My mum called me and I raced home then told him not to go back by himself (as he was looking for my sister) but he did which was dumb.

I actually took a knife down there and my dad come out of their house with my sister and this guy pulled out something from behind his back when he seen me. Then his ex gf showed up who I knew and calmed him down. Turns out the guy was shit scared of me. I went off my head at my sister telling her she is a fucking idiot. Turns out that wasn't the only situation, there was a few others and I told her "I've had enough i'm not covering for you anymore". And since then she barely talks to me or tells me anything.

Sure i've done some dumb shit, but she seemed to just encourage it and was way too naive to understand. She even invited a guy to our parents house who was known for breaking into houses and stealing stuff. I told her after not to ever bring him there again and she went and told him then he said he was going to bash me. So I had enough of her shit in the end. And I have nothing to really talk to her about these days.

I feel like I "should" see her more, but I just don't care anymore.

[malakaix]

(04-11-2016 08:54 PM)Wutang Wrote:  

Anyone else in a similar situation? I was wondering if this sort of relationship is more common then I thought only people tend not to talk about it or if my circumstances is truly uncommon.

I pretty much have an identical situation as yourself with my younger brother. We're just strangers, no bond ever developed outside of childhood.. we are just two completely different people.

Our whole family environment was quite emotionally disconnected though. There's to many variables to consider what may of influenced this sibling dynamic.. but my parents almost never showed emotion towards each other so that probably had an impact.

[LeightonBlackstock]

Wow.

I had to post, as Wutang, me and you have nearly the exact same situation with our sister, almost word-for-word.

I haven't spoken to my sister in 14 years (I'm 25, she's 29). I also haven't spoken to my mother in 3.5 years since leaving the UK (She doesn't try to contact me, I don't try to contact her). As for my father, we speak every three months by email. He's happy that I'm happy out here.

Looking back, it's hard to pinpoint where the exact problem occured, but essentially my sister split the family in half. She used to shout the house down about three nights a week for years. Any time we were in the same room, my parents would communicate around us.

There is no one on Earth I hate more than that woman. She's a terrible person, and now she's had the audacity to bring a child into my parents home and force them to help her raise it through their retirement years (the kid is like six now, and she doesn't work). I won't be at her funeral, and those are words I mean.

So, growing up, my family didn't spend much time together. After ten years of it, I'd had enough and cut myself out of the group. It had gotten to the worst level it could have when I was 21, so it was hardly going to improve.

My feeling is, who are these people? I'm very grateful that they fed and clothed me as a child and have thanked them many times for that.

But I feel no connection or love or guilt. We are connected only by blood, we have absolutely nothing in common. Furthermore, I can reel off about twenty people in my head I love so much more. Friends, past girlfriends, even a couple of guys from this forum, that's my family. I should see them more than I do.

This is a brave thread, as I full-well know the reaction most people have when I talk about this. It's one of blame, most people usually attack me and can't get their head around it. Most think I'm selfish and heartless.

But, one must realise that the paradigms we acquire through our youth cannot always be applied to other people. Just as I've never experienced racism as a white Brit, others have never experienced a disconnected family. We must listen and try not to apply things to our own experiences of family.

And so we have it, essentially the reason I haven't been in the UK for 3 years and 8 months. But, part of that is just my hatred for England and the fact that this is my home, right here, in Thailand. Living here is fantastic.