When I was in high school, a classmate once announced that he had been hit with the revelation that patriotism was irrational, because we don’t choose where we’re born. Why be attached to one country rather than another, he asked, if it’s all dumb luck?
Something like this logic has begun to shape the way we think about family in this country. The term “chosen family” has come into common usage to express the idea that the relationships we choose as adults are just as much, or more, familial than those we were born into. The idea is that, ultimately, “family” is about those relationships we choose to keep closest, whether they have anything to do with our family of origin or not.
To be sure, this alternative definition is a reaction to instances of real brokenness in traditional family arrangements. It is understandable for children from dysfunctional or abusive families to seek to rediscover family among people who, they feel, accept them. In fact, this desire points to how fundamental the human need for family is.
But in our efforts to comfort those whose relationships with their families have been difficult, we may be too quick to advise a separation, and we may overlook something of essential value in an unchosen family. Therapeutic language like “setting boundaries” can be clarifying, but it can have the effect of limiting our personal growth, excusing us from reasonable obligations, and causing us to abandon relationships that could be nurtured, healed and redeemed.
Family as a school of growth
It is common today to hear people talk about having “cut out” a parent, sibling, relative or friend from their lives. The underlying idea is that if these people do not serve us or make us feel supported, then they have no right to talk to us. In her book Set Boundaries, Find Peace, for example, the best-selling author and therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab recommends valuing self-love over relationships with “toxic people.” The number of adult children who say they are estranged from one or both parents suggests that this idea is popular. (In a survey conducted in 2019 by Karl Pillemer, a family sociologist and professor of human development at Cornell University, 27 percent of U.S. adults reported a current estrangement from an immediate family member.) As the psychologist Joshua Coleman has written, “our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual” may lead us to see cutting off a family member as “courageous, rather than avoidant or selfish.”
There are situations in which this is entirely legitimate—for example, when abuse is involved. It may be necessary to avoid genuinely manipulative and abusive people, and healthy boundaries can protect us from being taken advantage of, harassed or needlessly distressed. But there are many cases in which we cannot assume that the other party in a relationship is solely at fault for conflict or tension. Human relationships are always a tricky business: Feelings get hurt, we say the wrong things, we misunderstand each other and talk past one another. Part of what can make all this bearable is exactly the understanding that our love, our bond, is unconditional—that no matter how many misunderstandings we have, we are bound together by something deeper than a choice that we can change at the snap of a finger.
Part of the risk of a “chosen family” is that it can be a way of avoiding the accountability and personal growth found in long-term, committed, familial bonds. If relationships are ultimately dependent on our choice to be in them at the moment, we can cut and run whenever we run into obstacles or failures. It is these kinds of loose social groups, and not, say, adoptive families or in-laws, that I (and I think most people) have in mind when we speak of “chosen family.”
But personal growth of the most important kind, as the Harvard psychologist Kevin Majeres has argued, comes from embracing challenge. Traditional family life is a school of challenge; we must learn to compromise, to resolve conflict, to apologize, to make space for others, and to give up our own selves, our own pleasure and our own designs in service of our family. It is a unique kind of challenge in that the “difficult people” (including ourselves) within it are bound in an unchosen but permanent unity. This type of challenge is not a punishment but an adventure.
The promise of commitment
But why enter into this challenge, why this adventure with these people? It is precisely the unchosenness of the bonds that constitutes the fruitful challenge of family life—whose rich reward is the unconditional welcome that sees past fights and failings and goes by the name of “home.”
It is not irrational to be connected to the people who gave birth to us and to see that connection as more than mere happenstance. We are precisely constituted as the combination of the man and woman who gave us life; every cell in our body bears their signature. If our parents were not abusive, we are indebted to them for raising us, just as they stand in obligation to us for having created us. This given relationship is no less rational for being unchosen; it is the most natural and rational thing in the world.
New families can begin through chosen unchosenness:namely, through the unbreakable promises of marriage. But we increasingly fear this kind of commitment, too. Young people are not getting married as they once did, and if they are married, they often do not stay that way. Marriage suggests a kind of relinquishing of choice—and we may fear this, perhaps because of brokenness in our own upbringing. But it is precisely this kind of irrevocable choice that constitutes family. In marriage, we make a leap of faith into a new adventure, whereby our choice is open to the unchangeable unity that is our children, for men and women become one in the very cellular life of their offspring, and in each partner’s whole being, too. Anything short of that commitment is friendship at best—not family.
The sad reality of our postlapsarian world is that many have broken and abused the sacred bond that is family, which emerges from the married couple and their child. We are all too familiar with cheating spouses and abusive, neglectful or manipulative parents. The children of such families cannot be blamed for doubting the whole endeavor of family, or for seeking it elsewhere. The wound of being unable to heal the bonds of our given family is truly a wound. But the human need for family, as evidenced by the term “chosen family,” is unquenchable and universal.
We do not choose our parents or brothers or sisters, but we do choose to honor and love them. We do choose to unite with our spouses, but what we choose then is to relinquish unlimited choice. For this reason, we must do everything we can to honor, to heal, to live with and to grow with our given family and, where that is not possible, to find family in promised and unshakeable commitment. Whether our family is the one given to us at birth or found later, it must have the paradoxical but essentially human quality that it is a choice to move beyond choice and into committed love. In doing this, we may find that we are better at keeping not only our families but our friendships, too.
