Morning all,

This topic is a source of alot of mental disturbance and i dont like it.

I have a perfectly nice family, they are all nice people and i like them all, on both sides, i think i am quite lucky as many people dont have a good family they could fall back on.

This is where i encounter my issues, i dont love them, any of them, except my Dad. I have no more connection to them than i do to a pleasant stranger i meet on the bus.
To go to extremes if i had to choose between saving my whole family(except my Dad) and saving my mate J, i would choose J everytime without having to think. this also applies to my other close friends in my little group.

Its not as if i have never seen my family, i see both sides a couple of times a year and used to see them more often when i was younger, but i have never felt any kind of connection with them, none.

I once heard one of my Aunts say about another "i cant stand her, but i still love her". I cannot compute this at all, i just dont have a refernce point for this.

I feel i should love my family, i feel there should be some kind of unspoken bond through my liniage, other people seem to love theirs and it makes me feel as if there is something wrong with me. If i had been abused by them or they were all idiots then i would mind but their not, their nice peole.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Certain members outside my immediate family yes however it appears the lack of feeling is mutual with the aforementioned as I never hear from them and I never contact them either, its quite hard at rare gatherings being interested! Its not in my make-up to be all oooo how lovely to see you again, as to me thats worse and its actually lying.
Surprisingly I drifted apart from my cousins when my Aunt and Uncle died, I expected us to grow closer but no, although I did make a complete twat at myself when I got too drunk at my Uncles wedding, my female cousin and the others understood it was a case of mixing booze with greif but my male cousin seems to have estranged me despite living closer than all the others but there you go, shit happens..
We are pretty much thrown together with no choice of our own and nowadays there seems to be very little community spirit which doesnt help, the other thing is maybe the similarites between family members show in this way too.

It depends on how you define family.
I surely feel more love for my children and my wife then I do for my parents.
Probably because things have happened in my childhood that were fucked up (drunk mother, father away for months on end to work).
But I realize that they are only human and they did the best they could. This becomes more apparent if you have children yourself.
So I've forgiven them a long time ago and accept them like they are. They're always there for me if I need them and that means a lot to me.
Maybe it's enought to respect them for what they are, and just be nice to each other. You don't have to be best friends with your parents cause you didn't choose them.

I have a few family members like this, and I honestly find it irritating. I don't like lying about being happy to see people, or seeing them, but I always take care to be friendly and act as though I do. Otherwise, you may not realize it, but everyone assumes you're an a**hole. And it's because it's an a**hole thing to do. One catches more flies with honey, no? Even if catching flies isn't your cup of tea, there's no need to throw vinegar.

Generally, family consists of many of these scenarios where we do things we don't like because... that's what family does for each other. Think of the child refugees in Darfur whose entire family has been hacked to death, and then think of your own family, faults in all. We are so lucky to even have this conversation, it almost seems unethical to do so.

EDIT: Basically, I feel that the idea of not loving your family in the way yall have so far described is just the manifest of extreme privilege. In my experience, those who say things like "I just don't feel like I love my family" (unless coming from a broken home) have never had to see their family push it's limits to survive.

I completely agree. And I think that part of that respect is not being cold and made of stone around them. Cause what good is it if we don't show it, right?

Maybe I should add that Buddhists actually believe that at the end of the reincarnation process the soul chooses the parents he will most benefit from on a karmic level….
But to be honest, to me it rather feels like one is stuck with them, whether one likes it or not.

Regarding the original question:

"Does anyone else feel this way?"

I understand what you’re saying to an extent – I would imagine that for most people the strongest bonds are going to be with their children, siblings and parents. I have a very large family on both sides and when we meet up we all get on well, but I don’t ‘miss’ the majority of them when I don’t see them as such. And when I do see them it’s a bit like when you bump into a mate of a mate round someone’s, we get on perfectly fine and enjoy each other’s company, but it’s not like we count down the days to the next meetup.

There’s always some you have a closer bond with, typically those who are the same age and same interests like cousins, however the fact of the matter is you chose your friends because they are the ones out of all the 100’s of people that you meet that you feel that you identify most closely with and wish to spend your time with, family of course you can’t choose!

The same thing can be said of work colleagues, the ones here at my work are perfectly ok, and the amount of time you spend with them you would expect a strong bond to form (admittedly sometimes it does), but in the majority of cases the opposite is true, and when they leave people generally resent having to chuck £1 into the collection tin for the customary pointless gift, even though they might have spent the majority of their waking time for the last 5 years speaking to them!

Do i love my family?
Mum- yes, dad- he"s growing on me (it"s taken a long time), little sister- yes, big sister- i don"t know, there"s been a lot of friction between me and her (and her family) over the last 18 or so years. Family shit. Her husband is ok but can be a bit annoying. It"s down to me to rebuild the bridges as the only person i know who is more obstinate than me when an impasse has been reached is my big sister.




3rdI i can understand this to an extent. If you feel that you want to bond with your family, the next time you visit them, get drunk. Get them drunk. And then start taking the piss out of them (not too harshly). A bit of mutual insulting can really help the bonding process. If you don"t want to bond with them don"t tear yourself to pieces over it. I know a lot of people who arn"t that close to their families.
My girlfriend rings her dad up everyday but he is the only family that she has. Maybe if my big sister was the only remaining member of my family we would be closer. We sometimes take things for granted until they are suddenly taken from us.

Yes and no. I feel there are generational and cultural discrepancies between myself and most of my family members. My cousins are very religious and indoctrinated to a point, and while I enjoy getting high with one of them, I view him as more of a friend.

But my grandparents for example, they will most likely never be able to understand the things I do. They don't even know I smoke weed let alone do psychedelics! While one might be tempted to think they would embrace such usage (living through the 60s and all), both sets of grandparents were on the side against mind exploration and free love and such. So while it is nice to spend time with them and learn about the past and other family members, I am rather indifferent about the grandparents.

My parents are pretty cool and know a lot about my life, but I feel like my dad just uses me to get what he wants and doesn't actually care about my success. But that't his prerogative. My sister is nice too but a little crazy.

3rdI I agree that at the end of the day I would "save" my close friends over most of my family members. It's funny that you use this example as I think about it often to evaluate who I subjectively think should stay alive and who I personally value.

At the same time, it is nice (from a social and evolutionary standpoint) to have a support group who you'll know until you or they die, and who doesn't love those hilarious family get-togethers?

I love my family yes, I don't spend to much time with my mom, dad and brother, but when we hook up we have a lot to talk about, we grew up together and are still growing. But I don't have the same relationship with my dad as I have with my mom and brother.

thanks for the replie everyone, some fine points.


i have a friend who says he loves family but even though he lives close to them he doesnt bother to see them, i find it hard to understand how he convinces himself that he loves them, surely he would go see them if he loved them.


parents, sibling, aunts, uncles and cousins. i can understand that there are differing levels of love toward different members but it is the lack of connection to any, bar my dad, that seems odd to me.



i will happily admit that, in a global sense, i have had extreme privilege, however i cannnot help that and i have to play the cards i am dealt. i do come from a broken home but i knew about the lack of attachment to family before that happened, i remember sitting at family get togethers when i was a kid thinking what is the point of all this.


this is how i feel, its the fact i dont miss them that brings about idea that i cant really care that much for them. if i loved them id miss them, but i dont.


thats the thing, i dont really want to bond with them, more than i do when we have a family gathering, but something in my psyche tells me that i am wrong not to.

It used to get me down quite alot but one day, in a moment of clarity, the old saying "everything is as it should be" suddenly made sense, many weights were lifted from my shoulders that day.


i think this is similar to when my aunt spoke about her dislike, but love, for her sister. if anyone was to use me to get what they wanted i would not be interested in them at all, even if they were family.


can i ask if this is due to geographical condition

thanks again everyone

Love is such a strong word. How about environmental enforced interactions.
This may be shocking to those who love their family more than life itself,
but to me family is to love as religion is to spirituality, not the same.

My family is textbook 'a good home' X-mass get-together, church on sunday,
Oooo so nice to see you. Oooh yeah, it's great not telling you all to F.O.
Some of them are so stupid, hateful, ignorant, i denounce relation!

Some of my family is tolerable, and i love them, and i also love everyone.
Anyway, i just wanted to say family doesn't love you, family loves family,
..would mother/father still love you if you were a stranger in the street?

can i ask if this is due to geographical condition

thanks again everyone


[/quote]

My dad work a lot, he is a workaholic, lot of traveling, but when he is home and i come for visit, we usually work at the farm and we are building a cabin in the woods, my brother also participates on that project. that is pretty nice, but other than that he is to busy, can't even have a deep long talk with me, and that irritates me, my dad's father have almost never shown love to him, and my dad is telling me that but don't realize that he does the same to me and my brother, but he tries and i respect him, he have worked hard for us, and i guess that is his way to show it, true money.

My mom lives 1km away from me atm, so i see here maybe 3 times a month, we have actually connected very well and she loves to listen,

On my fathers side they talk a lot of money and bullshit, I'm not a fan of that, but they are cool tho, they know everything about me, drugs and my vision on life and respect it, so i have nothing to cry about

This is actually a very nice thread, made me realize that i have a great family. thanks, take care

Not sure if you meant that I was fed up, or if you meant the OP. I'm certainly not fed up with my family... yet. just fed up with people not appreciating what's right in front of them that so many would kill for. I tend to feel that familial love is as much a part of a healthy lifestyle as safety, moderation, and research.

Also, to be fair to the OP, I used to feel the same way as you. Then my family and I had to i
struggle to survive, and now I can definitely say without hesitation that I love my family. I truly feel that certain class privileges are to blame in many of these situations, the
oug sometimes it's the opposite.

Edit: disregard the above. I didn't read your last post 3rdI. dint confuse not missing them for not loving them. We don't often miss things until it is too late.

I think you misunderstood me or it got lost in translation I did not say I am unfreindly or act cold in anyway I meant I dont go over the top with superlatives about the meeting so please try not to analyze it too much and deduce things that were not said.
Also, who are you to say how we should feel? Its all relative and is unrelated to any tragedy someone else has had to deal with, nowhere have I or 3rdi said we are ungrateful for having a family. Trust me my family has had some tough times and sometimes these push people apart. The example I gave being my Cousin and I.
In my opinion it has nothing to with extreme priveledge it is how we feel and as I mentioned before maybe it has something to do with the break down of social family behaviour, in the past families would be localised therefore would have time and opportunity to bond, as I recall from my childhood in fact.
Nowadays most people are in a rush to do this go there or do that and have little time for just sitting down somwehere and 'relating'.



Very true.

The family members we’re closest to tend to be the ones that grow up in the family home, as these are the ones we share all our experiences both good and bad with.

Also, in my case my mental perception of my extended family changed with time. As a child I didn’t like constantly hearing “look how he’s grown” etc these trivial comments were a source of irritation to me, and the competition with my same aged cousin meant i really didn’t like him. But then in my teenage years it was a passive acceptance of the family as i enjoyed their company but not a great deal more and I grew much closer to my cousin and the fighting stoped. Then from around the mid 20’s to now I value spending time with the extended family so I think as you grow older these sort of things grow in importance.

I don’t know if everyone’s relationships with their families develop in the same way, I’m sure some do and having children of your own helps as you want them to understand the importance of family bonds and so on which gives you incentive to spend time with them. Another cousin of mine has had a child and I wouldn’t ever have thought of visiting her until recently (she lives 4 hours away), but since neither my wife or I have siblings, our children will never have ‘proper’ cousins, so the children of our cousins we tell them are their cousins

Sorry, I just used the wrong words. I meant that I feel like one is stuck with his parents, whether one likes it or not.

im not confusing not missing them with not loving them, i just use it as yet another indicater that i dont have a connection to them. All the people i care about in the world i miss when i dont see them.

i have had family members die and felt no real loss, im not happy that a person has died, thats very sad, and i wasnt happy to see my dad upset, but that was it, i was more upset when my cat died. I think this is a horrible thing to admit but im not in the buisness of lying to myself, its very grim, i appreciate that, but its the way it is.


if this happened to me i would think that it wasnt the fact that the group of people were my family, but it was the fact that we went through a struggle to survive that generated the feeling of love/connection.

I have developed a very specific bond with my climbing partner that i dont have with anyone else, how has this happeneded? we have both stopped each other from dying on multiple occasions


so you see your dad/ bros when you can, and your mum once a week and enjoy seeing them. i would say thats OK, i could see some my aunts/uncles/cousins every day after work but i have no desire to do this.



good, im glad its not a completely morbib thread

3rdI, I'm sorry to hear to that. In that case, I suppose you do indeed have quite the quandary. Although, it's only a problem insofar as you perceive it to be. If it doesn't bother you that you don't really love them, then there's really nothing to worry about. It sounds like it does though (correct me if I'm wrong), but I don't really have any advice other than try meditating on it which I'm sure you've probably tried already. I wish I could be more helpful.

Also, my apologies for the offensive tone of my prior posts, which I now realize after reading your last two posts in reply. I misdirected my feelings toward a specific group of people in my life toward you, which was unfair, and made some hasty assumptions about you in the process.

I think you're right about the whole religion comparison when applied to extended family, but we run into the problem of defining love. I'd argue that love between lovers is not true love, and I'm sure you'd disagree. I think the unconditional love between mother and child, siblings, father and child, are the love that all other loves strive to be. Sometimes two lovers or spouses achieve it, many times not. But I don't think that defining love by unhealthy relationships is a productive endeavor. We've evolved to love our families whether we'd like to admit it or not, so trying to define that love by the few cases where it is not present seems a little silly, no? So what if my parents wouldn't love me if I wasn't their son. Why should they? That's not how humans have evolved to work.

Ultimately family is an extension of us, so maybe when we don't love certain people in our family, it is us also rejecting that aspect of ourselves. I know that personally I despise the fact that my great aunt stole from my grandmother on her deathbed, perhaps all the more so because it reflects a side of me portrayed in her.