While many people have loving, accepting, supportive families, for others, family-of-origin relationships can often be fraught with a great deal of tension and hurt. They are sometimes comprised of people who have little in common other than DNA or shared names, and for some people, they cause far more misery than joy.
In contrast, a chosen family can be one of the greatest and most underestimated gifts you could ever experience. The connections between those who choose one another, consciously and sincerely, are often more than just friendship and are sometimes closer than bonds between relatives. Here’s why:
1. They love you for who you are, not out of a misplaced sense of duty.
From earliest childhood, most of us have been inundated with the idea that family members have to love one another — as though emotion is tied to shared DNA.
But when love is absent, either due to lack of connection or broken bonds (like betrayal, abuse, and so on), people are often made to feel that there’s something wrong with them.
In contrast, chosen family makes love a conscious decision rather than an obligation. They love you for you and have chosen to care for you deeply because they recognize what an amazing person you are.
They don’t resent having to be in your life because they had the misfortune of being born into the same family unit, nor do they make a point of telling you that they’re only being nice to you because they have to be.
2. They often offer acceptance without judgment.
How many times have you spent time with family members, only for them to ask why you aren’t doing X thing with your life? Or have them make unsolicited suggestions about what you should be doing, from losing weight or changing your hair color to having children, etc.
Chosen family rarely (if ever) do anything like this. They accept you as you are rather than having some preconceived notion of who you should be based on their own ideals and wants.
They aren’t pressuring you to give them grandchildren because they want them, nor are they pushing you to change your appearance so you’re more attractive in their eyes. They simply love and accept you as you are, here and now. End of.
3. They often share your values, which means fewer clashes and compromises.
Chosen family members often tend to be those who share your values and priorities. In fact, these shared values may be a cornerstone of your relationship.
As such, there’s rarely anything major to fight about: the things that are important to you are important to them as well, and you might all work together on projects that you feel strongly about.
This is in stark contrast to time spent with biological family, whose views may be polar opposite to your own, especially if they like to pick fights about them at the dinner table.
You’ll never feel obligated to defend your views and values to someone else’s satisfaction, nor will you be mocked for liking or caring about things that they think are stupid or irrelevant.
Instead, your chosen loved ones want to hear about what’s important to you, and then ask how they can support you in the things you’re passionate about.
4. They appreciate you for who you are now, rather than clinging on to a past version of you.
When you create a chosen family of people you meet as you go through life, they generally know you for the person you are now, rather than who you were in the past. This is immensely beneficial for people who have been through difficult or traumatic things that they don’t particularly want to be reminded about.
Your chosen family has gotten to know the person you have worked and fought hard to become, and they adore you as you are.
With biological family, however, you may have relatives who’ll insist on doing things like using your deadname to get a negative reaction out of you or who keep bringing up something devastating or embarrassing from your past, no matter how often you’ve asked them not to.
5. They allow you to attend celebrations out of choice, not obligation.
When I was growing up, I dreaded holiday get-togethers because of the obligatory performative emoting that would be required.
Pretending to be happy to see relatives I despised, pretending to be okay with bigoted jokes at the dinner table, and having no choice but to attend unless I wanted to be guilt-tripped about it for months.
This cast a pall over most holidays for years, until I created a chosen family full of amazing people whom I absolutely adore.
Now, holidays like Christmas are events to look forward to, because I get to spend time with those I love. I buy gifts year-round when I find things that I think my loved ones will like, and spend days cooking and baking to share, whether I’m hosting or visiting.
There’s no sense of dread, nor bracing for the horrible things that relatives might say or do. I know that the entire celebration will be a joyous one, because I love and respect everyone in attendance.
6. They give you sincere reciprocation.
When you do kind things for your biological family, they often behave as though your actions are expected because you’re related, rather than being grateful for them. Furthermore, every small kindness you do may be picked apart and criticized.
With chosen family members, it’s more often acknowledged that every act of kindness is a choice that stems from loving care, rather than duty.
They appreciate your actions beyond measure, and often seek to reciprocate when they have the opportunity to do so. You aren’t taken for granted, but are instead treated with great respect and appreciation.
7. They respect your boundaries without fights or antagonistic pushback.
A lot of relatives seem to balk at the idea of respecting their children’s or siblings’ boundaries because they’re “family.” As a result, if a family member tries to establish them, they’ll overstep intentionally as a means of proving that those boundaries don’t apply to them — they’ll never respect them, and they better not be rebuilt again.
In contrast, chosen family members don’t just respect the boundaries that you’ve put up: they help to defend them fiercely. They offer the type of support that some relatives often fail to provide.
This tends to happen because they see you as a whole, adult person, instead of having memories of the child or adolescent version of you clouding their perspective (and judgment).
8. They give you bonds that are often much more powerful than obligatory ones.
For many of us, the bonds that we choose in life tend to be much stronger than those we’re born into.
This is because we have no choice about the families that created us. We’re assigned parents (biological or adopted), as well as siblings, aunts, grandparents, and cousins, and we may have little to nothing in common with them.
And yet we’re expected to have unshakeable bonds of loyalty to them because that’s the expectation associated with “family.” In fact, some people believe that these bonds are absolute, even in cases of betrayal and abuse.
In contrast, a chosen family has bonds of loyalty and trust that are cultivated over long periods of time, between people who choose to love, trust, and care for one another.
There’s no pressure to force yourself to pretend to care about individuals who treat you poorly, because you don’t have anyone like that in your life anymore. Your chosen family is entirely made up of good, decent people whom you have bonded with, and would do anything for — just as they would do for you.
Final thoughts…
While it’s nice to imagine that biological families are bastions of unconditional love and acceptance, and some certainly are, the truth is that many families don’t offer that kind of support.
A startling number of people live with a great amount of grief and trauma that they didn’t have the love, support, or even acceptance from their families that they always dreamed of having, even from earliest childhood.
For those of us for whom this applies, a chosen family gives us the opportunity to have exactly that, and it is one of the most precious, underestimated gifts life can offer us.
