I’m male aged 19-22, I have an older brother about 4-5 years older (giving age ranges for better anonymity). Relationship is… not good (read: it’s terrible, horrifyingly terrible, arch-nemesis). How about you?
Edit: added age for context
Older brother… Grew up together, hated him for a long time, perhaps unfairly as mother is really responsible. Kinda fine with him now
Younger sister. Love her dearly. She’s off keeping her distance from the family and so am I and so we never really talk.
Younger sister 2. Adores me. Makes bad decisions. All I can do is support her. Love her to bits.
Younger sister 3. Living the standard good life. She’s fine, doesn’t need anything from me or vice versa.
Younger brother. We get along great. Reconnected recently. Look forward to seeing him again. We have a lot in common.
Younger brother 2. We worked together for a few years, weird being his brother and his boss but we’d had so little contact it wasn’t too weird.
Now I write this down I realise there’s so much story here. Really interesting!
For reference, I’m in my early 40s and I helped raise most of my siblings to different degrees. Taught them to read, to use the toilet, that our parents are pointless 😁
I appreciate that everyone doesn’t have perfect relationships with their siblings.
Growing up, my parents made me feel horrible for having a bad one with my sibling. As though there was something wrong with me.
To this day, I carry a lot of shame around it, as in, how can I expect to have healthy relationships with friends and professional relationships at work if I couldn’t even manage one with my sister?
So, thank you all for making me feel less like an anomaly.
Looking at my parents and their siblings (varying degrees of almost no contact to some contact with one exception that is good), and looking at my sibling (really good), it has nothing to do with you. It’s just, two people that shared an environment growing up, and those two people can be close or not.
I feel very grateful for my sibling, but that’s just it. We happen to have the personalities that match.
It’s not your fault.
That’s a very even way of looking at it. I can’t tell you how much that perspective means to me, and how much that makes sense.
I think that’s the lens I’ll try to embrace when I look at our relationship moving forward.
Got an older brother. We were very close growing up, sharing hobbies and friends, and it’s been our foundation for keeping in touch since then. We don’t see each other as often as I would like, but I would say our relationship remains strong. We’ve both kept in touch with the same group of friends. “Life”, however, has imposed on us both; we live in different countries, both with family (mine is large, his is small but his lovely son unfortunately has a set of issues) so finding time to both talk and meet is very, very difficult. I’m definitely the one keeping in touch (can’t remember the last time he called me, other than a few times where he needs IT support) but that’s understandable given what’s going ok with his son.
