Invisibly Intertwined

(Title by Michelle Shieh)

Eh. My dad always seems to put considerable priority on family, and forces me to do the same, causing me to have to ignore my friends. Why? Because "I rarely see them" and "I should spend more time with them." Why is he so insistent that family is more important than friends? Also, what makes family family and friends friends?

The obvious answer to why family is more important is blood relations. A person is half of the genetic material of their father or mother. To ensure passing on of this genetic material, the father and mother invest a countless amount of time and energy to raise the child. Why other relatives? They also have, no matter how insignificant an amount, similar genes to the person, so they must be helped and/or protected. Why parents though? Possibly because they may bear more children, and that idea carries on through lifetime, so even after infertility or even right before death, their children are always trying to protect them.

But that is beyond the point. Most teenagers(not talking about me necessarily) have a closer bond to their friends than their siblings or parents, telling them more secrets or things in general. I remember attending a relatively close relative's funeral, and now, thinking back, I would have been more sad if it had been a friend, no matter how many red envelopes the relative had given me. Why then, as we age, do we begin to care more for our parents and siblings over friends? Besides the issue of blood relations, as we age we lose friends. In that, the only people who you are essentially required to keep in touch with are your relatives. They become your friends, just as previously your friends had become nearly your family.

Family bonds are not easily broken, except in the case of family disputes.. My grandparents traveled from Taiwan simply for my uncle's 50th birthday, and we pay 1000 dollars (per person!) every few years in order to visit our grandparents. Again, why is this essential? Most animals do not remember their offspring, nor their parents. The ones that do, like us, have a strong parental sense (except the ones the ones that eat their children. Er... Just kidding, those don't remember their offspring.) However, remembering offspring is simply for the purpose of keeping that child alive until it is old enough to fend for itself. Human parents nowadays do something similar, letting their children go to college at 18, but they are never truly able to forget their children. Continually sending care packages, surprising them (sometimes with ill results) with trips to college, paying for grad school, and, in the case of people unable to get a job, leaving them a room open in their house.

Friendly bonds, on the other case, can fluctuate from the extremely strong to extremely weak, depending on the person's compatibility to the friend. They are much easier to break, or at the least, have the chance to decay. A lack of contact due to a difference in schools, jobs, or locations in general can cause a friendship to simply disappear. Even in high school, I am a spectator of decaying friendship: people lose friends only because they have no classes with each other. Maybe it is because of our shallower brains, or perhaps that is how it works. High school friendships do not last, and those that do must have been as close of bonds as siblings during school. Friends are not actually essential for survival. Animals' friendly contact is limited to friendly jousting, group hunting, or picking bugs off of one another.

Humans, due to hormones and a larger brain, actually have a sense of "friends" and "family," both of which are essentially nonessential (ha ha) for survival (family bonds are required by some in order to reach maturity). The drives for these bonds have developed so much that we go out of our way in order to make survival easier for the ones we have bonded with, or just to make them slightly happier.