There is a particular kind of family estrangement that the wider cultural register has tended to miss, because the estrangement does not look like what the wider register has been calibrated to recognize. The recognized version involves a specific event, a confrontation, a betrayal, some kind of identifiable rupture that produces a clear before and after. The recognized version is real. The recognized version is also, on close examination, considerably less common than the version this article is about.
The more common version involves no event at all. No confrontation, no betrayal, no identifiable rupture. The two people involved did not, at any single moment, decide to stop being family members in any substantive sense. The two people involved made, more accurately, a hundred small decisions across years that nobody was particularly tracking. The decisions were small enough that, in any single instance, they looked like nothing. The decisions accumulated. By the time anyone in the family was in a position to register what had happened, the silence had become the relationship.
The estrangement is not, in this version, the outcome of a choice. The estrangement is, more accurately, the cumulative outcome of many small choices that nobody experienced as choices at the time they were being made.
What the small decisions actually look like
It is worth being precise about what the small decisions actually look like, because the wider register has tended to absorb them in vaguer terms than the underlying texture warrants.
The call that came in on a Tuesday afternoon, when the person was in the middle of something, and that the person meant to return but did not. The holiday that the person quietly decided not to attend, because the travel was inconvenient and the family member would understand. The conversation in which a name might have come up but did not, because the topic moved in a different direction. The text message that arrived and that the person read and did not respond to, on the assumption that there would be a better moment to reply later. The birthday card that the person did not send, because they had not sent one the previous year either and the not-sending had become structurally easier than the sending.
Each of these is, in the moment it occurs, almost entirely invisible. The person performing the not-returning, the not-attending, the not-mentioning, the not-responding, the not-sending is not, in any meaningful sense, registering what they are doing as a choice about the relationship. The person is, more accurately, just navigating their own life with the available time and attention they have, and the small omissions are simply what gets squeezed out by the various other things competing for that time and attention.
The family member on the other side of the omission is, in many cases, doing some version of the same thing. The family member is not, in most cases, particularly attending to whether the call was returned. The family member is also living their own life, with their own competing demands, and the small omissions are mutually invisible across the relationship. The two people involved are, in some real way, conducting parallel processes of small omission without either of them registering what the parallel processes are accumulating into.
What the accumulation actually produces
The accumulation produces, across years, a relationship that has structurally disappeared without anyone in the relationship having decided to make it disappear.
The two family members are still, in the technical sense, family members. The two family members still know each other’s phone numbers. The two family members still appear in each other’s address books, in each other’s family trees, in each other’s various structural records of who is related to whom. What has gone missing is the actual ongoing engagement that used to constitute the relationship. The engagement has been quietly defunded by the accumulated small omissions, in the same way a savings account can be quietly drained by small withdrawals that nobody is particularly tracking.
The discovery, when it occurs, tends to arrive in a particular way. The two people end up in the same room at some unavoidable family occasion. A wedding. A funeral. A milestone birthday that the wider family has organized in a way that makes attendance structurally difficult to decline. The two people see each other across the room. The two people experience the small interior recognition that they no longer know what to say to each other. The not-knowing is not the result of any specific difficulty between them. The not-knowing is the result of the accumulated absence of the small ongoing engagement that, across years, would have given them the material to actually have a conversation about.
The conversation that does occur, in this situation, tends to be calibrated to surface-level catch-up. The two people exchange the various standard updates about work, location, general health, the various other adults in the family. The conversation lasts ten or fifteen minutes. The two people are pleasant to each other. The two people then move on to other parts of the room. The exchange has, in some real way, just confirmed for both of them what each had already been suspecting, which is that the relationship has, without anyone having decided this, quietly stopped being a relationship.
Why nobody decides to fix it
The honest acknowledgment is that, once the accumulation has reached this point, neither party usually decides to fix it. The reasons are worth examining.
The first reason is that the fixing would require one of the two people to do considerably more work than the not-fixing would. The fixing would involve the deliberate reopening of the engagement that has been quietly closing across years, with no obvious starting point and no obvious script for how to do it. The not-fixing involves continuing what the two people have already been doing, which is structurally easier and produces no immediate pain. The asymmetry between the work of fixing and the work of not-fixing tilts the available decisions toward the not-fixing in almost every case.
The second reason is that neither party experiences the accumulated absence as their own responsibility. Each party can, on close examination, point to specific moments where the other party also failed to return a call, also skipped a holiday, also let a name fall out of the conversation. The mutual omissions create the structural impression, in both parties, that the responsibility for fixing the relationship rests primarily with the other person. The two people are, in some real way, each waiting for the other one to do the work. The waiting continues indefinitely.
The third reason is that the not-fixed relationship, on close examination, no longer particularly hurts. The two people have already adapted to the absence. The various small ongoing engagements that used to be part of the relationship have been replaced, in both parties’ lives, by other things. The fixing would, in some real way, require the two people to make space for an engagement that neither of them is currently structured to accommodate. The not-fixing preserves the status quo. The status quo is, by the time anyone is in a position to evaluate it, already what the relationship has become.
What the wider register tends to miss about this
The wider cultural register has tended to absorb family estrangement through the framing of conflict, with the implicit assumption that estranged family members have, somewhere along the way, had a falling out. The framing is intuitive. The framing is also, on the available evidence of how most estrangements actually develop, almost entirely inaccurate.
Most estrangements do not involve a falling out. Most estrangements involve, more accurately, the slow accumulated decay of an engagement that nobody was particularly maintaining. The two parties are not, in most cases, angry with each other. The two parties are not, in most cases, carrying any specific grievance. The two parties have, more specifically, simply allowed the relationship to drift across years, until the drift has reached the point where the relationship no longer functionally exists.
The implication is that the standard advice for repairing estranged family relationships, which tends to be calibrated to the conflict framing, is structurally mismatched to most actual estrangements. The advice involves addressing the underlying grievance, acknowledging the harm, making amends for the rupture. There is, in most actual estrangements, no underlying grievance to address, no specific harm to acknowledge, no rupture to make amends for. The thing that needs to be addressed is the accumulated absence, which is considerably harder to address than a specific grievance, because the absence does not have any clear location to start from.
What is available, if anyone wants to attempt the repair
What is available, on close examination, is the small ongoing willingness of one of the two people to start producing the engagement that the accumulated absence had been quietly defunding. The willingness has to be ongoing, because the accumulation that produced the absence was itself ongoing across years. The willingness cannot, in most cases, be performed in a single gesture and then withdrawn. The willingness has to be performed repeatedly, over months or years, before the accumulated absence begins to be filled in.
The performance is not, on close examination, dramatic. The performance is the call that gets made even when the person is in the middle of something. The holiday that gets attended even when the travel is inconvenient. The name that gets brought up in conversation even when the topic was moving in a different direction. The text message that gets answered the same day rather than waiting for a better moment that, on the previous evidence, never quite arrives. The birthday card that gets sent even though the not-sending had become the easier option.
The performance is small in any single instance. The performance is, accumulated across the same kind of timescale that produced the original absence, what produces the relationship that the original absence had been quietly replacing. The mathematics is the same. The direction is opposite. The work is what the relationship, on close examination, has always been built on, in the periods when it was actually being built rather than being quietly defunded.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The family estrangements that look like rupture are, on close examination, considerably less common than the family estrangements that look like nothing at all. The nothing-at-all version is the more common one. The nothing-at-all version involves no event, no confrontation, no identifiable point at which the relationship decided to stop being a relationship. The nothing-at-all version involves, more accurately, a hundred small decisions across years that nobody experienced as decisions at the time they were being made.
The call that did not get returned. The holiday that got quietly skipped. The name that stopped coming up in conversation. The text message that was read but never answered. The birthday card that the person did not send. Each is, in itself, almost invisible. The accumulation is what produces the silence. By the time anyone in the family is in a position to register what has happened, the silence has become the relationship.
The wider register would benefit, on close examination, from absorbing what this implies about how most family relationships actually decay, and about what kind of work would be required to prevent the decay from reaching the point where the relationship has, without anyone having decided this, quietly stopped being a relationship. The work is not, in most cases, dramatic. The work is the same small ongoing engagement that, in its absence, produces the estrangement. The mathematics is the same. The direction is opposite. Either direction, performed consistently across years, becomes what the relationship actually is.
