Families Brought Closer Together This Past Year

Over the past year-plus, we have known that, with family members spending more time together than ever before, more people were becoming interested in, and engaging in, consanguinamory than ever before. Soumya Karlamangla has an article at latimes.com that, if you read between the lines, touches on this. It was even titled: "A pandemic love story you haven’t heard before: Parents and their adult children."

“I don’t know anybody like I know Melissa,” said Mary, 58. “You raise your kids to grow up, and somebody else gets to meet them like this, as adults. But now I get to know her like this.”

The pandemic pushed millions of young adults to live with their parents as college campuses shuttered, businesses reduced their hours and social isolation wore down people’s mental health. In July, 52% of Americans 18 to 29 years old lived with a parent, making it the most common living arrangement for people in that age group and the highest level recorded in at least a century, according to the Pew Research Center.

I want to make it clear that I'm not saying that any of the people mentioned by name in this article have engaged in consanguineous sex. But the dynamics are in line with fostering that added bond.

But for some lucky families, the unexpected time together often felt like a gift, a bonus year to bond with parents and siblings. And for the luckiest, like the Andersons, that time was a revelation.

Melissa, 29, is the third of four daughters. She hadn’t spent much time alone with her parents until she packed up her Los Angeles apartment last summer and moved in with them in Gridley, about an hour north of Sacramento.

But over several months, the three Andersons formed a bond that more resembles a friendship among peers than a parent-child relationship.

Sounds wonderful!

During a stressful year, they took care of one another.

“Normally you look to your parents as reassurance that everything is going to be OK, but we were all on the equal playing field of being scared and being in the unknown, and I think that allowed us to know each other better,” Melissa said. “I think they know me probably better than anyone else now.”

Beautiful. 

Unlike so many stories about the pandemic, the recent movement of adult children home is often a joyful one. Americans traded their independent lifestyles for shared movie nights, exercise buddies and dinners around the table. Many, for the first time, tried a kind of intergenerational living far more common in other countries — and liked it.

Hopefully, more families will be closer together going forward.

Derek Daniels’ three-week trip to his parents’ house last summer turned into a 10-month stay. Not only was his childhood home in Burlingame less lonely than his empty L.A. apartment, but he savored the extra time with his younger sister, who was home from college.

“When would you be able to go back at 24 and live with your entire family for almost a year?” said Daniels, who returned to North Hollywood in April. “As the world outside was crumbling, it was nice to be together.”

It's not just parents. People are closer to their siblings.

“When they’re kids, you’re still more the parent. Now it’s less of a parent role — actually, hardly any of a parent role — and it became more developing a friendship,” said David, 60. “She was a good roommate.”

Melissa and Mary began a daily ritual of wandering down their street around dusk. While the world swirled with uncertainty, they took the same path every day, to the stop sign and back, never deviating.

The time allowed them to get to know each other in a new way. Mary had once thought that Melissa was a private person, but the wall that had separated them fell.

No topic of conversation was off the table. Dating. Religion. Money. Family relationships. Life goals.

Mary said that she had previously thought that Melissa, her only daughter who is single, was missing a necessary piece of her life.

But she realized Melissa can be happy partnered or not, and that her child has become a confident woman who doesn’t put too much stock in other’s opinions.

“That, to me, has been fascinating because I love that in a person. I didn’t know she had that. I didn’t give her enough credit,” Mary said. “I would like to be her friend if she wasn’t my daughter.”

Did you make the best of being home with family over the pandemic? Comment below (you can comment anonymously) or email Keith at fullmarriageequality at protonmail dot com

Consanguinamory After COVID