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?
I have two older brothers. One is an unhinged hypochondriac that’s gets off on fighting with people, and the other is a white supremacist. Haven’t talked to either in about 5 years. I have a brown daughter.
Older brother, we live halfway across the country from one another. We play video games almost nightly in Discord as a way to keep in touch. Visits are a couple times a year it wasn’t always good but the 5 year age gap gets easier to overcome the older we get. Both in our 30s and we align on most things these days.
I’m feeling so jealous of your relationship. 🥲
I have a brother who is younger than me by 6 years. Our upbringing was a bit weird. Our parents basically forbid anything that might cause them inconvenience, irritation, or expense - which was most things that might interest a kid. (No, they’re not religious, which is the first question that everyone asks. They’re just raging assholes who are also a bit stupid. I can’t really explain it much beyond that.)
In addition to the manipulation and emotional abuse, they rewarded us if we informed on each other. I seldom did. Not through any great virtue or integrity of my own, but because I routinely got punished for the stupid shit he did. For instance, I didn’t tell them when our adult neighbor shot little bro with an air rifle because I knew he would catch absolute hell for being in the position of getting shot with an air rifle. Even if I didn’t catch hell about it, it was miserable to watch him get screamed at. For context on this story - we had been told to stay away from Steve’s yard because Steve was a known psycho with a hatred for neighbor kids. On that glorious summer day, Steve had dropped a $5 bill on his driveway just inside the property line… and was waiting for a kid to come by and be dumb enough to try to pick it up.
I might actually tell that one at their funeral.
By contrast, bro was younger and never got any blowback if I was doing something wrong. He actually recorded me talking on the phone with a friend when I was in middle school. He picked up the other line and held one of those shitty '70s tape recorders to the earpiece. Talking on the phone was forbidden and he was collecting proof to use against me. My friend and I weren’t plotting shit, I wasn’t grounded (the concept was foreign because we were never really allowed to go out or do things like talk on the phone anyway), it was just forbidden to talk on the phone.
I could excuse it when he was eight, but he passed along “dirt” on me well into his late teens and my twenties. He was under pressure from them as well, but he basically shredded any idea of trust between us for far too many times to count. I forgot what the final straw was, but I remember thinking, “I can never confide in this person and feel trust.” In every meaningful way, I’ve ignored him for the last 20 years.
He’s probably the least shitty thing about family gatherings, but that’s not saying much.
Man I feel for both of you in this situation. Obviously he could have made a decision at some point in his life to stop being shitty, and he didn’t, so that’s on him and I don’t blame you one bit for not having a relationship with him (or much of one). But I can also imagine a kid with really shitty parents who gets “rewarded” for essentially alienating their older sibling in this manner, so he does that in the hopes that it will strengthen an otherwise toxic bond with the parents. Which of course it really doesn’t, but no kid is going to understand that. Any kid wants good parents who love them. Oh man, I’m so sorry, for both of you but mostly for you.
Wow, your family and your neighbor are such asshole people. I’m glad you are out of there.
I’m 59 and have a sister who is 61. She went all out Trump Christian years ago and we barely talk
That’s sad.
Two younger sisters. The age difference is quite big, I am 8 years older than one and 13 years older than the other. That’s just a possible side-effect of being born when your parents were VERY young.
The older of the two I barely speak with, no real animosity we just simply have nothing in common.
The youngest one I speak with a little bit more often, as we do share some similar personality traits - I see a lot of myself in her from when I was younger.
The final complication is that I live on the opposite side of the country from them. So no in-person visiting.
I have three younger siblings. Our relationship is basically that of acquaintances.
I’m 34 (male) and my brother is 31. He’s my best friend (besides my wife) but he moved like 10 hours away so we try to fly a couple of times a year to hang out. We text every day multiple times.
Aww that’s so sweet
Terrifyingly glances at my brother who looks furious af 🥲
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.
My younger sister is MTF. She’s always been a loud asshole, and I had hoped that maybe living as a man was the cause of it. Nope, still a loud asshole. Just with different hardware. Love her to death, though.
Way better than my crackhead Trump-supporting older sister.
Had a older brother lost him 6 years ago found him again last year now we’re best brothers again
I’m the oldest. I have a younger sister and brother, who are about quite a bit younger than me (the difference is under 10 years though).
We’re all close and extremely comfortable with each other, but they’re closer with each other than me, given their closeness in age.
I don’t live at home with them anymore, but our relationship always feels natural and picks up where it left off even after being away for so long. I think we’ve been fortunate in that we’ve never felt to the need to compete with each other, and I think of them as a constant in my life that that I can always count on
Older sister, drug addict, lost her first kid and second kid is now permanently in the custody of my mother. We don’t speak, it’s hard to talk to her, she thinks shes a god and that she sees spirits and she’s just totally out to lunch.
I am very sorry to hear that. I have a friend who is an addict. We have really tried everything but it was futile - multiple withdrawals and all that. He ultimately ruined himself and his family. I wish you all the best, but please be careful.
I appreciate the kind words. I myself am a recovered addict, was very addicted to Xanax and cocaine (which my sister introduced me to at a young age). It can be frustrating at times especially for myself to see people deal with this, because I was able to stop myself and change my life.
Ultimately you can’t help those that don’t wish to help themselves, and trying to do that will accomplish nothing except for ruining your own life.
I admire your willpower. Stay save!
I have two younger siblings.
My brother is like my total opposite. We get along but don’t really go out of our way to hang out or chat.
My sister is basically like me, but weirder. We get along great and hang out all the time. And not just because we live together.
Younger brother. Haven’t spoken in about 17ish years. About sums it up.
I stopped talking to mine when he went batshit because I wouldn’t help him get onto Tor/darkweb. He wouldn’t say why he wanted to access it, and he got angry when I said I didn’t want to get involved.
Then he accused me of being a “tony blair lover” which is kinda bizarre to me because I don’t live in the UK anymore.
It was a very strange interaction!
Got an older sibling by 2 years. We don’t talk weekly, but we are still quite close when we do talk. Always have been close. Never big fights and usually got along really well.
As kids we used to “manage a business” together (it was plushie based) - we entertained ourselves during long car rides with that business.I get along really well with their partner, I am like a mix between the two of them. We can talk about everything. They called me when they had shit going on (like their gender), they took care of me when I was suicidal.
We are early thirties