What it’s like to have a sister or brother you barely speak to and why that makes a lot of people super-uncomfortable
I realised this on a recent trip to visit him and felt pretty crushed. I hadn’t been down to his place, which is just a couple of hours from where I live, in at least five years probably more, to be honest.
I had hopped on the train with one goal: to help him redecorate his living room. (He was desperate for help.) Furniture shopping kept us occupied and gave us something to talk about. Still, there were many awkward silences.
That night I joined him and his friends for drinks, and it hit me: I don’t even know the name of his best friend. I was introduced to a dozen people that night and I had never heard of any of them. In my head I blamed him. Why hasn’t he ever told me about these people? Then again, I reminded myself, it’s not as if I ever asked.
I look at most of my friends and they see, call or text their siblings all the time. Sometimes they do it multiple times a day. I’ve watched as one of my friends answered a call from her sister, laughed for several minutes straight, then just said, ‘Crazy! Okay, call me tonight,’ leaving me baffled by their secret language. A co-worker of mine couldn’t go a week without meeting up with her younger brother. I’m half jealous of their relationships and half weirded out by their freaky co-dependency. They look at me as though I’m the worst sister ever when I tell them I see my brother only over the holidays.
I got married recently and it wasn’t until after my husband’s bachelor party that I realised he should have invited my brother.
This story is from the August 2016 edition of Cosmopolitan - South Africa.
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This story is from the August 2016 edition of Cosmopolitan - South Africa.
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