Parents are your main guides through life, siblings are your annoying 18-year-long roommates, grandparents are your sources of eternal wisdom and aunts and uncles are there to give you questionable advice that your parents might not necessarily agree with. While most families generally align on the roles of these figures, there is one that varies around the world: cousins.
With several holidays coming up, there’s a good chance you’ll be seeing your family, which includes your cousins. If you’ve gained a general sense of your friends’ family dynamics, it’s easy to observe that cousins hold a different role in each family tree. Every cousin’s relationship is different, so it’s important to remember the values that our cousins bring into our lives.
Family Ties
With you and your cousins being of the new generation in your family, you get the newest perspectives on all your crazy family drama. All the parents tell details of stories at different times and to different degrees, so learning each new tidbit and working with each other to piece them together is a unique bonding experience.
While your mom might think you’re too young to learn about why your grandfather got lost in a national park, her sister thinks it’s perfectly fine for a nine-year-old to know. Suddenly, every child in your family has heard the story, and it’s too late for your parents to protect you.
You and your cousins are all raised by different people, which means you each experience things at different times. Learning from each other (and sometimes being bad influences) is a key part of having cousins — drinking alcohol, having relationships, and other milestones in life are often influenced by your cousins, and you’re able to trust them more easily since you’re related.
Make the Most of It When You’re Together
You, your brothers and sisters all wake up under the same roof in the morning and fall asleep under the same roof at night for 18 years. This means you are subject to everything that you could possibly find annoying about them — singing too loudly, leaving messes everywhere, and showering for too long. Since cousins usually don’t live together, anything you might find annoying about them only has to be tolerated until you both go home.
However, the times when you do get to see your cousins are special, especially if it’s not very often. When the family gets together for holidays you all can catch up on everything that has happened in the past few months, play games that have been your favorite since you were children, and hopefully convince your parents to let you sleep over.
As you get older, there’s a good (but sad) chance you’ll move away from each other. Although moving away from friends risks the chance that you’ll drift apart, it’s hard to drift from people who you’ve grown up with your entire lives. The distance makes it hard, but it’s also what makes reunions so much sweeter.
Built-in Friends
Cousins are the best low-maintenance long-distance friends you could ask for. It’s easy to say some of them are the brothers or sisters you never had. Whether you’re close with them or not, they’re usually the first people you look for at family reunions.
Since you’re part of the same generation in your family, you’re stuck knowing them for the rest of your lives and can watch each other grow from immature little kids into people who have their own futures, jobs, and extended families. You remember being forced to sit at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving, and now you’re watching them get married. It’s bittersweet, but it’s something we have to be grateful for.
If you miss your cousins, send them this article and tell them to follow @valleymag on Instagram!
