I learned the term “chosen family” in the queer community I came into after high school. Though the term has expanded beyond its original context, initially it was used to describe the way queer folks find one another and build strong lifelong bonds in the face of rejection by their families of origin.
These intimate relationships may end up stronger than those in blood family, in part out of the necessity for strong community when you have nowhere else to turn.
I grew up in a small nuclear family that became smaller when I left home and chose to end contact with one of my parents. At the time, I remember getting comments that I would miss that parent someday and that I would regret the decision. Yet 17-year-old me knew the harm I experienced from that parent was enough to end the relationship.
In my adulthood, I can also acknowledge the grain of truth in their comments though perhaps from a slightly different angle. I am an adoptee and already felt severed from the experience of traditional biological family, and estrangement from my adoptive parent added another layer to that sense of loneliness. The boundary was necessary, but it didn’t make it less painful.
It felt right, then, to give the weight and value of the word “family” to the relationships that did support me both materially and emotionally as I grew up. Those friendships and mentors lived out the core values of what I believe family should be.
A common narrative I hear from clients is the belief that family of origin should be all the support you need. If not them, then your romantic partner. Just as common, especially for those who have been estranged from their families, is the narrative that you should be able to meet all your needs yourself. But I believe that both of these stories descend from the larger frame of individualism, where it is shameful to rely too heavily on other people unless they have some obligation to care for you.
Chosen family challenges that framing by borrowing values from more communal cultures where being interdependent on one another is not as shameful. The concept also allows for more agency over the terms of our differing relationship structures — romantic partners may never need to live together or get married, for example, but have the same depth of intimacy as other relationships; longstanding friendships can be just as close as siblings or lovers; you can adopt generations above you as parents and grandparents whether or not you share a blood tie.
I present the idea of chosen family as another way to think about connection that breaks up the rigidity of how we may have been taught that families function.
I myself have grieved many times over the fact that my family system does not look like either a tight-knit Western nuclear family or a harmonious South Asian intergenerational web. Through acknowledging that loss, however, I learned to challenge the assumption that those family structures were better or more secure than the one I formed with my own community.
It perhaps takes more effort to build chosen family, but it is no less caring or powerful. Over time, I have come to realize that very few families fit into the traditional nuclear family structure and that even if yours does, it does not diminish the need for deep chosen connections.
Nowadays, I think of chosen family as a series of concentric circles: It is the largest circle and describes all my people who I can be authentic and emotionally deep with, the people I often rely on for physical, emotional and material needs to get met. Inside of that circle are smaller, more specific circles — friends, partners, safe members of my biological family, etc. And on the outside, there might be folks who I’m connected to but that I interact with in certain limited contexts. Blood family who I don’t see very often or have complicated relationships with might fall there.
When we push back against a narrative that tells us family looks a certain way, we have to hold many complex emotions at the same time. We may hold great sadness for what we have lost alongside great love for the people who have taken up parental or sibling roles for us. We may be angry or disappointed that it doesn’t ever completely fulfill our longing for a parent.
Yet if we can hold that hurt and invest as much energy into our friendships as we do our family members, then we open up the possibility for something new to form.