It’s Okay If You End Up Being Closer To Someone’s Family Than You Ever Were To Them

When it comes to friendships and relationships, your love and appreciation can often grow beyond the person you initially bonded with. When you befriend or commit to a relationship with someone, you might get lucky and end up loving their family, too. It truly is a blessing to be able to genuinely connect with the environment that comes with loving someone instead of finding yourself merely tolerating it.

Sometimes, life happens. Priorities shift, people change, and that’s okay. Time can change many things, and in the end, don’t be surprised if you end up being closer to their family than you are to the person you initially befriended or dated. Please don’t feel guilty if you find friendships blooming within the family of the person you initially connected with, especially if these new friendships end up being even stronger than any initial bond that you ever had with the person who introduced you.

People grow, and sometimes, we grow apart from the people we started with. You don’t have to maintain a friendship with the person who introduced you to their family members in order for these new friendships to be, or remain, valid. Nurture the friendships you actually want, instead of wasting your precious time and energy maintaining the ones you keep out of a sense of guilt or obligation. It’s okay to grow away from some people and toward others. That’s the beauty of life: it is always evolving.

Correspondingly, when a loved one passes away, you can carry the sacred bond and memory of that person with you for the rest of your life without having to feel obligated to carry their family member who introduced you as well. You don’t need anyone’s permission to love, grieve, or remember someone. We get to choose who to let go of and who to hold on to.

With whom or where we started does not define with whom or where we will end up.