#family-dynamics

#family-dynamics

I broke off my engagement to my beloved fiancé, "Tristan," in November. Everyone else in my family loves him. I'm pretty sure some of my aunts and uncles love him more than they love me. I told my closest people personally and sent out formal cancellations to everyone else who got a save-the-date. But I haven't seen extended family or childhood friends since I did this, and I will be going home for Christmas. I'm worried everyone's going to be really invasive and weird, especially because I'm embarrassed about the final straw that made me end it. I absolutely should have seen this earlier.

Christmas dinner? At home or in a restaurant? It's at this juncture of the year, with Christmas dinner hurtling towards us, that you may well find yourself muttering: Well, we could always go out! Who could blame any home cook for wanting to shove this great burden on to someone else's back, especially since every culinary TV show, magazine article and advertising break since mid-November has hammered home what a colossal faff Christmas dinner actually is.

I get it. However, she continues to be disrespectful to me and has made him choose sides in disagreements. I've always tried to be neutral in situations. We all live together, but Amber and I just don't get along. She doesn't respect her father at all. When I have tried to make him realize it or support him when she's being unruly, I am turned into the bad guy.

It's a well-known fact that women are the primary makers of holiday magic. We're the ones who do the decorating, we're the ones wrapping the gifts, we're the ones making the cookies - we've got a vision, you know? But does being in charge of holiday magic mean we should also buy our own Christmas presents? One mom on the Reddit community Mommit took to the app to ask if she's the only mom buying herself Christmas gifts, and the responses really ran the gamut.

Then she asked a childhood friend, Ping Chong, to hold onto her records, including the death certificate of her husband, who had died of cancer three years earlier. Chong, reluctant to confront the prospect of her dear friend's death, refused at first. But Hang, who never shouted, pounded the table with a fist weakened by chemotherapy and yelled at Chong to take her request seriously.

The manager curtly pointed out that everyone there had specifically asked to work that day, and I realized that most of the employees either needed the paycheck (hourly workers aren't typically paid for national holidays if they don't work) or wanted to escape their various home situations. I left the coffee shop thoroughly embarrassed about my entitled assumption that everyone would want the day off and should be given the day off without having a say in the matter.

My aunt turned 80 last weekend, and to celebrate, a bunch of us flew out to the West Coast to visit her. While planning the trip, I realized that where we were staying was just a short train ride from a fairly popular gay bathhouse I'd been curious about for a while. I figured the day after the party would be the perfect time to finally check it out.

Like white lights versus colored lights, The Family Stone has become a polarizing Christmas icon to debate. The 2005 film with an all-star ensemble cast is either deeply loved by someone you know or considered an unhinged, terrible movie by somebody else you know. But I'm here to tell you: It can be both. Because yes, I am well aware that The Family Stone is a truly wild movie, but I love it deeply -

It is true that sometimes the black sheep is indeed different or problematic by anyone's standards (sometimes the result of a hidden mental illness). Or she may be a sociopath who violates the family's boundaries and care, so that the family has to exclude her to rightfully protect themselves. But surprisingly, very seldom is either of these scenarios actually the case.

If you've ever hit a moment on day three or four of a family visit when everything suddenly feels like too much, you're not alone. Most of us have a threshold, and once we hit it, even small interactions can feel overwhelming. Just know that's not a personal failure ― it's actually a common psychological response. And if you pay attention to the subtle signs that you're nearing your limit, you can avoid a tense blowup or unnecessary burnout.

"I'm either a widower or a divorcé," Culkin explained (via Variety). "I'm raising a kid and all that stuff. I'm working really hard and I'm not really paying enough attention and the kid is kind of getting miffed at me and then I get locked out. [Kevin's son] won't let me in... and he's the one setting traps for me."

I grew up with three brothers. Several canon events in the '90s shaped our dynamic to this day. There was a certain game of Risk. There was the day mom relinquished her Hi8 video camera to us with no strings attached. A bike accident here, a rock thrown down the stairs there. I'll never forget (nor forgive) the "snowball fight" with algae at the river. While we were careening through these incidents, most of the time we were unaware that we were making history.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has accelerated since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and now many people lean on AI chatbots for advice and even companionship. The problem with this approach is that AI chatbots are, at least currently, quite sycophantic and don't, by default, challenge a user's worldview. Rather, they can reinforce one's current beliefs and biases. Furthermore, since we as humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things, we perceive the output of AI chatbots as "human" and think we

She's in practically every frame as Linda, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she juggles, with increasing desperation and resentment, her responsibilities as a parent, a spouse, and a professional therapist. Her husband is constantly travelling for work, leaving Linda to deal with their young, never-named daughter, who suffers from a mysterious eating disorder that requires her to be attached to a feeding tube.

When something becomes old and then new again during my lifetime, I might be forgiven for feeling at once quite aged and a little sentimental. But suggestions that the landline telephone may be having a cultural renaissance just make me feel old and somewhat triggered by experiences of fraught teenage social negotiations over the long obsolete rotary dial phone of my youth.

I would routinely stay up late watching TV or reading in bed and say yes to dinners that started long after nightfall. My relationship with mornings was casual-I'd occasionally enjoy a sunrise but I certainly never set an alarm to see one. Then I had children, whose needs demanded an early start, and I spent years stumbling out of bed at their first sounds, making breakfast, and building block towers before I'd fully woken up.

Kushal certainly has pretensions toward neutrality, even if he isn't strictly neutral. This makes him an effective narrator, as you point out. But it's the pride that Kushal takes in his neutrality that really interests me. I think he savors the idea that he exists at a remove from his family; it makes him feel unusual, even exceptional. The irony being, of course, that everyone around Kushal is equally convinced of his or her own exceptionalism.

That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore, and she claimed that her teacher had been impressed with her from the start. "Madame Aurélie says I have a natural ear," she announced one evening. "Wonderful," my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table. Tarun, my sixteen-year-old brother, and I were at the table, too, wrapping our notebooks in brown paper. Summer was over; on Monday, we'd return to school.

Nobody warned me about the awkward phase with parents. For me, it was the period right after college that included landing my first important, non-internship job, taking control of my finances, and eventually moving out. I was a full-fledged adult - by society's standards. At work, I fit the bill. I was patient, poised, and responsible, always communicating respectfully, pulling my own weight, and holding myself accountable for mistakes.

Growing up intellectually gifted in a household in which no one shares your cognitive intensity creates a kind of loneliness that cannot easily be named. It is more than being smart. You are just being who you naturally are, but, inevitably, you are out of sync with the world around you. One of the sad realities of being neurodivergent and out of sync with others in the family is that you inevitably feel oppressed or humiliated.

Some couples bicker for the better part of their time together. Others may prefer to simmer in silence until something like a misplaced sock becomes a referendum on the relationship as a whole. Conflict, in its many shapes and sizes, is par for the course in intimacy. For this reason, psychologists rarely concern themselves with whether or not couples fight anymore; all signs point to the fact that conflict exists in some way or another in a majority of relationships.