How to avoid awkward family gatherings

Spend time with your weirdo family members.

Credit: Giovanni Francesco Romanelli

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This week, Amazon posted the first trailer for the upcoming movie The People We Hate At The Wedding. The movie doesn’t come out until mid November, but based on the trailer, the “people we hate” in the title appears to refer to family¹.

Though I suspect the movie ends with a reconciliation, the idea that family members don’t like to spend time together is everywhere. The awkward family holiday gathering is a recurring trope in sitcoms and movies. Advice columns around this time of year start filling up with counsel on how to avoid drama over Thanksgiving dinner. And anecdotally, a large number of the people I’ve known over the years don’t exactly relish big extended family get-togethers.

Interfamily friction also appears to be getting worse. A day before the new movie trailer went live, the New York Times published a report on how nearly one in five voters “said that politics had hurt their friendships or family relationships.” It’s a sad finding, and the piece notes that “people with years of common experience came to the conclusion that they no longer even agreed on enough facts to have coherent arguments.”

The New York Times piece is basically describing budding family estrangements, and it comes after earlier findings that more than a quarter of Americans are estranged from someone. Psychologist Joshua Coleman, who just published a book on estrangement, also recently said the scale of this phenomenon is “relatively new.”

The point then is that tension between family members appears to be widespread and growing as a problem. The People We Hate At The Wedding is tapping into a very real, very common thing.

I have to admit, though, that these findings feel somewhat foreign to me. After my wife and I relocated to be closer to family a few years ago, we constantly saw my siblings, nieces and nephews, and parents. And we continue to see each other despite a wide range of opinions on contentious topics such as politics — my extended family pretty much spans the entire political spectrum — and religion. In fact, not only do members of my family have opposing views on big issues, but it’s not uncommon for us to actually debate these issues at our family gatherings. Discussions have on occasion become quite heated, but tensions have not boiled over into permanent fractures.

Why is that? I love my extended family, but I doubt we’re all exceptional paragons of magnanimity. So why haven’t we turned out like the characters in The People We Hate At The Wedding or the people in the New York Times report? How have we avoid estrangement, or even the unpleasant ritual of awkward annual family gatherings?

I’m sure there are many complex explanations for family dynamics, but there’s one thing in particular that I suspect may be at play here: time.

Specifically, Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar has found that the depth of a friendship is connected to how much time people spent together. For example, it takes about 45 hours together for two people to move from acquaintance to friend. Deeper relationships require more time still: “To move from being a casual friend to a meaningful friend called for another fifty hours spent together over the course of three months, while those who advanced to be best friends took another 100 hours to be spent together”².

Dunbar was writing about friendships, but the point strikes me as applicable to family as well; time spent together is a kind of secret ingredient for stronger relationships.

The pandemic gave me a case study in this idea. Prior to COVID-19, my family routinely got together for dinners, birthday parties, dessert nights and other things. Then during the pandemic, those gatherings mostly stopped. And curiously, the amount of drama went up. Honestly, I can’t even remember what was going on, but it seemed like every week there was something new. At the time, I marveled (and lamented) that the pandemic was having a more corrosive impact on group cohesion than either the polarizing political climate of recent years or the drift toward heterodox views on religion³.

Then something surprising happened. As pandemic restrictions waned, so too did the drama. That’s not to say there were never conflicts before or after the pandemic. There have been plenty. But during isolation, things could fester. For me at least, that hasn’t been the case after the pandemic. When I think about my extended family, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t whatever the most recent micro-conflict might have been, but rather my 2 year old’s birthday last weekend where we were all hanging out at the park eating pizza.

The variable here seems to be the amount of time we’ve spent together. Which makes sense; if you have one hour of conflict with a person, and that’s the only hour you spend together, your relationship will likely be strained. But if you spent 100 hours with them, and 99 hours are great, that one hour of conflict might not seem so important. The the good times dilute the bad.

Obviously what works for some people won’t work for everyone. And if people want to cut others off or minimize contact, go for it. I can think of plenty of good reasons to do so and either way what you do isn’t going to impact me.

But my hypothesis — based on both Dunbar's research and my own anecdotal experience — is that in at least some cases, the reason it’s not pleasant to be around family is because we don’t spend enough time together to have meaningful relationships. We’re family, the thinking goes, so we have to get together occasionally. But we’re definitely not friends⁴. Even The People We Hate At The Wedding points to this theory, as it appears to be about a rift between family members living on different sides of the Atlantic.

Advice columns will propose remedies like avoiding certain conversation topics or staying in different hotels during holiday visits. But these kinds of solutions really only address the symptoms; they offer no way to deepen relationships in the first place so that they go from unpleasant to pleasurable.

One alternative, then, is to apply Dunbar’s findings about friends to family members. In other words, spend time together. Don’t limit interactions to the point that the pandemic might as well still be in full swing. Embrace time’s leavening effect on relationships.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown and reading to the end of this post. I’d be so happy if you shared it, but more importantly you would be so happy too. Try it and see.

Headlines to check out this week:

Why More and More Children are Cutting Off Their Parents

“We're becoming increasingly atomized; our definitions of what constitutes a good relationship makes us very fragile. The notion of boundaries, however useful they are, means we're constantly evaluating whether a relationship is good or bad for us. That puts enormous pressure and stress on the self. It also creates a lot of anxiety. So everybody's sort of looking for their tribe, but tribes can be very fragile, and they aren't necessarily able to provide the kind of corrective feedback that we all need, and that we're more used to getting from family and closest friends.”

1. The movie does have a great cast, looks charming and seems like a familial take on the romcom bildungsroman, so I’m sure I’ll end up watching it.

2. Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. Robin Dunbar. 2001. Page 118-119.

3. Religion has been a big part of my family’s identity for seven generations, and many people with a similar background have had their families ripped apart as people changed their views on faith. That hasn’t really happened in our case though.

4. “Yes,” the logic goes, “I will sit down on Thanksgiving with crazy Uncle Bob, but that’s it.” The problem in my experience, though, is that this creates a vicious cycle; the less time spent together the less you want to spent time together. That’s a shame in general, but it could also lead to material losses. Maybe Uncle Bob is actually a skilled dentist and you have a cavity. Maybe he knows how to hang drywall and you’re remodeling. Maybe he has teenage kids and you need a babysitter. There’s a real benefit to having a village and cutting off family members, crazy as they may be, comes at a cost.