“I hoped that he would say, ‘Oh, my daughter’s no longer talking to me, I should try to fix that so I can talk to her or see her again,’” Rose says. That’s how it was for Rose, 21, who says she used to be “Daddy’s princess” before her father’s heroin addiction escalated to the point that Rose felt forced to make a choice. Threaded into so many of these stories is the same hope Jordan had: that maybe the nuclear act of estrangement would eventually bring the estranged closer, like cutting hair to try to make it grow longer. She thinks she did the right thing, but part of her grief is accepting that she’ll never know if, given more time, he could have ever changed. Now she finds herself grieving a complicated relationship. She took a red-eye flight to be by her mother’s side and say her goodbyes to her incoherent father, who died after she got there. The year after their estrangement, Jordan’s dad was hospitalized. Threaded into so many of these stories is the hope that maybe the act of estrangement will bring the estranged closer. “I was always hoping that he would take my silence as a cue to get himself together and to apologize to me.” “It’s an extreme privilege to have a great relationship with your adult children,” she says. While he called and texted her repeatedly, Jordan didn’t budge. Looking back, she says he’s lucky she waited that long. But after one last explosive call, Jordan hung up the phone and had a “moment of clarity.” She realized she was finished, done. Because her parents were married, Jordan says she held back from cutting her dad off despite the fights they had about religion, politics, and her exit from the church. When Jordan, 32, decided to leave the church in early adulthood, tension rose between her and her father. But as ubiquitous as the phenomenon can seem, the reality behind each separation is as layered and individual as the families themselves. On her daytime talk show, Drew Barrymore talks about her emancipation from her parents at age 14 and hosts celebrities like Jennette McCurdy, bestselling author of I’m Glad My Mom Died, and Brooke Shields, who opened up about her tumultuous relationship with her mother. How pervasive family estrangement has become is also evident in pop culture. There is a sense among younger people today that if the relationship is aversive over a long period of time, they have the ability to get out of it.” “There is less of an overwhelmingly normative guideline that you must stick with your family no matter what. “The norms that forced families to stick together no matter what have weakened,” Pillemer said, noting that difficult childhood experiences, value and lifestyle differences, and unmet expectations are some of the factors driving estrangement. Today, certain young people appear to be far less rigidly beholden to the idea of family obligation above all else, even at the cost of their own happiness. If TikTok is to be believed, attitudes about estrangement fall along generational lines: Boomers accuse millennials and Gen Zers of being too quick to cut contact, while younger generations push back by saying they don’t have to tolerate unacceptable behavior just because someone is related to them by blood. The rise in millennials and Gen Zers coming forward to discuss their own crises-the hashtag #ToxicFamily has 1.9 billion views on TikTok-may suggest that American families are severing ties at an all-time high. Although there is a lack of long-term research, Pillemer believes estrangement rates are increasing in the United States and other Western countries, especially in white and non-immigrant people under the age of 35. That’s more than a quarter, although the actual proportion could be much higher because many people are still reluctant to discuss such a personal and stigmatized topic. Karl Pillemer, a professor at Cornell University and author of Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, found that in 2020, 27% of Americans over the age of 18 were estranged from a family member. If it feels like whispers of estrangement are everywhere lately-in your group chat, at your happy hour, and of course on TikTok-it’s because the data is staggering. Family estrangement flies in the face of what we were taught as children: that family is forever.
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