Chosen family

Chosen family is the term for the small group of non-biological people an adult constructs as their kinship circle, friends, mentors, partners, household members, the kin one chooses rather than inherits.

The phrase began in LGBT communities in the 1980s, when biological families had often withdrawn from members during the AIDS crisis and the surrounding networks of friends became the actual kin: the people at the bedside, the people who buried the dead, the people who raised each other's children. Kath Weston's 1991 ethnography Families We Choose documented the concept; it has since been adopted across many contexts.

What chosen family does

Chosen family fills the slots that families of origin typically occupy: emergency contact, post-surgery care, holiday hosts, the person you call when you have just received bad news. The relationships are often, but not always, deeper than equivalent friendships; the difference is the explicit understanding that the relationship has kin-shape obligations. Members of a chosen family will absorb cost for each other (financial, time, emotional) in ways that friends typically would not, by mutual prior consent.

Who has chosen family and why

People estranged from their family of origin, queer adults whose biological families have rejected them, immigrants whose family is geographically distant, single adults whose households are not nuclear, and a growing number of people whose biological families are intact but whose closest practical kin are nonetheless friends. The pattern is not limited to crisis: many adults construct chosen family alongside their family of origin rather than instead of it.

How chosen families form

The recognition is usually slow and after-the-fact. Two friends find themselves spending every holiday together; the friend's mother starts asking how the other one is doing; emergency contacts get updated. At some point the relationship is recognized aloud as family. The chosen-family literature emphasizes that the recognition itself is a meaningful move, because it explicitly elevates the friendship into a different category of mutual obligation.

Where it shows up around VibeLovely

Chosen family runs through the Family desk's coverage of non-traditional kin structures, sits alongside family of origin as a deliberate pair.

References

• Weston, K. (1991). Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Columbia University Press.
• Muraco, A. (2006). Intentional families: fictive kin ties between cross-gender, different sexual orientation friends. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(5), 1313-1325.
• Levin, I. (2004). Living apart together: a new family form. Current Sociology, 52(2), 223-240.
• Survey Center on American Life. (2022). Chosen family in modern America. americansurveycenter.org