Aunt Acid: Advice About Sisters
Feel free to ask Aunt Acid a variety of questions at [email protected] at any time. Previous installments can be found here .
Hey! So… I have a younger sister who is the best person I know. And this is a good thing! We somehow, between the two of us, divided up all the “Traits of awesome peopleness” so we’re evenly matched, but split. She’s more patient than I am, but I’m more outgoing. She’s short, I’m tall. She’s an amazingly talented artist. She’s objectively gorgeous, and I’m… subjectively gorgeous? We’re moving to a new city together shortly, and I have concerns. I just don’t know how to deal with the way people react to her. I don’t know how to gracefully be “the other sister” when guys at bars approach me to ask for her number. Or how, when I go out, I can go all day without talking to anyone, but when we go grocery shopping together, people are always stopping and talking to her. Or when some dude is hitting on her, and I’m just standing there like a lump that will totally not cry.
Now, this is not anything to do with HER, more how people react to her, and it’s not her fault, but the result is that we hang out best in our living room, watching TV. It’s just not how I want to spend time in a new city. I guess my question is, What to do? Obviously, this has spilled over into other parts of our lives, and we’ve had talks where our perception of the other person’s strengths has made us each jealous and insecure. I just… I want to enjoy my sister and not resent her for something she can’t control.
Hello Kitty,
Option #1 is to do the opposite of what you think you want to do and move somewhere else, away from your sister instead of with her. I hear Pittsburgh is prettier than one might expect, and Seattle is good if you like your folks friendly and your shoes flat. Or go abroad! Go to Melbourne, to Mozambique, to Morocco. The operative word is go.
I know, you’re already shaking your head, but bear with me for a second. Having a sister, even the best sister in the world, is hard. Mother Teresa probably had a sister, right? You think that Aunt Teresa lived in Calcutta alongside Mother Teresa, nodding and smiling at all the praise MT received, and didn’t go crazy enough to brain someone with a pickaxe? No way. If AT had managed that, she would have earned the sainthood before MT did.
Sisters are mirrors: useful in their place but also tempting, and dangerous, to become obsessed with. The worst part about mirrors is that we assume that they have no agenda, that what we see in them is the unvarnished truth. When you say your sister is “objectively gorgeous” whereas you are “… subjectively gorgeous?” with a question mark, and when you say that she is “ an amazingly talented artist” and then leave your side of that see-saw empty, to imply that you’re not as good at anything as she is at art, your melancholy wafts through the page. You think you’re telling me My sister is great . What you’re actually telling me is I am sad, and being around my sister either doesn’t help or makes the sad-rain fall even harder.
Fact: You love your sister. Fact: When she’s nearby, you compare yourself to her. Fact: The patterns we develop in childhood, such as comparing ourselves unfavorably to our siblings, are harder to escape than cat videos on the Internets. If you want to go with Option #2, which is to continue with your plan and move with your sister to a new city, understand that that will, perversely, be the more challenging choice. It will take hard work, and maybe therapy, and then more hard work, to figure out how to be happy, because Option #2 involves breaking a very ingrained habit and acknowledging the complexity of your feelings towards your sister.
She’s great and you love her. At the same time, you are—perhaps occasionally, but often enough for it to register—jealous and resentful. Love and resentment, and admiration and jealousy, often come as matched sets. Girls are trained to suppress our negative emotions, lest we appear whiny or bitter, i.e., unattractive to dudes. But negative emotions are part of the package. They are real and, as you are discovering, impossible to pretend away. What would happen if you admitted that they exist? What if, instead of pretending you didn’t mind when dudes hit on her in bars and ignore you, you tell her later that it bummed you out? What if instead of trying to balance all your sister’s attributes on one side of the scale and yours on the others, you admitted that life isn’t fair and that the only way to stop feeling like you’re losing is to stop keeping score? Or, even, to stop playing altogether?
In your letter, you don’t interrogate your statements/conclusions about your sister; you present them as true, self-evident. I’m not saying you’re wrong. Maybe you’re right! But I think you’re not the best mirror for your sister right now, and she’s not the best mirror for you. Even if your sister is great in lots of ways, that doesn’t mean she has to be great to be around. Not for this current iteration of you. Right now it sounds like you need to breathe, and regardless of how awesome Sister is, when she’s around, she hogs the oxygen. She might not mean to; she might even wish she didn’t. That doesn’t really matter, though. When you’re drowning, you need air, not excuses. I say go with Option #1. Give yourself the freedom and permission you need to, at last, get your own room.
*
Illustrator: Liana Finck’s work has appeared in The New Yorker , Lilith, Tablet, and The Forward. Her first graphic novel is called A Bintel Brief . Her webcomic, Diary of a Shadow, can be read on her website .
About Author
by Aunt Acid
The role of Aunt Acid is played by Brooklyn-based know-it-all Ester Bloom . Follow her @shorterstory .
As someone with an "objectively gorgeous" and supremely gifted sister who is constantly making waves and leave *impressions* everywhere she goes, I can't recommend Option #1 strongly enough. I, too, love my sister to the moon and back, and she is my best friend, but everything has been better since I moved away. For both me *and* her. I have no doubts that you are also incredible – and for me, it was a lot easier to find that out about myself when my life wasn't centered around my sister anymore.
I adore my sister, but we are both jealous of each other for different things we are and different things we can do, and we are much better for each other when we get together every few months for long dinner dates and helpful talks about our lives.
It does not help that she is my mother's favorite, simply because the things she wants to do with her life are things my mother thinks she OUGHT to do with her life. Me, not so much. That's hard on my sister, too, that dynamic, but our opposing positions in the problem make it very hard to talk about family.
She's starting med school this week. I'm going to miss her so much. She's not going to have a lot of time for long conversations for oh, about forever, now.
I read this comment without, er, noticing it was you, and thought WOW we have a lot in common. (And then I saw it was you and it ALL MADE SENSE.)
Oy, this letter resonated with me. I'm the older sibling (by a 6 year margin with my sister), and my sister is the one that does the comparing–and just reading this and knowing that she does this comparing with me in the 'better than me' slot just hurts my heart. She's been doing it for her whole life (my mom enables it, telling me to let her believe certain things of me or that we can share clothes when we can't–there are body image issues there, as well). It just makes me sad. As we get older she's getting better about it, but sometimes she says/does things and I try so hard to discourage it, but it's a learned-over-decades behavior, I'm not even sure I can do much to help, I just need to wait until she can see it for herself. It was a lot worse in her teens, and it's becoming less pronounced, so hopefully with time she can find a way to stop comparing.
Oh man. I have 3 sisters. Yeeeeeeeeeah. I get along best with my brother.
Never been more thankful for my polar opposite baby brother, who is several states away for the foreseeable future. :(
Similar. I think some of my brother's opposite-ness is inherent: he is more of an extrovert, naturally more interested in (and gifted at!) athletics, more laid-back, funnier, etc. At the same time, though, I think we both leaned into those inherent differences from an early age. I was the smartypants, so rather than try to compete, he focused more on sports (since he was fine with his B-average, something I could never handle).
If I were myself but had an older sister like me, I'd go crazy too. I'm lucky that my brother is way more chill and could *decide* not to compete.
Oh hello, are you me? That's an incredibly similar dynamic to the one my brother and I have. It works!
This is not the first time I've suspected that you and I are actually the same person.
Same here.
The Toast: Bringing People Together Who Are Actually The Same People (catchy!)
I could have written this exact comment.
Though, in our case, it doesn't stop OTHER people from comparing us.
I agree with a lot of AA's insights, especially that the LW is downplaying her own presence in the letter. I doooo have some questions about this part:
"What if, instead of pretending you didn’t mind when dudes hit on her in bars and ignore you, you tell her later that it bummed you out? What if instead of trying to balance all your sister’s attributes on one side of the scale and yours on the others, you admitted that life isn’t fair and that the only way to stop feeling like you’re losing is to stop keeping score? Or, even, to stop playing altogether?"
I don't have a sister, but as an unbeautiful person with a terminal case of Beautiful Friends, I have done the thing where I'm honest where they ask me why I got so quiet when we were out together. In my experience, said friends don't know what the hell to say to you because they are great friends and they care about you but they can't help the fact that they're hot and you're invisible. They feel guilty you're upset, but there's also a resentment that you've made them feel guilty when they're just kind of existing and getting attention that they often aren't even seeking. It ends with them awkwardly telling you that you're amazing and some boy is going to be so lucky one day yada yada yada, because what else are they going to say? Then YOU feel bad for making THEM uncomfortable.
As far as not keeping score: say you're very bad at basketball. You're playing one-on-one with a friend who's very good at basketball. You're playing a friendly game, not even keeping track of the points really, but it eventually becomes clear to you that your friend is scoring again and again. You simply cannot score. Eventually you might get better at basketball if you keep playing. You might score sometime. But you start getting annoyed that your friend gets basket after basket, adding insult to injury. You aren't keeping track exactly, but it is so obvious she's winning, you'd have to be blind not to see it. The thing is, you are both doomed to play basketball forever! You don't really like playing against each other! This was supposed to be fun! She's enjoying herself but getting a little tired maybe, and you would like to go do anything else. Maybe if you score once you'll be allowed to go home, but you're not sure. But society is forcing you to play basketball and now this analogy is turning into Space Jam or something.
I guess what I'm saying is, I identified with the LW who's just trying to be a good friend and not feel like garbage, and while her worldview is definitely making her feel crummy about herself, I don't really get how you don't play the game without, I guess, giving up completely. And I would love to find out!
No one else is going to go there? Fine I will do it.
"This is our daughter Dottie. This is our other daughter – Dottie's sister"
I haven't been in quite this situation but moving away from my competitive family was great for me overall (I do miss them, but I don't miss the drama) and Kit ultimately triumphed only after getting traded.
"Kit ultimately triumphed only after getting traded." Oh boy do I ever want to get that tattooed on me!
Oh man, I SO do not agree with this advice, but I suspect my family situation is MUCH different from most people's.
Honestly, I think the letter writer should get therapy to deal with this jealousy, because a) comparing yourself to people all the time is exhausting, and b) your worth is not diminished by how many dudes hit on your sister. (And she probably does wish they didn't.)
DO THE HARD THING BECAUSE ONE DAY YOUR SISTER MIGHT BE THE ONLY FAMILY YOU HAVE LEFT, AND THAT DAY MIGHT COME SOONER THAN YOU THINK.
I agree with you! I think you two can live together, but LW, definitely consider therapy if you think it will help. I am in the same position as you (being the less-hit-on, less-creative, less outgoing etc sister), but have you ever considered she thinks just as highly of you? You might be surprised to see how much she admires you and hearing how awesome you are from her perspective might be good for your self esteem.
Also: don't forget to make your own friends. Go out without her or join a club or rekindle a friendship with a someone only YOU know who lives in the new city. Just because it's the two of you in this new place doesn't mean it always has to be the two of you, together.
Yeah, whether she moves away or not, the LW needs to make her own friends. That's a great point!
Yep. Spending too much time with one person can be pretty damaging on your relationship no matter WHAT the dynamic is, I think.
confession: I have been thankful that I do not have a younger, prettier a sister a not insignificant amount of times
Or potentially an identical twin who is in better shape and has her life together more than me. (You're not the only one to have those feelings!)
I have a 20-years-younger than me objectively gorgeous sister. She's just coming into her beauty as a teenager now, and I'm starting to get wrinkles.
I have a friend, about whom I have…complicated feelings, who has two older twin siblings, both gorgeous and accomplished (brother is a professional opera singer, sister is getting her doctorate at oxford), as well as a gorgeous and talented younger sister. My friend has some personal issues as a result of this fact.
My two younger sisters are thinking about moving back to our hometown and being roommates. I'm not sure to what extent they compare themselves to each other – I suspect they both compare themselves much more to me – but I really wish they would rethink that plan.
Living with your sibling(s) again must be somewhat akin to the development of communism: works better as a theory, and someone is going to end up like Trotsky.
Also likely to be quite a lot of red splashed about everywhere.
My brother lived with me for a couple months and it turned out pretty well! But we're very different people and there was an end in sight, so.
My brother is my roommate right now and it's…pretty okay! Sometimes I get annoyed because I feel like I end up doing more of the cleaning, but he also helps during the day walking my dog, and when I was exhausted after work yesterday, he took her out for her last walk of the night (aww). He's still applying for jobs and stuff (he just graduated), so it's nice to have someone home with her for at least part of the day, so she doesn't get lonely.
Also we trade off cooking dinner for each other, and we're doing a season 6 Buffy rewatch right now, which is SO MUCH FUN. I'm so happy he likes Buffy as much as I do haha.
But yeah, it's definitely not the same as living with a friend or not-relative. For some reason, I get SO MUCH MADDER at my brother, probably because he's family, and I feel like I'm allowed to (which is horrible, but there it is.)
Next year we're hoping to get a three bedroom with one of my other friends, so hopefully that'll even out the dynamic a little.
Been there. Been there so often that I am the mayor of there on Foursquare. My sister is pretty much objectively perfect: I do a pretty fair line in awesome myself, but I describe myself as the silver medalist in the family. She's goopily in love with her husband after 10 years of marriage, two adorable children (not that I am biased), she's a judge pro tem at 37, owns a house, plays an instrument, makes gorgeous quilts, is kind and reliable and amazing, etc. bloody etc. Whereas I am aromantic asexual and have just been laid off for the second time.
We did live together for a bit when I was in grad school and she was studying for the bar, and it went fine, except that she kept babbling law at me.
Aaaaagh, this letter is bringing up some feelings. I had a sister who was a year younger than me, and she could have written a letter very like this, I think. She died a little more than a year ago (liver cancer), and one of the hardest parts of her death for me is that I know she was "keeping score" in this way for much of her life, and I hate that I ever made her feel like she was somehow inferior to me, because she wasn't at all.
I'm very sorry for your loss. I'm sure you were a great sister to her.
*hugs* (if that's appropriate and you would take them from a stranger on the internet). I'm so sorry.
I love this advice! I think being close to your family is great, and a wonderful part of being an adult, but when you're young, it's the age appropriate time to spread your wings and create an identity that is separate from your family (adored or not). I started cringing when I read the part about dividing up the traits…I see this happen with siblings all the time and it's not a good thing! You are you, she is her, and you don't have to choose what is left over to own. You get to pick from the fully stocked variety of character traits. It's not a zero sum game when it comes to personality. You can gorgeous and creative in your own right, but you're going to need some distance to coax that person out of where she is hiding. There will be time to live close later, when you are more confident about your identity.
This wasn't written about in the letter, but I'm wondering how LW's sister acts when dudes hit on her at bars? Because I've been the subjectively-gorgeous hanger-on to the objectively-gorgeous friend, and one of the things that helps dispel jealousy is for the objectively-gorgeous one to NOT RESPOND. Like, "I was in the middle of a conversation" or "I'm catching up with a friend I haven't seen in a while" and turning away from the would-be suitor. Sisters before misters.
Alternately, you could just not go to bars with your sister.
This makes me so sad! I love my sister and we are very good friends and I would totally live with her if she didn't have that pesky husband. We've never been super competitive, perhaps because we're five years apart and excel at different things? And also neither of us are gorgeous attention-getters.
So I disagree with Aunt Acid's advice and prefer that of the above commenters. Make separate friends, build separate interests, but tell your sister how you feel so that when you are together, she can say to the random dudes "Sorry, but I'm with my sister right now and not interested"
I'm so glad I have brothers, and therefore I am the privileged sister by default. And I've spent years feeling awful that I really was the privileged sister — clearly the favorite, partly because I wanted to please folks more than they did and worked my ass off to do so, partly because I was the oldest and the only girl and therefore stood out.
One of my brothers moved out of state for college, and that really helped him bloom. My other brother waited too long and crashed and burned when he finally tried to branch out. Go while the going is good. You're worth it, but you have to be the one to bet it all on yourself.
I am writing from the perspective of someone who has lived apart from her much loved, totally awesome sister for over 40 years. I suggest option 2. Due to different career opportunities, my sister and I are separated by 400 miles, and as far as day-to-day life goes, it may as well be 4000 miles. As we have gone through various stages and roles in life, from engaging in careers to caring for babies to caring for our aging parents, nothing would have meant more to me than sharing physical space with her. We email, text, and talk almost daily, but I would love to have her physical presence in my life as well. She feels the same.
When we were teenagers, I confessed to my sister that I coveted her perfectly straight nose. She laughed and told me that she sat in movies, pushing the tip of her nose up, hoping to get what she thought was my irresistibly cute turned-up nose. A classic case of us both wanting something just because we didn't have it, even though both of our noses were perfectly fine for our faces. My sister is brilliant, cute, perky, energetic, and many other things I am not. I have many qualities she does not have, and we share some strengths and weaknesses. Like our noses, they define who we are.
Your insecurities about your perceived (real or imagined) shortcomings compared to your sister's (real or imagined) strengths aren't going to vanish if you move away from your sister. It would be possible that you could end up telling yourself that your sister is so awesome that you had move away from her to escape it. Your new friends in the new city will also have qualities that you wish you did, and you'll be back to making comparisons.
What you need to learn to do is stop the comparisons. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The only person you should compare yourself to is the best version of yourself. It may require a few visits to a therapist to set you on that track, or you may master it yourself, but it's what we all must learn to do, whether we are blessed with multiple fabulous siblings, the shining star in the family, or an only child of only children.
Agreed, so much. I think that once you get into the destructive habit of comparing yourself to others as though everything is a zero-sum game, it is very, very difficult to stop. Moving away from her sister might prevent LW from comparing herself to her sibling, but perhaps those comparisons will simply shift to another person. In short, I hope the LW learns to embrace all the great, not-so-great, weird, funny, delightful things about herself, because life is just too short to do otherwise.
Yes. I'm an only child, but I do the comparisons with my friends anyway (I'm getting better at not doing it on most fronts, at least), and being apart from them made no difference–actually, it made it worse. I was abroad for a year and a half, and when you're far away but keeping in touch, you hear about the milestones but not all the little bullshit that makes up life. It meant that I was constantly thinking "UGH L is starting med school and L2 PASSED THE BAR and O got a promotion at his big fancy job and D is PRESENTING A PAPER AT A CONFERENCE SHE HASN'T EVEN GRADUATED GRAD SCHOOL YET" instead of "hmmmm I am concerned about how much L2 is drinking and how this may affect her relationship with her fiance." Distance makes it easier to turn their lives into narratives that reprimand your own.
As an older sister, I highly recommend both the therapy and branching out. My sister comparatively fixated on me a lot, and it led to me being blamed for a lot of her struggles, which… soured things between us a little. It's hard to have healthy interactions when you can feel squished down resentment coming off someone in waves, resentment you are literally incapable of alleviating because it's towards who you are. Finding her own stuff and owning it and being away from me seems to have helped a lot, and it's made it easier for both of us to relax when we're together. I think she just needed to realize being different from me isn't a bad thing, and that everybody has their own less than stellar moments.
Apropos of nothing too much, except to say that here is Mother Teresa (on the right), and her sister Agatha. http://i0.wp.com/www.retronaut.com/wp-content/upl …
I have two younger sisters, who live in different cities far away and I wish so much, much, much that I could live near them (but not in the same house!). I think being able to live near family you love is such a gift, I guess I just don't agree that moving to a different city away from the sister is the best thing. I do absolutely agree the best thing is therapy though. I genuinely couldn't care less that my two sisters can share smaller clothes and I wear bigger different clothes or that they may be perceived by others as "better" than me so it's possible to live in that reality and not have it be painful, but the real trick in making it work is addressing how you create the thoughts in your head that are hurting you and learning how to mend that process rather than be a victim of it. When you do fall in love with yourself how you "think" the external world is reacting to you, how you see yourself relative to others, it all just changes and everything just opens up…
I have a younger, much more gorgeous sister, and we live together, and it is totally fantastic. BUT only because we have had plenty of time apart to become our own people, with our own friends and interests and identities, I think. Also, we both have boyfriends (mine lives with us), so that probably helps the jealousy that could come up around men, and also I am pretty secure in my job and career and rest of my life. I'm definitely the *big sister* – I take care of things and am more together, which I think gives me a role that feels good for me.
LW, if you are going to move somewhere with your sister, my advice is to GO OUT WITHOUT HER. A LOT. Find interests and clubs and groups of people that are yours alone, where people will get to know you qua you, and not qua your sister – not as the less good looking half of a pair. This will allow you to bloom as yourself, and the jealousy you feel – the WANTING something other than yourself – will likely fade some. If you think you cannot do this, I don't think you should move with her. If you are so attached to being half of that pair that you can't imagine developing an identity without her, then you will just go on being sad about not being good enough forever.
LW, you are not actually a moon, only reflecting light. You are another star that is being eclipsed by one you think is brighter. Ugh, that analogy is gross, but I'm leaving it there anyway.
ETA: Your letter sounds like you are falling into a trap about people that I used to fall into: that everyone's strengths add up to 1. "She's taller, I'm smarter at math, she's got perkier boobs, my hair holds a better curl" etc. It's a total fallacy. Some people are luckier in the genetic and life draw – my best friend is taller, smarter, has perkier boobs, and a trust fund. It's just the WAY IT IS. And it's fine! We don't add up to 1, we add up to human. You just have to embrace your humanness, and stop doing all the accounting. That lesson alone is enough to make turning 30 the best thing that ever happened to me.
This is such a great post! Especially the "everyone's strength add up to 1" thing.
I've been living with my younger sister for a year now, and it's been mostly great, but I desperately want her to make her own friends. She's become very close with some of my close friends, which is great, but basically her only friends here are my friends and she gets a little angry/upset for a bit when I go to hang out with them by myself. It definitely makes me feel guilty, but I do it anyway because I'm afraid spending SO MUCH time together will be bad for us in the near future.
I think naturally jealousy comes into play because hello, sibling rivalry, but as adults if we can identify these feelings (i.e. jealous that dudes hit on your sister at bars) and try to curb them or make sure they don't happen (i.e. don't go to bars with your sister), things can work out!
Oh man, I could have written this letter. My two-years-older sister is The Most Beautiful Person in All the Land, and she's so funny and smart and great, and magnetic in a way I can't even describe, let alone try to emulate. There's obviously a lot of hero worship there, but she's a significant part of why I live on the opposite coast from where I grew up (the other one being that the Bay Area is the greatest place for me and while I'm sure I'll get out of here at some point, I hope it's not particularly soon). There's so much scorekeeping with sisters, especially sisters close enough in age to inhabit the same social circles. I do not have this issue with my younger sister, who is 13 and hands-down the coolest person in the family.
Ugh, yeah. Sister comparisons are so hurtful. And all the adults play into this. I was always the smart one, my sister was the pretty one. We hated each other so much during puberty, because we both were jealous of the other one’s label. Which is kind of absurd, isn’t it?
And while I love her very much, I’m still not over her being thinner and more fashionable or something. (Which I could be, I guess, at least the fashionable part, but I don’t really care that much when she’s not around as a comparison.) And, while I think she has learned during the years that she can be very smart and academically successful herself, she doesn’t seem completely over her issues with being “the less smart one”.
So it’s actually good that we live in different cities.
Feeling amazingly smug about being an only child right now…
I used to be friends with a pair of brothers who were like this. Both completely wonderful guys, but very different. I knew the younger one better, so I could see that a lot of what he did was to carve out a niche that was his own, because his brother was so smart & blah blah. Then one day I was hanging out with the elder brother and I saw a physical resemblence between the two for the first time & commented on it. Turns out *his* hangup was that his younger brother was the funny, pretty one. They both did a lot better when they'd left home and went their separate ways. The younger one got to be clever and the older one got to be pretty.
Hey all, LW herself here.
I'm reading all this while crying because of PMS but I wanted to say thanks for all your kind words! I went with option 2. It hasn't been the easiest, but I'm real happy with how it turned out – It had been almost 6 years since we'd gotten to spend time together between college and my few years overseas. Plus, she had a year until her bf got a job in DC, and as of today, she's got a job and is planning to move over there to be with him. So we basically had a year to get to spend real time together and I wouldn't have traded it for the world and all the gross bad stuff about myself it stirred up.
I AM in therapy, and it's been good. I clearly don't have any underlying self esteem issues I'm dealing with. Making friends on my own has been hard because almost everyone my age is getting on the married/baby train, but I've slowly got people who are objectively lovely.
I just… on a feminist level, maybe, I don't know why all the work I did to feel good about myself around my gorgeous friends never carried over to my sister. And for those of you with only brothers, why is it that I don't feel the same competition with my own brother (who is much more similar to me, and with much more potential)? Being a girl is the worst because of society, and all that.
Again, thanks for the advice and all the lovely words.