You may see them daily or weekly. However, if you are like me, you may instead go years without communicating aside from the occasional like on an Instagram photo or the annual “Happy Birthday!” post on your Facebook timeline. Regardless, once you are in the same room, you pick up right where you left off the last time you saw them. As your family convenes for a visit or a reunion, your long-lost best friends are thrust back into your life. If this sounds familiar, you have been blessed with an incredible gift: cousins.
The concept of a cousin is an interesting one. Cousins are just about the lowest-maintenance friends imaginable. While most other friends require constant, or at the very least frequent, communication to maintain a relationship, this agreement is virtually nonexistent between cousins. If you can talk, great! If not, I still love you. Think about how much less anxiety we would all feel if every person we cared about had this mentality. Cousins are friends destined for us from birth. Even though we can go years without seeing them, we get along so well upon reunion. The same people raised each of our parents, so it makes sense that cousins are so similar to one another.
While having friends at family functions certainly is a perk, this is by no means the best that cousins have to offer. You know they love you for the very essence of who you are. You must know they love you, because they have seen you at every stage of your life, most importantly: the awkward stage. My family doesn’t have a ton of cousin pictures from this era, but that sight does not fade from a memory. If they knew you then and are still excited to see you, keep them around. Age is no big deal between cousins. Whether you are four months, seven years, or twenty years apart, you are still forever connected. But, by far the greatest cousin perk is the shared past. There are countless family stories that no one outside the group would ever think are the least bit entertaining. These keep cousins laughing for hours. The number of inside jokes is infinite. If any of you ever did anything embarrassing, the others will never let it go.
Most importantly, though, you have a support system. When a beloved member of the family falls ill or passes, your group of cousins is your rock. They are the only ones who truly understand exactly what you are going through, and they will keep your head above the water. In life, we are given many choices. Our cousins were granted to us without choice, but whether or not we appreciate them and the gifts we have been given through them is a choice. By choosing to appreciate them, we are choosing happiness, love, and a feeling of being home, no matter how far away from a physical home we may be. In good times and in bad, they will be there for you. Maybe we were given cousins because our parents couldn’t handle us as siblings. While the past antics in my family certainly speak to the validity of this statement, I think we were given cousins to serve as eternal friends, forever secured by the strongest bond humans know: family.
