The Rules of Love, 3rd Edition

RULE 82

Make the effort

It’s all very well making time for your close family relationships, but it’s important to work at new family relationships too, because they don’t just make themselves.

I was very struck by a conversation I had many years ago with a woman I worked with. She told me that she had a brother 15 years younger than her, and by the time he started at school, she had left home. She always regretted that she hadn’t made more effort to forge a relationship with him because now they were both adults she felt she barely knew him, and this made her sad.

Having a large and disparate family myself, I can empathize with this entirely. It’s easy to develop a bond with, say, siblings who are close in age. No matter where your lives take ...