There’s a certain type of midlife sibling distance that has nothing to do with a fight, a falling-out, or a wronging — it’s the slow accumulation of decades spent being the one who was compared to the other, and the quiet self-protection of staying just far enough away that the comparison can no longer reach you

I have a sister. She’s three years younger than me. She lives about a forty-minute drive from our parents’ house in London. I live in Bangkok.

We have not had a fight. We have not had a falling-out. There is no specific incident I could point to that would explain why, at thirty-eight, I have a perfectly cordial but distinctly distant relationship with the person who shared a childhood with me.

If you asked me, on a phone call, when I last had a real conversation with my sister—the kind where we talked about something that mattered, in a tone that wasn’t logistical—I would have to think for a long time. I’d come up with something from probably six or seven years ago. We were at a wedding. We’d both had several drinks. We had, for about an hour on the dance floor and the smoking patio, a conversation that felt like the conversation two siblings might have if their distance hadn’t accumulated to the point ours has.

It was a great conversation. We have not, as far as I can recall, had another one like it since. We have, instead, had hundreds of perfectly civil text exchanges, dozens of pleasant family lunches, a few short visits where we caught up on the surfaces of each other’s lives. The civility has been complete. The closeness has been, in some structural way, missing.

I want to write about why this is, because I think there’s a particular kind of sibling distance that almost nobody talks about, and that, for the people inside it, is more painful than the more recognizable forms of family rupture.

What hasn’t happened

I want to be precise about what hasn’t caused the distance, because the absence of the usual culprits is part of what makes this kind of distance so hard to discuss.

We didn’t fight as adults. We’ve had small disagreements, of course, but nothing that produced any rupture. There has never been a moment of confrontation that we have to walk back from.

We don’t dislike each other. If you asked either of us, on the record, we would tell you we love each other. We would mean it. There is no buried hostility lurking under the cordiality. The cordiality is real cordiality, not a performance over hostility.

Neither of us has wronged the other. There’s no inheritance dispute. There’s no romantic situation. There’s no thing one of us did to the other that has festered. The relationship is unfreighted by any of the usual specific damage.

Our parents have not played us against each other in any obvious way. They have not been wildly favorable to one of us at the expense of the other, in any clear sense.

And yet. The distance is there. It is real. It is not improving. It is, I would say, the most quietly disappointing relationship in my adult life, and the disappointment is sharper precisely because there is no incident to point to. The distance arrived without a story. It is, in some way, just the texture of the relationship now.

What I think actually produced it

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I’ve come to believe that the distance between me and my sister has a specific structural cause, even if there’s no event to attach it to.

The cause is the comparison. We were compared to each other for our entire childhoods, and we’ve been being compared, in subtler ways, ever since.

I want to be careful here, because the comparison wasn’t done with any malice, and it wasn’t done in any particularly heavy-handed way. It was done in the way comparisons get done in ordinary families, which is mostly through small daily statements and observations that, individually, didn’t seem to mean anything.

“Daniel was always the one who could read at four. We didn’t have to teach him.”
“Your sister has always been the social one. Daniel’s a bit more solitary.”
“Daniel was so easy as a baby. Your sister—well, she was a different story.”
“Your sister’s so good with people. Daniel’s better with ideas.”

None of these sentences, individually, was a problem. They were the kind of casual characterization that every family does. They were, by the standards of how families talk, mild.

What I didn’t understand until I was probably thirty was the cumulative effect of being the recipient and the audience for these sentences for two decades. The cumulative effect was that my sister and I were, very early, slotted into roles that defined us in opposition to each other. I was one thing. She was the opposite. The architecture of our identities, in the family, was relational. Each of us was, partly, a description of what the other one wasn’t.

When you grow up like this, the sibling becomes, on some level, the lens through which your own qualities are visible. You are not just smart. You are smart-compared-to-her. She is not just social. She is social-compared-to-you. Every quality each of you has is bracketed by the other one’s relative position on the same dimension.

And here’s the thing. As long as that bracketing is in place, being in the same room as your sibling is a constant act of self-comparison. You can’t help it. You walk into the kitchen and the comparison machinery starts running. She says something, and you can feel the family ranking apparatus reassessing, in real time, who’s currently winning at what.

The comparison machinery doesn’t go away just because you’re an adult. It runs for both of you, in the family room, every time you’re together, on every dimension that was ever assigned. It runs whether you want it to or not. It runs whether anyone is making explicit comparisons or not, because the comparisons have been so deeply installed that you both, automatically, generate them yourselves.

The slow self-protection of distance

What I think happened, between me and my sister, is that we both, gradually and without ever discussing it, figured out that the comparison machinery couldn’t reach us when we weren’t in the same room.

If we don’t see each other often, the machinery rests. If our parents are talking to one of us about the other one, the absent sibling is being characterized in their absence, but the characterizations don’t have to be performed in real time, in front of both audiences, with both subjects available for ranking. The distance, in some structural way, mutes the comparison. The mutedness is restful. The restfulness is, I now believe, what we’ve both been quietly buying with our distance.

This is not, on either of our parts, a conscious choice. I don’t think my sister has, at any point, sat down and decided to stay away from me in order to protect herself from comparison. I don’t think I have, either. We have just, over time, found that the relationship runs more easily when we are not in close contact, and we have, gradually, optimized for the easier version of the relationship rather than the closer one.

Each individual decision in this direction has been small. She doesn’t move closer to me when she could. I don’t visit her when I could. We don’t initiate the long calls we could, in theory, have. We do not, in any of the dozens of small ways available to siblings who want to close distance, choose to close it. The non-choosing has, over fifteen years, produced the distance we now live in.

And the reason we don’t choose, I’m increasingly sure, is that we both know, on some level we don’t articulate, that closing the distance would reactivate the comparison. The closer we get, the more the family ranking apparatus has to do. The more it has to do, the more both of us experience ourselves as the person we were assigned to be in opposition to the other. We do not, in middle age, want to keep being those people. We want to be the more complete versions of ourselves that we have been, in our separate lives, slowly building.

Distance protects those more complete versions. Distance is, in some real sense, where each of us has been allowed to grow into a fuller human being than the family roles permitted. Closing the distance threatens to collapse us back into the original architecture. Both of us, I suspect, prefer not to risk it.

The cost of the protection

I want to be honest about the cost, because the protection is not free.

The cost is that I do not have a sister, in any meaningful adult sense. I have a person who happens to share my childhood. We have a kind of formal cordiality. We do not have, and almost certainly will not have, the kind of adult sibling friendship I see some of my friends having with theirs. The version where they call each other on the way home from work. The version where they confide in each other about their parents. The version where they show up, in the bigger moments of each other’s lives, in a way that goes beyond duty.

That version is not available to my sister and me. Not because of anything we’ve done. Because of the architecture of how we were placed, decades ago, in opposition to each other, and the slow work of self-protection that placement has produced.

I find this sad, in a particular way that doesn’t have a clean expression. It’s not the kind of sadness you can do anything obvious about. It’s not the kind that responds to a heart-to-heart conversation, because the issue isn’t anything that can be cleared up with a conversation. It’s the kind that just sits in the background of your adult life, a quiet ongoing absence, not bad enough to address but not okay enough to forget.

I know my friends with similar distances feel something like this too. I’ve talked to a few of them about it, in cautious tones, the way you raise a topic you suspect might be more common than people admit. The conversations always go the same way. The friend recognizes what I’m describing immediately. The friend has the same low-grade ongoing absence in their own life. The friend has, also, no particular plan to address it. We agree, in these conversations, that this is just how it is now, and we move on to talking about something else.

What I haven’t tried, and might

I want to end on something tentative, because I don’t have a clean resolution to offer.

The thing I haven’t tried is talking to my sister directly about what I’ve described in this article. I have not, in any explicit way, told her that I think the comparison machinery of our childhood is the actual cause of our adult distance, or that I think we’ve both been quietly choosing distance as a form of self-protection. I have not asked her if she’d like to see if there’s a version of our relationship that doesn’t require either of us to perform the original family roles.

I haven’t tried it because I’m not sure she would want to have that conversation. I’m not sure I would, if she initiated it. The conversation, if we had it, would be uncomfortable. It would require both of us to acknowledge things we have spent a long time agreeing not to acknowledge. It would, possibly, not produce any change. We might have the conversation and then continue to live, geographically and emotionally, exactly as far apart as we always have.

But I’m in my late thirties, and she’s in her mid-thirties, and we have, if we’re lucky, somewhere between fifty and sixty more years of being siblings ahead of us. The distance, if we don’t address it, is going to keep accumulating. It is going to mean that when our parents die—an event that, statistically, will happen in the next ten to twenty years—we will be doing it without each other. The version of ourselves we’ll be in that moment will be the version that has been, by then, fifty years away from each other rather than thirty-eight.

That’s a sobering thought. It is, slowly, becoming the thought that might, eventually, push me to try.

I haven’t tried yet. I’m writing this article, in part, as a kind of preparatory thinking. The article is the rehearsal. The conversation, if I have it, will come later. Or maybe never. Or maybe she’ll read this article, recognize what I’m describing, and start the conversation herself.

That last possibility is one I find both terrifying and quietly hopeful. It is, I suppose, the closest thing to an ending I can offer this particular reflection.

If you’re reading this and you have your own sibling distance that doesn’t have a story attached to it, I want you to know that you’re not alone, and that the lack of a story doesn’t mean there isn’t a real cause. The cause is usually structural rather than incidental. Knowing that, I think, is the first step toward deciding whether you want to do anything about it.

I’m still deciding.