Family is a complex and confounding subject that is only becoming more complex and confounding. Maybe that’s our fault and maybe there’s a good reason for it.

By definition, family is considered to be a union of marriage, blood or adoption. But as humans, it is a pesky condition of ours to label things and depend on identity and labels to classify us and help us find belonging. Perhaps it’s to our detriment to feel the need to fit things into such tidy little boxes.

While teaching a college English class once, I tried to give an example of connotative and denotative language, and here is the example I used: any male who contributes biologically to the creation of a child can be a father (denotative), but it takes someone special to be a dad (connotative).

The point is that a person doesn’t have to be a biological parent to be an effective parent. And I would argue, as well, that one doesn’t always have to fit the confines of “marriage, blood or adoption” to feel a family connection. Oftentimes, we stretch the term “family” to encompass the bonds of like-minded people. We have our sports team families, our work families, our church families.

Let’s take this to a more direct place.

What about when you find out you have family you never knew about? During the pandemic, my wife and I thought it would be fun to purchase DNA testing kits. They’re easy to use, and when you get the results, one of the most fun things to do is learn about your heritage. I discovered that my origins are, not surprisingly, rooted in Northwestern Europe with heavy Irish and Germanic genes. Yet, I don’t have any sense of inherent loyalty to St. Patrick’s Day. I also discovered, to my surprise but not surprisingly, that I’m about a tenth of a percent African. But that’s where civilization began, right?

Another feature of these DNA tests is that one can begin to link family trees with other DNA relatives, so now I have this growing list of relatives, some of them closer than others, and most of them I do not know. I had one surprise when I found out that someone I had befriended just a few years ago was actually a distant cousin. Yet, I don’t feel more of a family bond because of my DNA connection. Should I?

I also got a message from a woman who lives less than an hour away from me, whom I’d never met before that identified as a relative. After exchanging a few messages, she was convinced that one of my great uncles was her grandfather, and to my surprise when she showed me a picture of her father, I could see very similar physical attributes of my own dad. We spent some time trying to piece it together, only to arrive at the conclusion that some hanky-panky happened somewhere up our family trees.

And to no one’s surprise, this is happening more every day. People are learning family secrets that were buried decades ago, long before the possibility of finding the truth through DNA existed. It’s curious to imagine how people deal with these revelations.

I haven’t rushed out to embrace the new relatives I found. They’re “family,” but they are not “family.” As it happens, my wife, who was adopted at birth had questions of her own, and the answers she got were very different than the story the adoption agency had to tell. With some digging, she was able to track down some of her “family,” but like me, she couldn’t care less to connect with them because they were not the family that raised her, her real family, the ones who cared for her and gave her the life she has today.

Some people have blood relations that they don’t consider family for whatever reasons. We have all heard someone say “he/she is like a brother/sister to me.” Undoubtedly bonds of love, circumstance and obligation can make people feel truly related. And what about family members that we don’t like because they’ve done something bad to us? Does someone get a free pass because they share our DNA?

The American family structure has changed in the past 50 years. The number of married adults over 18 has decreased more than 20% since 1960, there are more blended marriages than ever before, as well as more same-sex marriages, which increased after it became legal in 2015. Many younger, married couples have chosen not to have children, and hence family size is decreasing. All of these things affect the family unit as we have come to define it.

Coincidentally, all humans share 99% of their genome, and while time has convoluted it, we can all trace our ancestry back to the same genes. So, in essence, the human race is one big family, although we rarely tend to look at it this way. Genetically, we are all basically the same, only a tiny amount of our DNA really makes us unique.

I say all of this to point out that “family” is as much a social construct as it is a genetic or even a legal connection. However, regardless of how we classify our families, connection is most important of all. We need a family, whether it’s one of our destiny or one of our choosing because we all need a sense of belonging, and that is what family does for us.