What even is it?

Who gets to call their relationship "estranged"?

I was estranged from my father from the time my birth in 1981 until his death in 2006. We were in complete communication cutoff that entire time, except for one three-day period when I was 20 years old and I traveled to his city to meet him for the first and last time. I stayed in a hotel, but otherwise we spent all day together each of those three days. After that meeting in December 2001, he sent me a birthday card and a handful of emails, communication which petered out after I stopped replying. By 2003, we were out of touch again and didn’t communicate further before his death. 

This essay is not going to delve into the details of that story: I’m saving a deep-dive for a future essay. But I share that short summary (which I’m super-proud of since brevity is NOT my forte) because I want to raise a larger conversation about estrangement. 

Namely: What is estrangement? How, exactly, do we define it?

Karl Pillemer, whose research indicates that 27% of Americans are estranged from a family member, defined estrangement very narrowly for the purposes of his estrangement studies as “a situation in which a family member has cut off contact entirely from one or more of their relatives.” 

But many people who count themselves as estranged don’t fit Pillemer’s definition. Some of them have limited interaction with family members, but not zero interaction. Some of them count themselves as estranged because they no longer have meaningful conversations with family members, sticking instead to narrow small talk. Some people qualify this by calling it “emotional estrangement.” Some people call it plain old estrangement. And some just call it “Thanksgiving dinner.” 

Sometimes people don’t call it estrangement because the entire history of the relationship has been distant. For others, the distance feels like a huge shift that they do characterize as estrangement because it contrasts so much with an earlier incarnation of the relationship in which the two family members were close. (Picture siblings who grew up together, played together, maybe even shared a room, who have a falling out over end-of-life care for their parent.) 

If you spend any time in Facebook groups or Reddit threads dedicated to estrangement, you will see the abbreviations “LC” and “VLC” which just stand for “low contact” and “very low contact.” If you like those terms, by all means, use them. People who are “LC” or “VLC” are warmly welcomed into those online groups (which I’ll talk about at length in future essays). 

Since this is still early days for “Estranged,” I just wanted to say in case it’s not obvious: all are welcome here.

You can be interested in this topic for your own reasons, or you can self-identify as estranged, or not! Anyone who is “living on the edges of estrangement,” as a friend put it the other day, is no less entitled to feel the strain and stress that comes with estrangement. 

One reason I’m encouraging you to self-identify is because I don’t claim to decide for everybody the one, true definition of “estrangement.” I don’t even know what that would be!

But there’s a second reason I’m encouraging you to self-identify: it’s for you. If you have a very difficult relationship with a parent, for example, but you still see that parent, even regularly, some people may not define your relationship as “estranged.” Maybe you’re walking around, thinking to yourself, “It’s complicated.”

Alternatively, maybe you had no relationships with a parent to begin with. “Is it really an estrangement if I never knew them in the first place?”

That’s what I used to think about my own father. “Is it really estrangement?” In a way, my story about my father fits Pillemer’s “textbook” definition of estrangement because we had almost no contact while he was alive. In another way, though, it doesn’t fit at all, since the dictionary definition of “estranged” is “having lost former closeness and affection.”  Can I claim to be “estranged” from a person with whom I was never close? 

I have decided, yes, I can. I do claim the term “estrangement” and apply it to my relationship with my father. 

Maybe some other people would not define our relationship that way. But when I did begin to call it “estrangement,” it gave me a word to Google. I could find academic research, online forums, and therapists, who all used this word to define and understand this family phenomenon. I have found that helpful. So, if you hate labels, don’t use it. If it doesn’t feel appropriate, don’t use it. But if you’re on the fence, maybe try it on? 

I know this sounds silly, but what I’m saying is that you don’t have to be doing estrangement “perfectly.” There’s no such thing. All we have are our best instincts and reasoning about how to navigate a difficult, often painful, relationship. 

I use the word “estrangement” so that we can find each other. 

What do you think? Comment and let me know. 

- Maggie