How a brother-in-law became my best friend.
Friends, it is often said, are the family you choose. But sometimes, it goes the other way.
I met my brother-in-law, Rob, more than 20 years ago, when I was dating my now-wife and he was engaged to her sister. We were soon bumping into each other at family gatherings, and despite some slight differences, we bonded over a shared set of interests (’80s alternative music, John le Carré novels, soccer) and the fact that we were both outsiders navigating a family that was not our own.
Once we were official brothers-in-law, those gatherings became more frequent, and Rob’s presence was always an underlying draw, as we’d escape from the house to shoot hoops after Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas lunch. Our bond deepened when he and his wife, Heather, moved from Boston to the Catskills a few years later to open a restaurant, and my wife and I bought a small house nearby. I found myself helping out with their new business most weekends, even pitching in to cook when he was in a jam.
Neither that restaurant, nor that house, proved lasting, but what has endured is our friendship, one that reaches beyond easy familiarity and proximity at holidays. Lately, amid the widespread reports of a loneliness epidemic — particularly among men — I’ve been newly grateful for Rob, and reminded of a somewhat overlooked idea: Among your pool of in-laws you may find a new best friend, hiding in plain sight.
Out of the research that exists about family relationships, in-laws tend to receive scant attention — and brothers-in-law are practically invisible. (One of the few studies I could find — from Denmark — concluded that having a brother-in-law with a criminal record made one slightly more likely to gain a criminal record as well.)
But in-laws are interesting. In a big-picture evolutionary sense, “affines,” as in-laws are called among researchers, don’t seem all that different from blood relations. As one team of anthropologists noted, “people treat affines as biological kin rather than unrelated friends.” One reason is that despite not being genetically linked, they tend to have, like any family member, “a common genetic interest in future generations.”
Gretchen Perry, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, said the connection might explain the altruistic bent Rob and I seemed to have toward each other, inside or outside of a restaurant kitchen.