Dear Eric: I’m 70, and my 68-year-old sister has ghosted me over politics. After the 2024 election, she stopped responding to me – no birthday or Christmas cards, no phone calls, no emails.
She also did this in 2016 – ghosting my mother (82 at the time) and me for more than two years.
I finally wrote her a letter and told her that I loved her the way she was, not the way I wanted her to be. Could she do the same? No response. I wrote to her about a major injury I had requiring surgery. No response.
I have a very full life. My first wife died of leukemia after a 40-year marriage. I am three years into a relationship and marriage to a wonderful second wife. I have sons and grandkids and numerous friends. While I would love to have a relationship with my sister and feel melancholy about it, I am fed up and want to put my energy into my loving family and friends. Any suggestions on how to manage and/or accept this?
– Severed Sibling
Dear Sibling: Yours is, unfortunately, not an uncommon problem, as you’ll see from the second letter today, which also touches on a political divide.
On a human-to-human level, there must be space for empathy, for communication beyond headlines, for love in times of need that focuses on the places where you meet, rather than the places where you diverge. This is sometimes easier said than done. All politics is personal. And in a time when rhetoric more frequently stands in for political thought, it becomes harder to separate the human from what they espouse.
Itap not clear from your letter if the ghosting came as a result of a specific series of disagreements, arguments, posts, or actions. And those tend to be important clues, because a relationship never breaks where it breaks; it starts to fracture much earlier and in tinier ways.
However, because it sounds like you’ve done the work to try to reach beyond this fracture, and even to try to heal it, the work in front of you now is mourning the relationship that you had. Your sister has made her boundary clear – even though ghosting is rarely, if ever, the most effective form of communication. Acknowledge, in thought or even in a journal, that you’re not getting what you want. You can even write down the things that you’ll miss. If you process it like grief, the frustration and anger you feel will abate. Anger often tells us, “this is for you to fix.” The hard lesson of grief is that there is nothing to fix. The task is to incorporate this new reality into the path going forward.
Dear Eric: I have a friend of 50 years whom I love dearly. We have shared many of life’s challenges and been very supportive of each other. However, we couldn’t be more different when it comes to our views on politics. We agreed about 30 years ago that we just wouldn’t talk about politics because that is not what our friendship is based on.
We have honored that agreement until recently. We met for lunch and after the usual pleasantries, my friend began complaining about current national/international politics. I made a comment that I didn’t agree with her views and said we should change the subject. She kept talking about politics. The lunch ended on a somewhat unpleasant note.
I don’t want to end our long friendship, but I also don’t want to argue politics with her when we see each other. I thought I had made it clear at our last lunch that I didn’t want to talk politics, but she persisted. What else can I do?
– Political Silence
Dear Silence: Before the next lunch ask your friend if you can talk about what happened previously. Go in with curiosity, with the goal being understanding the why behind her actions. It may be that she was too frustrated to focus on anything else on that particular day and you were the person in front of her. Or it may be that something has changed in her thinking and your position is something she can’t abide. What you’re listening for is information about her thinking beyond the political issue.
This isn’t to say that the issue isn’t important. Curiosity on both sides rests on the idea that you know itap important to her and she knows your political opinions are important to you. But the subject of the conversation is your friendship. And so, the question underneath the question is, has our friendship changed? Your frustration about her not honoring the agreement you made 30 years ago is on the surface about political disagreement and respect, but underneath itap about a shared understanding of how your friendship works.
(Send questions to R. Eric Thomas at eric@askingeric.com or P.O. Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)
