Recently, the Indian government opposed the queer community’s demand for the legal recognition of same-sex marriages in the Supreme Court. According to the government in power, families only consist of a biological female, a biological male, and the children born out of their “union” (I am assuming they are referring to sex here ). The government thinks that the recognition of same-sex marriage will completely upend the socio-religious structure of marriage (whatever that means) in India. Of course, this makes complete sense if you ignore the fact that many legally-recognized families consist of single fathers and single mothers. This sounds like a completely rational response if you are willing to overlook the fact that adoptive families include children not born out of the “union” of the father and the mother. The socio-religious fabric of our country is totally under threat if you ignore the various customs and myths where queer marriages, polygamy, and even marrying trees have been accepted for centuries. For a party and a society that likes to throw around phrases like “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” — the world is one family — it sure has an ironic view of what families can be.

But let’s leave these little details aside. As a mental health counsellor this debate was interesting to me not because of the government’s reply, but because of the question itself:

What is a family?

Is a family only a collection of habitual rules followed by society? Is it just a convenient social unit tailor-made for sexual reproduction — a factory for producing the next generation? Or is there something more to it?

What about the experience of being in a family? What about the roots of feeling like family? What about the actual relationships in a family? In other words, what about the Psychological essence of a family?

The Psychology of Family

The family is crucial for the development and nourishment of our minds. It fulfills certain primary psychological needs. It creates the space for our minds to learn and discover itself. And precisely because of these core functions, biology, or a certain “blood and sperm” conception of the family, is not only lacking but is harmful to our society.

So what makes a family? Let’s find out:

1. Attachment

Human beings are born incomplete. Infants can barely lift their heads, let alone sit or walk around. They are unable to protect themselves. They cannot clean themselves or even hide and stay silent.

We need someone to care of us every day, all the time, or we die. Thus, our minds have an innate system that not only seeks out other human beings but also latches on to special individuals who (hopefully) love us and we love them back. We call this attachment. It not only helps us protect and feed ourselves but also nourishes us psychologically.

In now-famous studies conducted in Romania and Mexico, orphans who received adequate food, shelter, and resources, but were not provided with human contact or warmth, experienced long-lasting psychological deficits in life, and even had smaller brains compared to other individuals. Without significant attachments our mind remains emotionally emaciated just like without food our body wastes away. The role of the family is to provide such attachments to individuals. This is, of course, true for kids both born out of the “union” of a biological male and female or adopted without such “unions”. But it is also true for adult friendships and romantic relationships.

As adults, we might no longer need caregivers to clothe, protect, and feed us ( this seems to be questionable in the Indian context). But we still need emotional nurturance from others. And that is precisely why it is shocking that retired judges, our national government, and self-appointed guardians of religion are more obsessed with genitals rather than attachment in their definition of a family.

2. Safety

Your family should make you feel safe — both emotionally and physically. Unfortunately, I am acutely aware that this is not true for a significant number of people. That is precisely why families need to be much more than biology and reproduction.

When families are reduced to reproductive lineages, societal duties, and traditional norms safety becomes a secondary concern that can be easily sacrificed. Individuals in those families are made to believe that the pressure to conform, to “save” the honour of your family, is worth more than the health and security of all the individuals who actually make up that family. In its extreme manifestations, individuals are even killed when they marry for love instead of tradition. These are ironically labelled “honour killings”. This idea of family feels similar to cutting off your hand to improve your handwriting.

Child sexual abuse or child abuse in general is more common within families than most people think. About 1 billion children around the world have experienced various kinds of neglect and abuse according to the World Health Organisation. What often stays within these children is not just the experience of abuse but also the sense of abandonment, betrayal, and guilt when their families prioritise social respect over their safety and truth. Similarly, abuse within marriages carries a similar sense of conflict where one is forced to suffer grave, often life-threatening violence and abuse, while the world around them either normalizes it as love or blames them for it. As a therapist, I have witnessed how the wounds created by familial abuse can fester for decades and impact multiple lives, with or without conscious awareness.

Without the experience of safety, families can resemble prisons rather than idyllic pastures of homeliness. But unlike real prisons, people are not bound by material walls here. Instead, they are bound by relationships that can haunt them throughout space and time.

3. Care

According to a popular story, Margaret Mead, one of the most famous anthropologists ever, believed that the healing of a broken bone was the first sign of civilization. This was because most animals die in the wild if they fracture their femur. However, if a broken leg gets the resources and time to heal from a fracture, it is a sign that people around that individual care enough to nurse them when they could not be a productive member of the group. Even though the story is most probably false, no one can deny that care is both the bedrock of civilization and also the family.

Care can be defined as a concern for the well-being of another person. It can be both a feeling and a category of tasks that you perform to look after another person. In the usual family system care is defined as a duty — something that one should expect. Moreover, who should care for whom and in what way is predefined in terms of gender and age. A father should express his care through stoic sacrifice and by providing material resources. A mother should express care through emotional labour, domestic chores, and often by protecting others from the father’s stern discipline. The precise stereotype might differ, but it is hard to deny that care in heterosexual families is seen as both predefined and naturally different.

Of course, duty is just a defense. An assumed social guarantee that protects individuals from a lack of care or neglect. But in practice, these notions do little to protect people, especially vulnerable people, from neglect and abuse. When children are not loved or cared for, when a woman is beaten and ignored, when a man’s emotional distress is negated, or when an elderly person is abandoned, mostly society can merely judge and avert its gaze.

The core of care and caring is not a duty or a task but genuine attachment and empathy. It is hard for a society that sees marriage and family as a bundle of duties to acknowledge this visceral reality. We can neither legislate nor coerce care. Indeed, care is not something that arises out of the institution of marriage. It is something that is a precondition for the possibility of all long-term relationships whether inside the institution of marriage or outside of it.

4. Authenticity

Our independent sense of self develops in interactions with others. For instance, when something unexpected occurs infants often look towards their caregivers’ responses to decide their own reactions and regulate their emotions. If a caregiver looks scared when a child falls, the child too will feel fearful. If the caregiver looks calm and smiles, the child might be able to soothe their own pain. This is called social referencing.

If we are around people who acknowledge our reactions and create a space where they can be understood without judgment, then we feel more “real” since we are in touch with our spontaneous feelings and thoughts. It also strengthens our sense of self as we find the environment to reflect upon and understand our inner worlds more concretely. On the other hand, if we are around people who either judge us for being ourselves or are simply not interested, we are forced to create masks that help us survive that environment. These masks suffocate our spontaneous self and it feels like we need to pretend to be something other than what spontaneously emerges from inside of us to be sufficient, safe, and “good”. We cannot be our authentic Self.

The family is the environment that creates the foundation of this process. Donald Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, coined the term “going on being“. It refers to the experience of existing without interruption. This feeling develops only when we are around people and environments where we don’t feel the need to constantly respond to, or rather protect ourselves from, the things around us. “Going on being” helps us feel more alive, and authentic, and supports the growth of the self. Our body and mind feel like one connected unit. If instead we are surrounded by a family system where our true selves feel too threatened or our vulnerabilities and spontaneous reactions don’t find appropriate acknowledgment, then we are compelled to defend ourselves. In these times the false sense, the mask, comes in and protects our true, spontaneous self. But in this process, we get disconnected from our internal world, our body, our desires, and the liveliness that we are born with.

A family unit that is premised on duties, procreation, and rigid customs has very little space for authenticity and the true self. A family that is defined based on obedience or silence or custom can rarely withstand the spontaneity that is the core of our internal worlds. A marriage needs to be between people who feel safe and true with each other. Such marriages can then become the bedrock for our society where children and even other adults can find a space to explore what they actually feel, what they actually want, and what actually makes them feel alive.

Conclusion

The discussion about marriage equality is certainly about queer rights, but the questions that this demand raises have implications for families regardless of gender or sexual orientation. The Indian government’s response in the Supreme Court makes it clear that the current definition of a family is disconnected from the people who actually make up families. Their arguments were strangely focused on genitals, biology, procreation, ancestry, duty, customs, and inheritance. The family seemed to be reduced to blood and sperm here. I think it is time that we foreground what really holds up long-term relationships and make them worthwhile:

Love, Attachment, Care, Safety, and Authenticity.