The False Promise of No Contact

Around the time nineteen-year-old Alice began cutting ties with her family, she announced on social media that she was bisexual and grateful for her “found family.” The phrase was new to her parents, Greg and Tammy, but the sentiment wasn’t. Alice had acquired a new group of friends and had become intensely political. She chopped her hair, developed a hard sartorial edge, and became easily angered and agitated by her parents and siblings. They tiptoed around her. She dismissed them as “toxic” and “Jesus freaks.” Though conventionally religious, her parents tell me no one would have described them as preachy or culture warriors. After months of unpredictable outbursts and withdrawal, Alice decided to go no contact. 

Alice’s story reflects a broader phenomenon I examine in my forthcoming book, No Contact. Family estrangement isn’t new, and sometimes, especially in cases of abuse, it’s tragically warranted. Like a healthy immune system, we need the capacity to identify and expel what threatens us. But the rising phenomenon of no contact is more like an autoimmune disease in which the body’s defenses mistake what belongs to it for a threat. Those swept up in this phenomenon can lose the ability to distinguish the dangerous from the difficult; they end up attacking indiscriminately what is in fact vital. 

At the same time, an expanding ecosystem, comprised of therapists, influencers, and online forums, has recast estrangement as an empowering act of boundary-setting and self-care. The “family myth” to be discarded, in this view, is the belief that familial relationships are worthy of special regard in a way that entails durable obligations. The heretofore commonly understood mandate to “honor thy father and mother” becomes an antiquated notion that serves as a fig leaf for oppression.

Today, estrangement plagues a substantial share of families. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s national research found that more than one in four American adults was estranged from a relative, which translates to roughly 68 million people. A 2024 American Psychiatric Association poll estimates that 21 percent of Americans had become estranged from a family member over disagreement on controversial issues. 

When Greg and Tammy discovered groups for estranged parents, they were startled to learn that others had been vilified with the same language they’d heard from Alice. Parents described a similarly surreal and often swift unraveling during which they were labeled “toxic” or “unsafe,” cut off, and ultimately displaced by a “found” or “chosen family.” 

Many people have had the experience of friendships that become like family. There is nothing strange, and something entirely wonderful, about such intimacy. For those without healthy familial ties, these relationships can be lifesaving. Christianity similarly holds an expansive understanding of kinship: Through divine filiation, we become brothers and sisters in Christ, bound together in a spiritual family that transcends blood. But there is an important difference between expanding what constitutes family and treating natural kinship as something interchangeable and replaceable.

The project of family deconstruction has an intellectual pedigree. In his 1984 work, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, anthropologist David Schneider challenged the assumption that kinship should be universally defined by genealogy. Kath Weston’s influential 1991 book, Families We Choose, applied this critique to gay and lesbian communities, contrasting traditional kinship—biological, involuntary, and freighted with roles and obligations—with relationships constituted through affinity and autonomy.

Judith Butler pressed the constructivist logic further. In Undoing Gender, she describes kinship as a kind of doing, a practice that produces and continually renegotiates its meaning. Somewhere downstream of Butler is the influential academic article “Drag Pedagogy,” whose authors describe Drag Queen Story Hour as an exercise in rewriting cultural scripts and as a “preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.”

No contact is, of course, far broader than gender ideology, with families increasingly fracturing over political allegiances, votes cast, COVID-era disputes, and other ideological differences. But chosen-family theory expresses in an unusually explicit way a premise that also pervades the new beliefs about gender: the notion of “construction” and—closely connected to this—“performativity.” If realities once thought of as given can instead be performed and constructed, family too can be made and unmade by an act of the will. 

For most of human history, family was understood principally as something given. We are born into relationships of parents and siblings we didn’t choose. Marriage begins in choice, but once entered creates obligations intended to outlast the desires that prompted them. Family thus contains a peculiar union of freedom and necessity, choice and givenness.

Our current—implicit—anthropology looks with suspicion on the unchosen element. In no-contact discussions, adult children frequently invoke this logic against their parents, saying some version of: “I didn’t choose to be born.” Parents chose to have a child; the child gave no consent. Therefore, the argument goes, the moral obligations created by the relationship run in one direction only and always, with adult children incurring no corresponding duty.

Life, seen through this lens, is a burden, not a blessing, and dependence becomes a power imbalance. Consent, indispensable within its proper moral sphere, expands until it is the sole criterion by which the most primordial human goods are judged.

Such a perspective, however, obscures the real nature of familial relationships. Parents have grave duties, but they aren’t duties that are grounded in guilt for having done violence to their child’s autonomy. Parental duty arises more properly from gratitude and out of reverence for the vulnerable and valuable person entrusted to their care. Meanwhile, maturity means recognizing that those whose sacrifices once sustained us have claims upon us as well. These claims don’t depend upon our parents’ perfection or even their relative success; they arise from the nature of the relationship, which carries a significance that precedes our choosing.

A notion of family that begins by downplaying obligation often struggles to produce permanence. Some people, having gone no contact, discover this the hard way. “I don’t have a ‘chosen family,’” one woman wrote after going no contact with her relatives. She had close friends whom she loved and regarded as family but came to realize that, ultimately, she still came second to their families. “You may have chosen them as family,” she wrote, “but they sure as hell didn’t choose you—they’ve never needed to choose in the first place.”

Another woman described reaching thirty-four only to lose her entire chosen family amid divorce and a mental-health crisis. “Mostly, any serious crisis or conflict [led] to people disappearing,” she wrote. “It seems like most people who claim ‘chosen family’ don’t actually stick through the hard parts.”

Of course, this sense of precarity and abandonment is a sign of a movement hoist with its own petard: A family created solely by choice must always remain vulnerable to future choices. 

A relationship that is all choice and no duty is unstable. A relationship that is all duty and no choice is impersonal. The challenge and opportunity of real love is to choose what has been given and to offer the security of fidelity to those whom we’ve chosen.

Greg described the feeling of losing Alice as unlike any other he had experienced. “The pain is staggering,” he told me. With estrangement, hope disappears, returns, and disappears again. But what makes the loss so painful is also what makes the relationship unlike any other. 

A child begins as a responsibility, utterly dependent, and over years of sacrifice something forms that Greg struggles to put into ordinary language. “With every little thread I tied my heart to you,” he said. It can’t be reduced to something transactional. “It was something much more metaphysical. There’s a reality. I’ve been looking into your eyes; you’ve been looking into mine.” And then he put it most simply: “Life gave us to each other.” The promise of radical autonomy is that what we did not choose can be deliberately un-chosen. But no act of will can make those years, or the reality of the relationship, unreal. Estrangement can sever contact; it can’t erase kinship. The hope of reconciliation begins, perhaps, in remembering the difference.

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Image by Lightgaurd via iStock.