My wife, novelist Kristen Arnett, hasn’t had any real contact with her parents for about eight years, a situation that involved a long period of strain before shifting into what she describes as their current state of “total estrangement.” When we got married in February, her parents weren’t there; we hadn’t invited them.

Like so many queer adults, Kristen had been forced into a place where she had to choose her own mental health over maintaining contact with her family. Because of our wedding and the questions we got about her family’s absence leading up to it, I’ve been thinking a lot about parental estrangement lately — the stigma around it, how it feels, how we can care for each other in light of it, and how so many queer people reach that breaking point. So I spoke to Kristen and six other  LGBTQ+ humans who, like my wife, are also estranged from their families, and while there were recurring themes and feelings, it’s clear estrangement can look like a lot of different things for queer and trans folks. But for all of them, the choice to cut off contact was ultimately the best for their well being and mental health, despite being extremely difficult because of the ways we’ve been told repeatedly that family is the most important bond in life.

For Kristen, there’d been tension in her relationship with her parents her entire life. She grew up in central Florida in an Evangelical Southern Baptist community that exerted total control over her actions: what books she could read, what music she could listen to, how she spent her time. Their family was also extremely conflict avoidant, never wanting to dig into anything hard or complicated.  It was not exactly an environment in which Kristen’s queerness could flourish.

She didn’t come out of the closet so much as she accidentally fell out of it — while under anesthesia for a tooth surgery in their late twenties. “When I came out of my anesthesia, I was coming out to my mom,” she says. “That’s the only way that my mind would let me do it: because I didn’t know it was happening.”

My own family knows about Kristen’s situation, and yet some relatives still asked if their parents would be invited to the wedding. It was a well meaning question with no judgment attached, but I was surprised and could feel myself slipping into defensiveness, advocating for my partner. Even without judgment, I still felt there were certain assumptions being made. To us, it didn’t make sense to invite people to the wedding who we don’t have a relationship with. But there’s a pervasive societal pressure on people to “mend fences” or otherwise “make compromises” with family, especially when it comes to big life events like weddings.

It was this same philosophy that pressed Kristen, prior to cutting her parents off, to make concessions like attending Christmas Eve service with her parents. She was expected to show up to family events, “and kind of sit in a corner and not talk about anything.” At their family’s mandatory Sunday lunches, Kristen stayed silent while her family spoke freely.

“At those lunches, I’d get done with them and I’d have these depression spirals or be sitting there and just feel like I was losing it, because they’d be talking about all kinds of stuff, like ‘It’s really important we don’t let trans people into bathrooms’ or it’d be like, ‘Oh, we need to make sure that the state of marriage stays same,’” Kristen says. It didn’t feel like a compromise when she was the only one who had to give something up to be there.

“It doesn’t actually mean compromise,” Kristen says. “It means me not rocking the boat, and that’s not compromise.”

Indeed, “making compromises” often amounts to queer people having to make all the sacrifices while their family members continue to speak and behave however they want to. This disparity wore away at Kristen until she stopped attending Sunday lunches altogether.

“And then I realized the more I wasn’t going, the better I felt mentally,” Kristen says. “And I was like ‘well, this isn’t right. I shouldn’t feel better not seeing my family.’ But I truly did.” She felt relieved.

That sense of relief then showed them that perhaps going “no contact” was the right path after all. Taking things further than just skipping out on Sunday lunches came with its own challenges though, especially because she lived in the same town as them at the time. Her parents would sometimes stop at her house unannounced, and she would pretend like she wasn’t home. “Which is such a weird thing to have to do with your family,” they say, “hiding from a person coming by trying to sell you something.”

And in a way, her parents were trying to sell her something. They were trying, again, to sell her this false idea of family and love. Kristen says the mentality of her parents was very much “we love each other, so we can love each other despite,” language Kristen describes as very loaded and also counterintuitive even to the Southern Baptist values her parents supposedly ascribe to. She was told so often that love is a verb, an action. “If you’re going to argue that this kind of level of compromise is love because we love each other, I’m like, you’re not showing me what love is,” she says.

My friend T Clark hasn’t spoken to their dad in six years. Even though they rarely spoke leading up to that, it was after T reached out to him about transphobic jokes he made on Facebook that things took a more severe turn. After that, their dad called them on their birthday. “In that phone call, I told him I was hurt and more or less came out to him,” T says. “And he said, ‘I don’t think that was reason enough not to talk to me.’ And that’s the last time we spoke.”

T is actually open to hearing from their dad, but they don’t expect it. In 2019, they tried friending him on Facebook after he apparently blocked them, but he didn’t accept. They don’t know for sure if it was intentional, but that’s been the only real instance of attempted contact in the past six years. “He could easily find me if he wanted to,” T says. They say the thought of actively engaging feels exhausting, so they’re just waiting to see if he’ll initiate.

My friend Kim Selling’s story reveals how estrangement can shift, intersect, and twist into a complicated matrix. Kim hasn’t spoken to their brother since 2010 because he physically abused them when they were kids and has an abuse history with other family members. Their mom subsequently disowned Kim for cutting out their brother and then started speaking to them again in mid-2011 after Kim’s grandmother died. She then denied ever disowning Kim. This past January, Kim stopped speaking with their father because he gave their phone number and address to their brother and told him Kim wanted a relationship with him again, which was untrue.

“It’s maddening to have my boundaries fucked with,” Kim says, adding that they know a lot of other friends who are estranged from family who have similarly had their contact information given out without consent.

Kim says queerness isn’t a direct reason for the estrangement, but it’s wrapped up in it. “It’s a part of a larger trend in which my experiences are devalued or go unacknowledged or are completely denied because I am the only fat person, the only nonbinary person, the only queer femme of my family,” Kim says. While they have other out family members now, they were the first and only out person in their family for a long time. Like many of the people I talked to, including my wife, they were raised in a religious environment. In their case, it was evangelical Presbyterian, and they say the homophobia and transphobia in their family was “incredibly thick and ever-present” when they were growing up. Their mom refers to Kim’s sexuality as their “activism,” and their dad pretends he’s always been supportive despite having drunkenly criticized them throughout high school. For Kim, so many parts of their identity are wrapped up in their familial dynamics.

Another person I spoke with, Kelso, says she hasn’t had contact with her father for the last 10 years. “When I first tried coming out when I was 8, he physically abused me,” she says. “I quickly learned not to trust anyone with my sexuality.” But it became so stressful to hide it that she tried coming out again after high school. At this point, her parents were divorced, and she was no longer bound by a custody agreement to visit her Dad  on weekends. At first, she tried to manage and preserve the relationship by setting boundaries like not allowing him to ask about her love life. It didn’t really work though, because having to hide she was a lesbian in order to keep her parents in her life was becoming increasingly difficult. Later, in her twenties, there were periods of time when her father would try and reach out, always when she wasn’t actively dating a woman. But even then, as soon as she would let him in a bit, his homophobia would come out, even resulting in him calling her slurs.

Kelso apologizes as she’s telling me about all of this, saying that she doesn’t want to be defined by it or seen as a stereotypical punchline of life as a lesbian woman with a homophobic parent. Kim and others echo Kelso’s sentiment that there can be a lot of guilt attached to estrangement.

“There’s a wild amount of guilt and shame that weighs down a decision like that, to cut out a family member or to separate yourself,” Kim says. “But what matters most is my safety and privacy and security, and that’s worth so much more than placating an abuser. And yes it took me too fucking long to get to that, but now that I do? Bitch, I’m never going back.”

Feelings of guilt and shame about familial estrangement can complicate the coming out process. Amy used to be incredibly close with her maternal grandparents, spending summers with them in Arizona until they moved closer to her family in California, at which point she started seeing them at least weekly until she came out at 30. She came out to them over email, and it took them four weeks to even respond. She talks with her grandmother only occasionally now and only at a surface-level. Her grandfather, who was the first person to encourage her to be a writer and who was her first experience of “chosen” family (he was her mother’s stepdad), hasn’t spoken with her in nine years. “I’ve tried to make peace with the fact that it’s likely he will die without us ever connecting,” she says. It’s their religious beliefs that keep them from accepting her. “This has been one of the hardest parts about coming out,” Amy says. “My joy and freedom led to such loss.”

“It’s essential, as a queer, to recognize that your family has no actual power over who you are,” Kim says. “You only have to trust yourself and know that you can figure your shit out on your own; they have no bearing over how you form and maintain and celebrate your identities. Once I was able to figure that out, my world became a lot more oyster-shaped.”

What does going “no contact” really mean? From the conversations I had, it’s clear that it’s not as straightforward as literally never hearing from another person or never speaking to them. It’s more of a way to describe a firm boundary in which one tries to limit contact as much as humanly possible. You can’t ultimately control another person’s actions. “No contact” can be scary for people considering estrangement, because it sounds so absolute, but it doesn’t have to be a fixed or permanent state of affairs. The rules around contact can change, depending on your situation and your capacity.

It can be exhausting to constantly have to reevaluate these relationships, but sometimes reaching out can provide some clarity, even if that clarity isn’t even close to closure or doesn’t  change anything. “I think it’s best to reach out if you’re wondering, if you have any desire to reconnect, or perhaps miss the familial connection,” says Eggy, a queer person in Florida who doesn’t speak to their mom’s widower and his kids, despite them only living 20 minutes apart. Their mom’s death complicates this estrangement from their stepfather, who Eggy describes as “Trumpy” with homophobic and racist tendencies. Eggy reached out around Thanksgiving once because it was one of their mother’s favorite holidays, saying something genuine about how sad it was that they weren’t still connected, since their mother would have wanted them to be. All they got in response to their vulnerable confession was a simple “happy Thanksgiving.” They haven’t reached out since. But still, the moment gave them some clarity. “The response for me helped solidify that it’s not a connection that serves anymore,” Eggy says.

“I have a tendency to romanticize connections I’ve lost, familial, platonic, romantic,” Eggy adds. “And I find it helps me to stop living in them if I just act on the urge to reach out. It certainly helped settle the ideas I had of reconnecting with them and allowed me to move on more fully when I thought I already had.”

But it’s also completely understandable to not want to reach out and not want to hear from someone at all. In addition to unannounced house visits after the period of time when she stopped showing up for Sunday lunch, Kristen’s parents tried all sorts of ways to get in touch with them. Her mother would text; she had a fraught email exchange with her father.

“In theory, that sounds nice, they want to reach out, but it’s not that,” Kristen says. “It felt like they were trying to persuade me to go back to doing the same thing that I was doing previously, and I was like, I can’t be put into this situation again.”

The reach-outs often felt like they were more for her parents’ benefit than hers, especially since her parents like to pretend the chosen estrangement isn’t actually happening. Recently, Kristen got a text from her grandma: Her uncle had messaged after seeing Father’s Day pictures on Kristen’s parents’ social media and had assumed the pictures meant Kristen was back in touch with the family, which excited him. Her grandma had to explain to him that no, those photos were actually from 10, maybe 15 years ago. Always embodying that classic pattern of avoidance, her parents just don’t acknowledge the estrangement, much like they didn’t acknowledge her queerness even after she was out.

Kristen says she’s “no contact” or “total estrangement,” but short of a hard block, it’s hard to enforce a “no contact” boundary when you can only control your side of the equation. She receives texts less frequently from her mother than she used to, and she hasn’t received a text from her dad in a year. Every couple months, her mom texts. “It’s almost like finding a little crack to squeeze into,” Kristen says.

Queer historical fantasy author Sarah Wallace is estranged from their father, an Episcopalian priest. They used to be close with their dad when their parents went through a divorce, but when he remarried their freshman year of high school, their relationship became strained. They fought all throughout Sarah’s time in high school, and when Sarah told their dad they were going to spend the summer with their mother, he told them to pack up their room. They weren’t welcome to make his house their home if they chose to spend extended time with their mom. Despite multiple invitations from Sarah to visit them in college, their dad never came.

Sarah says they’ve realized their dad’s love is extremely conditional — worsened because they remain unclear about what the conditions even are. Their dad replies to their emails with a litany of personal insults and sometimes sends these derisive emails unprompted. Like others I talked to, Sarah spent a long time feeling guilty for the “failed” relationship. “But a couple of years ago, I realized that I haven’t felt emotionally safe with him since he got remarried,” they say. “And it occurred to me that I don’t owe him my time or my self when he hasn’t created a safe environment for me.”

While some of the folks I talked to arrived at estrangement as either a direct or indirect result of coming out, Sarah’s situation is a bit different: Their father doesn’t even know they’re queer. They’ve hid all Facebook updates from him and avoided conversations about the books they write and publish, which are all very queer. Sarah characterizes their relationship as “no contact” but says they do respond when he reaches out, always telling him they’re too busy to actually meet up. “I don’t have the energy or the interest to pretend I’m someone else when I’m around him,” they say. “And I don’t feel up to coming out.”

Here, the decision not to come out becomes another way to enforce healthy boundaries with family members. I also spoke with some queer people whose familial estrangement didn’t necessarily begin because of their queerness. South Florida-based queer photographer Stephanie Huber, whose parents had her when they were very young, says she’s estranged from most of her family because she was born into a home full of physical, emotional, and substance abuse as well as generational trauma. She got out as soon as she could and never looked back, and she was raised primarily by her paternal grandparents. Her father was emotionally abusive and in and out of jail for domestic violence and DUI charges throughout her life.

Stephanie has considered working on her relationship with her mother, who she is occasionally in text message contact with, but it’s been close to a decade since she’s heard from her father. He tried to contact her throughout her twenties. Even though she had firm boundaries in place, much like Kim’s situation with their father giving their number to their brother, other family members disrespected those boundaries and gave her phone number to her father every time she changed it. She has since stopped speaking to those family members, too.

The last time Stephanie spoke to her father, she told him that she knew he was young when she was born and that while she forgave him for the abuse, she lacked positive memories of him that might inspire her to pursue a relationship now. “He showed me I was right to do so by responding that I would rot in hell for not respecting my father, and that ‘everyone’ thought I was bitch,” Stephanie says. He also said she was brainwashed and re-writing her own childhood memories to make him the villain.

Unfortunately, family members will often resort to this tactic of accusing someone of “misremembering” or “misconstruing” the reality of their upbringing. As Kim puts it: “My identities prevent me from being seen as a reliable narrator of my experiences to my family.”

In 2022, my wife wrote an  op-ed for Time magazine called “I Know What It’s Like to Be a Florida Teen Who Can’t Say Gay. I Was One.” While her parents might not always catch the essays she has published on indie queer websites or in literary magazines, Time is an especially large and mainstream platform. It would be harder for them to ignore this one, and in fact, Kristen received one of those now-rare texts from her mother about it. At first, her mother just wanted to tell her she was proud of her being in Time. She clearly didn’t want to acknowledge that the piece was about how difficult Kristen’s life had been growing up closeted and gay in the home environment created by their parents.

“I was not in a space to receive that,” Kristen says. It was terrible timing; she was forced to process her mother’s words while stuck in an airport after a long trip. Suddenly, she found herself pulled into back-and-forth text conversation with her mom for the first time since the estrangement began. “It was basically me losing my shit over text message with my mother,” they say. “I was basically like, ‘how dare you message me about this when so much of this is about you?’” She was met with her mother negating the narrative of the piece, telling her the things she experienced didn’t happen.

It was six years after her decision to no longer speak with them, and all over again, Kristen was reminded why engaging with her parents was unhealthy for her. She felt manic and wild. “I went to an airport bathroom and cried, and I was like, I don’t need to be feeling like this.”

“If this is what interactions are going to be like, then I definitely had made the right choice,” Kristen continues. “I do feel like my mental health is better when I’m not in dialogue with my family, particularly my parents.”

Early on in our relationship, Kristen told me I’d likely never meet her parents. It didn’t make me sad, especially because I already knew about her history in past relationships where the alternative — her parents dismissing or outright ignoring her partner — was worse. It also  wasn’t the first time someone I loved dearly had a complicated or nonexistent relationship with their parents (in fact, most close friendships I’ve had have been with people who fall somewhere on the parental estrangement spectrum). Because of the shame and guilt that can be attached to estrangement, I wanted to give complete, total, unconditional support.

In 2023, Kristen did reach out to her parents to ask them to meet up, completely on her own terms, an important distinction from the times it was her parents who were the ones to chisel cracks into the foundation of her “no contact” policy. It was shortly before our engagement. Kristen felt she needed to practice what she preaches about engaging in conflict rather than avoiding it like her parents always default to. She picked the location, a restaurant in our neighborhood, one she could easily walk home from if she needed to get out quickly.

The impetus for the meeting wasn’t to magically fix things, and Kristen knew it likely wouldn’t result in an actual change to the boundaries or their relationship. She went in very firmly, not aggressive, but the most direct she’d ever been with them. “I was like, here’s ways that you’ve made me feel, and here’s ways that my life is, and here’s what I need from you if you ever want to have a relationship in the future.”

She says the dinner went “well,” emphasis on the quotes. It wasn’t a disaster. It didn’t result in her feeling manic or crying in the bathroom. But her parents continued to be so conflict avoidant that they just sort of nodded and said yes, without really engaging and without really committing to any kind of change. After the dinner, she’d get a few texts, but it was never about anything meaningful. She realized they didn’t really understand. She has no interest in resuming contact until they are ready to address what she’s told them about how their political beliefs and past behaviors impact her life and her loved ones.

So the estrangement continues, and I continue to have zero interaction with her parents. We met once,  in passing at a family function, but it was incredibly brief and inconsequential. Kristen’s feelings about how I fit into this, again, reaffirm her commitment to her hard boundaries with them.

“I would never want to bring them into your life and have that be something that you have to deal with and something where you’re not being respected,” Kristen tells me. “And if I can’t count on my own partner being respected, that’s just not something I want to ever have to deal with. There’s things where it’s like I know that they want things to be a kind of way they want to have Christmas again or things like that. And I’m like, how could I ever bring my partner into this space?”

As for advice they’d give other people struggling with estrangement or considering estrangement, many people cited therapy as crucial to their journeys. Amy says therapy helped reorient her away from “fixing” the problem and instead toward accepting what it is and dealing with it. She also says writing helps, along with having a supportive partner. She allows for duality, as she puts it. “It’s good and it’s sad,” she says.

Kim adds that in addition to therapy, seeking out people with similar or linked identities to their own has helped.

Beyond therapy, folks also talked about their conscious efforts to unlearn what they’ve been taught about family, about love. “I’ve found family in many other, more fruitful ways by letting go of the idea that family can only exist in the traditional, hierarchical sense,” Eggy says. “Yesterday was two years since my mom passed, and the family that was there for me was the family I chose and built, and it felt more whole and meaningful than I think given family couldn’t ever made me feel.”

Kim similarly says while they thought they never gave a shit about family because of the treatment they received and continue to receive from their immediate family members, they had the realization that they’ve always received support from their grandparents, who treated them with compassion. “Engaging with my cultural heritage through my grandparents, and learning how to exist in the world from them helped me have an anchor that bypassed my nuclear family, and also provided a stepping stone to forming relationships outside my home,” Kim says.

“I think it’s hard with family because we’re told all the time that family is special and more important than other relationships,” Sarah agrees. “But the older I get, the more I assess all of my relationships more equally. It helps me to determine that if I wouldn’t accept a certain kind of treatment from a friend, there’s no good reason to accept it from a family member.”

Even though Kristen knows this is what’s best for their mental health and doesn’t want to return to that headspace she was in at the airport after the Time piece, she of course wishes things weren’t this way. There’s a difference between what you want to happen and what’s best for you, a tension that can make it so hard for people to pull the trigger on “no contact” or other hard boundaries with family. “It’s better for me mental health wise, but it sucks,” Kristen says.

“It’s hard, and it’s something that will be hard for the rest of my life,” Kristen adds. “But I would choose this again in a second versus the way it was before. Because this is still hard, but it’s hard in a way that’s respecting myself and respecting relationships I have.”

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