Internet Backs Man Who Refers to Close Female Friend as His 'Sister'

A man shared in a now-viral Reddit post that he refers to a close female friend, Angie, as his "sister," and his girlfriend doesn't like it.

Posting to the "Am I The A**hole" forum on Thursday under the username u/Eastern-Fox5409, the man claimed that his girlfriend, Joni, doesn't like that he thinks of Angie as his sibling. The post has received more than 12,300 upvotes and over 1,200 comments as of 4 p.m. Friday.

Despite Joni's feelings, a majority of commenters backed the man's decision to call Angie his sister. As it turns out, many believe that two people don't need to be related by blood to consider each other as family.

A 2014 study revealed that a person's close friends might actually be "family" after all.

"Humans are unique in that we create long-term connections with people of our species," Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist involved in the study, told LiveScience. "Why do we do that? Why do we make friends? Not only that, we prefer the company of people we resemble."

Wanting to "provide a deep evolutionary account of the origins and significance of friendship," Christakis, along with a group of researchers, "compared gene variations between nearly 2,000 people who were not biologically related," LiveScience said.

And what they found is that "pairs of friends had the same level of genetic relation as people did with a fourth cousin, or a great-great-great-grandfather."

At the beginning of his post, the man explained that he's an only child who experienced a "strange upbringing." He said he was often "ignored" by his parents, so he spent a lot of his childhood years alone. That changed, however, when he met Angie.

"When I was about ten...[Angie] moved in nearby," he recalled. "She would have been 18 at the time and lived alone."

"She saw how my parents treated me and would talk to me and hang out with me," he continued, adding that she also cooked for him and helped him with his homework.

Eventually, Angie started telling people that he was her brother, so he told his friends that Angie was his sister. After 20 years, the two still tell people that they're siblings. But this bothers Joni.

"I recently met Joni's parents, which I thought went well, and she asked to meet my family. Since I have no relation with my parents, I asked if she wanted to have dinner with Angie," he said.

"At this, Joni went quiet, and eventually said it was 'time I stopped pretending Angie is my sister' and that she's 'not real family,'" he concluded.

Regardless of whether or not u/Eastern-Fox5409 and Angie share any distant relation, commenters agreed that a person's chosen family is every bit as "real" as their biological family.

"You aren't pretending anything. You have a sister named Angie. She's not biologically related to you but she is your real family," u/GothPenguin wrote.