According to a recent study out of Johns Hopkins University, the term “family friend” now doubles as an accurate barometer for detecting people you wouldn’t otherwise want to share a bus with.
As indicated by lead sociological researcher Stephanie Pikitis, the study was devised after noticing an “onslaught of questionable relationships” among her own family. Pikitis details her experience in the paper’s abstract.
“I distinctly remember, year after year, my mother saying, ‘The Petersons are coming over tonight—you kids are going to love them.’ However, after discovering that the Petersons had nothing in common with us, it became clear they were just another typical case in the field of Family Friend research.”
Pikitis also reported, that, upon a parental figure labeling anyone to be a family friend, the “individual(s) is more than 80 times more likely to recount the same story twice in one night, talk over people, and just generally be weird.”
“My mom once said we were going over to a ‘family friend’s’ for dinner, and it was undoubtedly the weirdest night of my life,” said Matthew Jones, a respondent quoted in the study. “The dad insisted on showing me his collection of paperclips the entire night. They weren’t even unique. The whole collection was just a bunch of those normal, silver ones. Okay, I’m exaggerating—there were a couple of red ones. Those were actually kinda cool.”
At press time, Johns Hopkins published another paper to JSTOR, entitled, “The Comprehensive History and Social Implications of Non-Biological Aunts.”
Published in the Nov. 2023 edition of The Every Three Weekly
Dan Gutenberg 