Users of this forum, do any of you have much older/younger siblings? If so, what is your relationship like with them?

[Mysecondaccount]

Do any of you have much younger/older siblings ("large age gap" here is defined by the difference of a decade or more)? If so, what is your relationship like with them?

What inspired this question was a couple that used to go to my church. They had about 14 or so children, if I’m remembering correctly. Naturally there was an enormous age gap between the eldest and youngest. The couple’s oldest daughter was in her late thirties at the time, while their youngest son was only a tween. They had such a large age gap, that the oldest herself had a daughter that recently graduated from high school, while the youngest was still in middle school.

Another inspiration from my question was another guy in my church. His father was rather promiscuous and spent most of his life endlessly jumping from girlfriend of the month to another girlfriend of the month. To make matters worse, he was bit of an alcoholic and drug addicted lout, and never bothered to use any form of birth control. Thus the guy himself doesn't even know how many half siblings he has. The ones that he is aware off were (I think, my mind is quite foggy on the details as it has been several years since I last saw him) both over a decade older and younger then him.

[Mysecondaccount]

4 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Ie, someone like myself could be offended by your last paragraph. I won’t be, because I’m not easily offended, but just know it could be seen as offensive.

Thanks for letting me know, I removed it from my post. I apologizes for offending anyone here, that I was not my intention at all. I should have been more sensitive and thought through what I wrote before publishing it.

[BigFatCoward]

My youngest sister is 18 years younger than me. We get on great, though I have a very different relationship with her than I do with my younger sisters who are closer to my age. 

[Starkess]

I'm the youngest of 5, and my only sister is the oldest. She's almost 12 years older than me. She's the only one of my siblings that I am even remotely close to and actually talk to outside of a holiday get together. Not sure if it's because we were the 2 girls among the boys, because she moved out when I was 7 so we didn't have to have the friction of living together (well, before she moved out we did because we shared a room, and that was certainly hard--poor girl having to have her baby sister in her room as a teenager!--but I hardly remember most of that).

[Jaxom 1974]

A fun tale from my wife's family is that her dad, who is 18 years younger than his brother, and 9 years younger than his sister, was considered, "the back up plan" in case his brother brother return from the war in Europe...his sister told us the story at their brother's wake...

 

(For context, my wife's father was born in 1943...)

[Larry of the Lawn]

I'm the oldest of 6, I'm 38, the others are 36, 33, 21, 19, and 14.  The younger three are probably more like nieces and nephews than siblings, we get along well but I'm not as close with them as I am with the 36 and 33.

 

[Mysecondaccount]

9 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

What can get generation-skipping really fast is cousins from age-different siblings.

My son is 23, and my sister just had a baby, which highlights to me that technically, my son is old enough to easily be a father, and his cousins are in a different generation.

Yeah, I myself have much older cousins that are a decade or two older then me. In fact, I pretty much have an entire army of them. There are so many, that I can't even remember half of their names (it doesn't help that I live some thousand miles from the vast majority of them). According to my late grandparents' obituaries, I have 52 maternal cousins (and that probably isn't counting my "step cousins" from my grandpa's third wife) and 45 paternal cousins.

A few of my paternal cousins are only a few years younger then my dad. One of them even has a daughter a year older then me. Though, she was just a teenager when that happened, and got herself trapped in a shotgun marriage situation that didn't work out. A few others also have children the same age as my younger siblings.

[Alarich II]

I'm the oldest of 5, between me and the youngest are 11 years, which is okay. I would say that we are pretty close, we have an active chat group and we see each other on a regular basis. My sister who is closest to me (age-wise) has two kids, one is right between our two kids (who are only 18 months apart) and the other is a bit younger, and it's nice to see that the cousins like each other, too. My other sister has two younger kids too, so there are 6 cousins who are pretty close to each other.

From my mothers side, the age spread between us cousins from eldest (me) to youngest is 20 years already, and if this gap gets bigger it's not unsual that some further removed cousins that belong to an earlier "generation" are actually younger.