8 Struggles Only Siblings
with a Big Age Gap Understand
By Tria Bondoc
By virtue of spending your childhood together, your siblings become your soulmates. They become your confidant(e)s and official partners in crime, and you become one another’s shoulder to lean on when times get rough. Because you live under the same roof (and pretty much under the same version of a dictatorial government under your parents’ regime), you learn to trust one another without question or doubt. That is, unless one of you eats the other’s dessert without permission.
But for those who only almost made it to the only-child/spoiled-brat/I’m-the-king/queen-of-everything list, and for the what-were-you-thinking-making-me-15-years-later babies, these brotherhood/sisterhood dynamics may not be as simple as they should be. More often than not, you guys just can’t seem to make it work, and soulmates slowly turn into wary frienemies.
Here are 8 of the unavoidable struggles that siblings born years apart know all too well.
8. You belong to entirely different generations.
Which means that you have totally different interests in everything—from music to fashion, literature to sports, film to language. You name it.
Most of the time, it’s either you have clashing biases or you can’t relate to one another at all. What are you supposed to talk about???
7. Fighting over the remote is the ultimate battle.
When a Game of Thrones marathon is showing on HBO and your young sibling cries for you to switch the channel to Little Einsteins, all hell breaks loose. You’re left with practically no choice…unless you’re willing to be the day’s kontrabida, which your parents are most probably going to punish you for later.
6. There’s always one unhappy person during days out.
It’s either your younger sib is stuck with seeing your most awaited romantic comedy, or you’re in the kiddie playground watching over them. There is no in between.
5. You both know what it feels like to be an only child.
The older one most probably spent the first 10 years of their life getting undivided attention from the rents, and the younger one is spoiled rotten because their big sibling “already has a life of their own.”
Staying in the same room for more than an hour, then, means it’s time for the ultimate battle of the brats.
