Growing up, I was constantly reminded of how lucky I was to have a sibling.

Being raised by parents who had both lost siblings due to illness at a young age, having the ability to develop a relationship with my older brother was viewed as a highly coveted privilege, but one that I had grown accustomed to having in my life.

Now with him leaving for college in a matter of months, I can’t help but wonder how our relationship will change. Do we appreciate each other enough as individuals in addition to family to maintain our relationship even when we’re no longer under the same roof?

My parents always reiterated how my brother and I were inherently best friends because we were siblings. Despite their assertion, our conflicting personalities led to somewhat of a tumultuous childhood.

He had a tendency to instigate, to which I would react disproportionately. Although we always loved each other, our shared interests were often overlooked in the name of obstinacy and envy. Like most siblings, we were incredibly competitive, from who could play the most advanced piano piece to who achieved the higher grades to who received the most attention from our parents.

Much of our rivalry stemmed from the fact that we were always together. Our parents seemed to arrange our lives so that they were intrinsically intertwined, and at times our relationship felt like it was dictated by our prearranged and nonnegotiable companionship.

Our parents, like most others, wanted us to have a close relationship because they hoped that we would be there for one another long after they were both gone. But our real connection developed not when we were forced to spend time with each other, but once we had formed our own interests and sincerely wanted to have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the other.

There was no ulterior motive to the time we spent together: we were not doing it to make our parents happy, or to fulfill mandatory familial duties, or to enjoy the company of others we might see during the occasion. And although we still are involved in many of the activities our parents initially arranged for us, our real bond stems not from this, but from the mutual respect we have for each other and enjoyment of the time we spend together.

Sibling rivalry is widespread, occurring in the majority of families with two or more children. However, its abundance does not detract from its severity: feuding between siblings can lead to physical or verbal abuse, a phenomenon which around one in three children have encountered, and begets a heightened possibility of mental health issues.

Furthermore, this matter is more likely to be accepted by the public and overlooked by parents than abuse from other relationships, despite its detrimental effects.

My mom is one of 10, and my brother and I were raised hearing stories of their boisterous household. Their rivalry often played out over the dinner table, with one sibling complaining that they wanted the last serving of spaghetti, and the other responding with “You really want it? Take it!” and throwing the plate of spaghetti at them.

My mom often recalls how parental endorsement (i.e. “Mom and Dad put me in charge!”) turned her older siblings into intolerant despots, like when her sister was tasked with overseeing the cleaning of a shared bedroom and ended up tossing all articles of clothing that weren’t put away out a second-story window onto the front lawn.

Despite these ludicrous stories, there were moments of collaboration among the siblings as well, such as their annual tradition of devising elaborate routes for trick-or-treating on Halloween night to get the best candy and then engaging in carefully arranged trading negotiations afterwards.

To mitigate combative behaviors between siblings, parents need to empathize with their children and foster a collaborative environment to handle such inevitable conflicts in a healthy way. The benefits of a mutually advantageous relationship are abundant, ranging from higher life contentment to lower rates of depression, but only one third of siblings maintain close relationships into adulthood.

Despite this dispiriting statistic, my brother and I plan to continue our companionship throughout college and beyond. We both have realized the importance of cultivating a friendship, not just taking our immediate connection as siblings for granted, and expressing our appreciation for each other rather than immediately assuming it’s unspoken. Looking back at all the memories we’ve shared — constructing “secret passageways” through our neighbors’ yards as kids and later getting in trouble for it, spending hours creating secret handshakes, climbing the Presidential Range in New Hampshire during our summers — I realize that, through both our parents’ endeavours and our own, we have become each other’s best friends, and our connection is worth fighting for.

Maria Proulx of Ledyard is a junior at Saint Bernard School.