An older sibling not only provides a sense of security to a child but also plays the role of a mentor and confidant as the kid grows up. A 28-year-old woman named Bry recounted an instance from her school’s first-grade year when she realized how much her big brother loved her. Years later, she got a memento of his brotherly love sewn into her wedding dress as a button. Recently, a Redditor u/anontarg shared the screenshot of her heartwarming story in the r/MadeMeSmile group, that “made people cry.”
Representative Image Source: Getty Images | DLeonis
In the original post in a Tumblr (@lifeofbrybooks) thread that asked people to describe “a soft memory,” Bry mentioned that her brother is 10 years older than her. “As the youngest of six kids, I lived in hand-me-downs,” she said, recalling how her brother regularly took her shopping for school clothes. When she was in first grade, her brother bought her a little navy blue, polka dot dress with a Peter Pan collar and red alphabet buttons. But on picture day at school, she lost one of these buttons in the school playground.
“I had a total meltdown because my brother spent his own money to make sure I had this new dress and I ruined it. I was a mess, totally inconsolable,” she described of that time. Coincidentally, Bry’s teacher was also the mother of his brother’s best friend and narrated the entire incident to her son, who told Bry’s brother about it.
Representative Image Source: Getty Images | stacey_newman
Bry’s brother together with the teacher’s son and the entire football team combed the playground after their daily practice and ended up finding Bry’s lost button. Later on, her brother sewed the button back on her dress, while telling her that he wouldn’t have been mad with her for losing it. “It was just a button and a dress,” Bry wrote in the post, “But I did have one of those little red alphabet buttons sewn into my wedding dress.”
On Reddit, the wholesome brother-sister story received 88,000 upvotes and is making hundreds, if not thousands, of people cry happy tears. People are sharing personal stories about how big brothers are like the epitome of power, strength, love, magic, and wonder for younger sisters. u/lpalatroni, whose big brother is 15 years older, said, “When I was 18 I got my appendix removed. I woke up from anesthesia with my big bro, sitting near my bed. I asked if he could hold my hand, he did and then I fell asleep again. I woke up hours later, the sun had gone but my brother was still there, holding my hand.” “What a sweet brother he is. It's so touching that something so small like a button meant so much to both of them,” commented u/jsanders96858.
Image Source: Reddit | u/maybenotarobot429
It isn’t just the big brothers who love their sisters so much, sometimes, it’s also the little brother as u/crabjail revealed in a comment. They wrote, “I remember I had a really rough day at school. My little brother was hungry, so I was going to make him a box of mac and cheese. I dropped the box and some of the noodles got on the floor. I started crying because it felt like I couldn't do anything right. Little brother came over and started helping me clean up, saying ‘It's okay! Most of them are still in the box!’ It was such a sweet thing for me.”
Image Source: Reddit | u/arianalita
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.