It's usually hard for a stepparent to form a deep and delicate bond with the kids of their partners. They have to take each step with care and utter each word with the thought that it shouldn’t hurt the child who is still trying to adapt to their new reality. However, it is not impossible. It may take some time but things will eventually fall into place and the child’s heart will start gelling up with the stepparent. The same happened with Shane (@SHANELIANAloyal), the stepfather of a daughter who suddenly called him “dad” one day. Tears rolled down his eyes as soon as he heard the three-letter word he had been waiting to hear for so long.
Representative Image Source: Unsplash | Caroline Hernandez
Shane and his wife Liana are young entrepreneurs located in New York City. They have two beautiful daughters. The oldest goes by the name London and the youngest, Scarlett. On their YouTube channel, they mostly post vlogs about challenges, motivation, pranks, and cooking, but in August 2020, they decided to share a more intimate moment of their life with the world. In the video that has since then amassed nearly 20 million views, Liana wrote, “My 8-year-old daughter called my husband ‘dad’ for the first time!”
The 19-minute video shows the “Loyal family” sitting inside a car with Shane in the driver’s seat, Liana alongside him, and 8-year-old London at the back. In a casual conversation, London suddenly mumbles, “Hi Dad, how was your day?” With the steering wheel still in his hands, Shane looks back, nearly shocked. After a little pause, he says, “Did you call me ‘dad’?” He gazes through the side window, looking choked with emotion.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | RDNE Stock Project
“My heart doesn’t know she called me dad,” he says, his voice trembling. London tells him she has been wanting to call him dad for a long time. Shane folds his arms across his chest, holds his head, clasps his jaw, and looks almost at the edge of tears. Then he turns back, and tells London, “You just made my day the happiest day ever.”
He continues by telling London how much he loves her. “I love you,” he says, to which London replies with a chirp, “I love you more.” Shane extends his arms and tells London to hug him. She unbuckles her seat belt and jumps forward to embrace her stepdad. “Don’t worry about anything, okay,” he tells her, “I know your daddy was not around.” He says he feels blessed, and reassures London that nobody will force her to call him dad. But he feels surprised to hear that word from her. “I am your dad,” he asserts lovingly. The video transitioned into a montage of snapshots and small clips of Shane and his daughter sharing some beautiful dad-daughter moments.
Revealing the backstory, London says in the video that she deliberately planned to surprise Shane by calling him “dad” and Liana knew about the plan already. They wanted to capture Shane’s reaction. She described that she has a complex story. She met her stepdad when she was 2 years old while she met her biological dad when she was five. This is because her biological father was in jail for the first five years of her life. Before she could get to know him, he disappeared from the family again.
Image Source: YouTube | @tundra3693
The heartwarming clip made over 33,000 people in the comment section to weep happy tears and share some amazing insights on the father-daughter relationship. @aehudg commented, “I think this child is being raised right and by good people.” @roselyrics560 shared their own experience, “The first time I called my stepdad ‘dad’ he started crying and that was the happiest day of my life.”
Image Source: YouTube | @matthewbaker279
Many people praised Shane for parenting a child, so lovingly, a child who is not his own. @jayforrester2163 said, “Only a real man can be a dad to another man’s child. Much respect for this guy. This is what a grown man looks like. He is the man.”
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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.