There's something special about sitting in front of the TV with a box of pizza, sharing a movie night or hours of random gossip with your siblings. Despite the occasional quarrels, sibling bonds are often unbreakable. In May 2024, Tia Bee Stokes (@thetiabeestokes) decided to test her siblings' generosity by asking each for a $100 loan. Their responses left her in tears, and when she shared an Instagram reel of their text messages, the video quickly went viral.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Askar Abayev
Tia is a cancer survivor. Diagnosed in April 2020 at 34, she went viral by dancing for 15 minutes every day during her treatment. She told PEOPLE that she wanted to remind both herself and others that she was "still alive." Whether at home or in her hospital room, Tia recorded her daily dances and shared them on social media.
The video shows her text message asking all of her six siblings for $100 via Venmo. “I asked all of my six siblings for $100 with no reason except I was in a bind and I was shocked at how they responded,” she wrote in the video overlay. In each of the text messages that her siblings replied to, there were only positive remarks like “Of course,” “Let me know if you need anything else,” and “Igotchu!” One of the siblings even wrote “Only 100?” Plus, their screenshot showed that they transferred not just $100, but $500 to their beloved sister.
“This made me cry,” Tia expressed in the post caption, adding that they were tears of joy. “Just to know that I can reach out to any of my siblings no matter what I’m going through and they will love me & ready to serve me with no expectation or no reason why. If you notice not one of my siblings asked “For what?” Or “Why?” They just loved and sent $. I know our parents are smiling down on all seven of us we’re not perfect not even close to it. But our love is strong,” Tia said in the heartwarming message. “They taught me, ‘Love with no reason,’ she wrote in the video overlay.
Image Source: Instagram | @hellokenziee
The tearjerker scene made thousands of people bawl. @kreateurlife commented, “I love that they didn't even question why!” @whataboutaub said, “I pray my children will have this kind of relationship!” Others said how lucky Tia was to have siblings like these. Many said that their siblings would just block or ignore them in case they asked for this money from them. @da_sha8373 quipped “I need some new siblings.”
Image Source: Instagram | @msshaunrobinson
Speaking to PEOPLE, Tia reflected that she wanted people to see “hope.” And the way to make people see hope is to be generous towards them. "Whatever it is, that's why I show up, is to help the one, there's one person out there that needs that hope, and if I did it, you can do it too," she said. Her siblings showed that their love for Tia was unconditional. And despite enduring tough maladies and painful treatments like red devil chemo, Tia is one of the richest persons in the world, because she got “love.”
You can follow Tia on Instagram (@thetiabeestokes) for more content about her family and body positivity.
This article originally appeared on 08.09.24.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
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.