Creating Extended Families
Everyone deserves the love of a good family, but what if someone doesn’t have any?
During the holiday season, some people are alone. In such cases, finding an activity or even companionship is not really the issue. What makes the experience so exquisitely painful is the fact that no one actually cares whether that person shares the holiday with them or not. This year there is a solution. There is a new online service designed to match people who are looking to take a friendship and develop it into a chosen family who will care.
Creating Extended Families.com matches adults platonically to create surrogate extended family relationships. Matches are intended to develop over time into a long term family like relationship -- sharing holidays, sharing special events, and having someone who cares. The service matches adults both intergenerationally and peer to peer.
And the service is not just for the lonely and alienated. Individuals with families often find that a particular type of relationship is missing from their life. All too often we expect romantic relationships to fulfill all of our emotional needs, yet a complete extended family would create a much more powerful support network. For example, young adults raised in foster care may age out of the system without ever having bonded with parent figures. They may go on to get married and have children of their own, yet still miss having a mother or father figure in their life. Older couples who never had children may miss the opportunity to be a parent figure to a younger adult. Someone who grew up with only brothers, may wish she had a sister. There are many such examples.
Creating Extended Families.com launched October 2009. It is the only service of its kind on the internet, and it is very user friendly. The profiles are free. No credit card information is even required, until the member has at least one match. The service costs $50 per year and allows for unlimited searching and matching. Users can search for: parent figures individually as a mother or father figure; a couple as parent figures; son/daughter figures; and for sibling relationships. The system is very flexible, and it is entirely possible for a single user to search for several kinds of extended family relationships and, thereby, actually create a complete extended family.
www.CreatingExtendedFamilies.com
