Family feuding is simply the other side of love

A home entertainment company has carried out a survey suggesting that four in 10 Britons are feuding with their relatives. To which the only possible response is: only four?

Given the amount of time we spend in the company of our families, much of it when we are small, adolescent or old, perpetual goodwill would be more remarkable. One in five people has gone for three years or more without talking to a relative. That figure may yet come to include Gordon Ramsay, who has just fired his father-in-law from his company. And indeed, Lauren Booth, whose father, Tony Booth, on being asked by an interviewer whether he loved her, responded, "Not really" and said he probably wouldn't be inviting her to his birthday party.

Rather impressively, one in 10 of the respondents hasn't spoken to a member of their family for 20 years or more. Which is comfortably exceeded by my Albanian mother-in-law who has refused to speak to her husband's brother and his wife since 1958.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that, when it comes to a family feud, most people blame women in the family and their mothers in particular. There's gratitude! Mind you, my own mother ran away from London to Ireland to escape her mother, which makes, I suppose, a change from the number who do it the other way round.

I'm not sure that the contemporary cult of therapy helps; I've yet to encounter anyone who's been in therapy who hasn't ended up blaming their parents for their own failings. As for family wills, involving as they do our sense of entitlement and covetousness, they're almost calculated to engender hatred. Think Jacob and Esau.

Probably the reasons we feud with family are much to do with why we love them. Families are a given; you're born into them. And for a generation that sets so much store by individual choice, it's probably vexatious that relations are not a matter of choice, like friends or spouses. They're the people in your life you don't choose. You can't easily UnFriend your family the way you do someone on Facebook. Well, you can, I suppose, by not talking to them at all.

Families are a reminder of where you come from; and for people — you get a lot of them in London — who have remade themselves in their career and put a tidy distance between themselves and their origins, they're what Charles Lamb described in his essay on The Poor Relation as a "perpetually recurring mortification".

And the reason we usually behave worse to members of our family than to anyone else is probably because we can. I adored my father but he once infuriated me so much when I was a child that I stabbed him in the shin with a Biro and drew blood. If I'd tried that with my acquaintance, I would have got short shrift. The Biblical commandment to honour your father and your mother is an obligation precisely because it is sometimes hard to carry off; there's no commandment to love your friends.

Family feuds, really, are just the flipside of family intimacy ... or as Dodie Smith described it, "that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our innermost heart, ever quite wish to".