There is a saying that Westerners attach importance to "etiquette", while Chinese pay more attention to "human feelings". I don't know if you think this sentence is correct?
In fact, not only the society we live in, but also any place in the world belongs to the "human society", and it can even be said that as long as there are people, there is a "human feeling".
Human feelings, that is, "friendship" and "affection", in the final analysis, are "relationships", since they are relationships, of course, there are relatives and distances. The first step for each of us who normally own a family into society is to start with kinship.
Generally speaking, we call our parents and siblings relatives or family members, and other social relationships brought about by marriage or blood are "relatives" in the traditional sense.
So have you ever thought about the question, that is, among so many relatives, such as uncles and uncles, aunts and uncles, etc., what kind of relatives are the closest to you? Let's hear what the ancestors said!
Regarding the distance between relatives, our ancestors left many interesting sayings, especially in the ancient book "Augmenting Sages", there are many elaborations on family affection, such as "poor people live in the city and no one asks, rich people have distant relatives in the mountains", which reflects the common phenomenon of relatives who hate the poor and love the rich;
In the past year, we also shared the saying "cousin three thousand miles, cousin five hundred years", "cousin" generally refers to the uncle and aunt and aunt's family of the same generation of relatives, and themselves are often not the same surname, "cousin" Of course, everyone knows that it is the brothers and sisters of their uncles and uncles, who are relatives of the same clan and the same surname.
Although cousins and cousins are almost identical from the perspective of blood, because of the influence of traditional clan concepts, in actual life, cousins tend to be closer than cousins.
In the eyes of the ancients, the relationship between cousins is as far away as three thousand miles apart, and the cousins are still a family even after five hundred years because they are of the same clan, so our ancestors used to have a saying that "the uncle is gone, and the old cousin is not coming", which also reflects the difference between the cousins and the cousins.
Of course, even if the closest relationships such as sisters and brothers, after their respective families have established their own businesses and branches, this family relationship is destined to be continuously diluted until it dissipates with the development of successive generations, so our ancestors also have a saying called "one generation of relatives, two generations of relatives, three generations of four generations can not recognize."
That is to say, the relationship between the two relatives cannot be close to three generations and four generations, and when it comes to the third generation and the fourth generation, it may not even be clear who is who it is.
Just like in my family, the relationship between my father's cousins is very good, but in our generation, there is almost no intersection, and they are really not very familiar with each other, so the old ancestor said: Blood relatives are not as good as footsteps!
The meaning of this sentence is: relatives can only be considered relatives if they often come and go, otherwise even if they are relatives who are kissed again, they will not come and go all year round, which is as distant as strangers.