So many memes about Mom Friends but so few memes about the Aunt Friend who:

- encourages you to eat sweets
- takes you for surprise adventures (currently: mails you surprise gifts)
- gives the no-bullshit sex advice
- if you cannot reach her, she is in the garden doing rituals

If you are the person all your friends go to when they want encouragement to quit their shitty jobs to follow their dreams, but also the person they call when they know they need to break up but they need someone to lovingly scold them into it, you might be the Aunt Friend.

If you will not come over to make soup and clean up tissues for a sick friend, but you will absolutely spend 15 hours researching their symptoms and show up at the doctor’s office in person to advocate for them when the doctor won’t listen, you might be the Aunt Friend.

If your idea of helping a friend get over a dumping is less “Netflix and takeout and crying” and more “fuck it let’s go skydiving I read they use it as a treatment for depression in Australia” you might be the Aunt Friend.

If your idea of planning a fun trip for the friend group is less “I made a spreadsheet of our schedules and it looks like we could all travel together in June of 2024” and more “I booked a cabin in the mountains for next weekend, who’s going,” you’re the Aunt Friend.

If you’re the only single one left in the group but nobody tries to fix you up—not because you aren’t a CATCH (you are) but because they just can’t see anybody being more appealing to you than continuing to do whatever you want whenever you want—you’re probably the Aunt Friend.

If everyone just assumes you know about literally every topic from quantum mechanics to “how would abolishing the police actually work?” to “what do you think this shiny bug I found is?” and they aren’t wrong, you’re probably the Aunt Friend.

Aunt Friends sometimes settle down and have children, you don’t HAVE to be single and child free to be an Aunt Friend—but if you do have kids, you have probably pulled them out of school abruptly to go look at some weird, limited-time natural phenomenon 6 hours’ drive away.

Aunt Friends come in all genders and all gender expressions but always find self-discovery thrilling and admirable, which is probably why, if you’re the Aunt Friend, you have a specific congratulations message & possibly a gift pre-selected for when friends announce new pronouns.

Not all Aunt Friends keep pets (though most have at least one significant wildlife friendship) but those who do will invariably have Weird Pets.

Something in their house has an atypical number of eyes, legs, or senses. Or perhaps it is venomous, or has a tendency to curse.

Aunt Friends are bemused by others’ attachment to order.

“But WHY do you have a lawn,” they may be heard to say, to nobody in particular.

After moving into a new place, they WILL paint, and you WILL be surprised and unsettled to find that color actually works for a bathroom.

Yet, for all their chaotic energy, Aunt Friends will support wholeheartedly the conventional passions of their friends.

Because they aren’t odd as an expression of judgment towards those who aren’t—they are odd simply because it makes them happy.

They want you to be happy, too.