How is your personality and interests and behavior different from your sibling's?

If raising five children taught me nothing else, it’s that every one of them is as different from the others as night is from day. True, they sometimes have things in common, but there are far more differences. Variety seems to be nature’s preferred way. : )

@CaptainHarley How are they different?

My brother is no longer alive but when he was, he was a lot more impulsive than used to be – he was darker, at the core, than I was and he was much more able to swallow his pride than I was. These days, 9 years after his death, I am a lot more like him than I used to be and I am glad.

My middle sister was very much a home-centered and family-centered person.

My youngest sister is like me in that she likes hard science, but she is very modest, kind of quiet (not like me), and very stubborn.

My in-between sister loves riding horses. She and I have several things in common (but not that).

@wundayatta

One takes a very scholarly, philosophical appoach to life, yet is very loving and kind. One is a bit of a hard-nose, but loves his family dearly. One would have been a “party-girl” except for the way we raised them all. One is a total scatterbrain, but very kind and loving. One is a rather cynical and semi-sarcastic person, but can be easily coaxed to laugh.

I have four sisters and one brother. Two of my sisters would rather shop, dress in expensive clothes and stay at the nicest hotels. My other two sisters, my brother and I would rather camp, wear jeans and go fishing.

I have two older brothers, 28 and 26. Anthony, 28, never went to college, has never kept a job, by choice, for more than a year or two. He’s lived in about 5 different cities in the past few years. He is by far the most social person I know, he has what seems like millions of friends who are all the nicest person you ever will meet. He doesn’t bathe that often and always smells of garlic. He is 6’5 and skinny and wears the same few shirts all the time. To sum it up, he is the friendliest, funniest hippie ever.

Then, the younger of the two, Zach, who is 5’7 and about 2% body fat and goes to the gym twice a day. He went to school for 6 years and ended up with a math teaching degree. He has no desire to move far away from our hometown. He lives 2 hours away now and even that is too much for him. He’s not super social and prefers to only have a few friends. He thinks Anthony’s way of life is annoying and silly. He is more narrow minded. He can have quite a temper. He is extremely picky with girls and more concerned not only with self-image but with other’s images as well. He hates traveling by car.

It’s funny. They are polar opposites in every aspect. Physically, they couldn’t possibly look less related. Their interests couldn’t be farther apart. Essentially they have nothing in common. They don’t get along very well because of that, either.

I fall somewhere in the middle.

My two sisters and I share a strong genetic stamp, and we all like dogs, but after that nothing is the same. My oldest is quiet, very tech and science oriented, married and divorced (for the purpose of having children, she once told me, she was too afraid to buck the system.) The middle one is very self-oriented, married young (still married, BTW) chose not to have kids and has coccooned herself in a life where inconvenience is minimalized, and I (youngest) have always been the rebel, stepped out of the strict socio-economic conservative rut in which I was raised, got tattoos, tended bar, worked retail, had a bastard child, never married, and pay little or no attention to what my mother thinks I “should” do.

I’m a workaholic & they are more family orientated……. :-/
I’m little more introvert to their, little bit more extrovert…
We’re just a little different that’s all…... :-/

My brother hates doing work.
I love it.

My brother couldn’t give a care about animals except pets.
I love all animals.

He can be very violent.
I am usually not violent all bad things tend to stay in my head.

My brother is good at sports but doesn’t care for them.
I love sports but stink at them.

My sister’s degree is in sociology and she wants a people-oriented career. I’m studying physics and would be happy to be left alone in a lab all day long. She tends to be pretty self-conscious about her outward appearance, whereas I usually don’t give a damn, but she also has a lot more confidence in her social interactions than I do. She can be pretty impatient and bores easily, while I am fairly easily amused. Sometimes I wish I was more like her!

@Mariah

Just be yourself ;-)

My sister is a born-again Christian. I’m… not religious. (My beliefs are complicated, other than “I hate organized religion” which is pretty simple, really.) She started having kids at sixteen and kept at it for twenty years. No kids for me, thanks. Ever. I value solitude too much. She can’t seem to function unless she’s in a relationship but she seems always to get into abusive ones. My relationships tend to be very long-term and very stable and when they end, they end on friendly terms. She likes to pretend everything is okay in hopes of making problems go away. I’m not above ignoring problems for a while sometimes, but I’m far more realistic than she is. She prefers cool colors and pastels. I like warm colors and high saturation. She’s rom-coms and Lifetime movies. I’m horror and psychological thrillers.

Even when it comes to interests we have in common, we’re opposites. For example, we’re both very fashion-aware. But for her, it’s about how things look on her. For me, it’s all about design aesthetics.

I think the biggest difference between my brother and me is that I’m more book smart while he’s more street smart. He learns a lot of things through the people he meets and life experience while I’ve spent more time learning through school. He can tear apart an engine and rebuild it without a problem. He learned how to do it by helping my cousin when he was younger. At the company he works for, he designed and runs their website and internet sales. All of which he learned on his own without formal schooling.

After that, we have a lot in common. We are both protectors and will stand up for those we love and care about. We are both stubborn too. We both enjoy video games and spending time with our family. We both have a strong work ethic and would do whatever we needed to do to provide for our family.

I’m not even sure where to start. Clearly we have our similarities and differences, but I find people astonishingly complicated and find it strange when family or friends fail to acknowledge where our lines are drawn (especially when I can so clearly see them!)

My older brother looks remarkably like our father, but lankier. My younger brother inherited my grandfather’s facial appearance (he is the only one in my family with gray eyes and stands out a bit) but is tanner and smaller in stature. I look like no one. We’ve sorted through dozens of photos and it is unclear whose side of the family I resemble. If I stand beside my older brother, people say I look like him. If I stand beside my younger brother, people say I look like him <shrugs> In that department, we’re fairly different.

Our interests overlap a good deal. They almost have to since we spend so much time together. We do deviate when it comes to film (my older brother has an eclectic taste and can pretty much enjoy watching everything, while my younger brother requires a quick pace and has to be forced into watching tearjerkers. I am, in short, a snob. I am incredibly picky when it comes to watching movies and am the least flexible.) We also have very different writing styles: my older brother is the Journalist, my younger brother is the Fantasy-Humourist, and I am the Poet. Your results may vary.

Personality is the area where we split off. My older brother is a goofball, mellow, practical, and by far the most decisive. My younger brother is confident (verging on arrogance, depending on the situation), has a short fuse, cracks jokes like nobody’s business, and though people in general annoy him, he is incredible loyal and close to his circle of friends. I am the affectionate, emotional, hyper-introverted (though I try to hide it at university), ambitious, neurotic one. Oh, am I the neurotic one. I don’t know how they put up with me.

There are also smaller things, too… I love interacting with kids, but my younger brother can’t stand them. My older brother and I love animals, but my younger brother requires they remain at a distance. Both my siblings can tolerate sound, but it drives me up the wall. They are also great with visual puzzles (which I am terrible at) and on the flip-side, they have deemed me “the artistic one” which is laughable considering how minimal my drawing abilities are. I am generally the least squeamish, but also the only one who cannot tolerate a hospital checkup. My younger brother is a first-person-shooter, my older brother a platform gamer, and I solve all the puzzles from the backseat.

I could go on for far too long on this topic.

My stepbrother is really into football and basketball. I like sports… but of the more obscure variety, and I hate football.

My stepsister is really into celebrities and fashion magazines and that’s about the extent of her interests. Not my cup of tea.

I’ve got one sister who’s technically two years younger than me, but she might as well be my age. Sometimes she acts more like the older sister for me.
The amount we’re told we look alike varies: the less someone knows us, the more they say we look like twins; the more they know us, the more they say we just look like sisters.

My whole life I’ve grown up watching her going through what I went just two years ago, and what keeps striking me more and more the older we get is how much more mature she is. I don’t mean mature as in serious, or not popping stupid jokes. I mean just emotionally, mentally, she seems so ahead of where I pretended to be, let alone where I really was. She seems more grounded without fighting to be that way. She seems to know more who she is, or at least be more okay with being in the process of figuring it out. She’s much better at fitting in while being herself.

Neither of us are particularly rebellious, since we’ve got parents with pretty strong ideas of how we should behave, but of the two of us, she’s the one with the louder voice, and the greater ability to tune out what our parents are saying. But she’s had to be. I’ve been treated like the ‘star’ example she’s had to be compared to her whole life, so while I lost my sense of self to cope with trying to be that ideal that I’m not at all, she held on to more of hers to cope with not being it. Now she’s the stronger of us both… but craves more parental praise, since she got less when she was younger.

We both need things in their place. But where we feel the places are is worlds apart. for me, things belong a little off-center, a little messier. For her, they need to be straight and precise. Things being off bug her, while things being perfectly predictable bug me. Funny thing is, though, we tend love each other’s specific tastes. Like, we love each other’s rooms, but not the general styles each other’s rooms reflect. Maybe it’s just that we love each other, and so we appreciate what we each do…

She’s who I’d consider my family, and that’s it. Even thought we’re different, I feel closer to her than anyone else. It’s not even that I know everything about her: we’re both very quiet and enclosed. But what we do share with each other, the other understands without hardly any explanation.
But my distancing from our parents is putting a strain on her. Our dad tends to be much sharper with her than before. She’s caught in the middle when the ‘family’ wants something I don’t want. She’s the one who usually gets asked to help around the house because I won’t. I’m an awful big sister right now, and it gets to her sometimes. There have been so many isntances where she’s asked me to just suck it up. For her, I usually do. But not always…

She fits in with the family much better than I do. When I’m with them all at once I feel like I’m drowning, while she keeps treading the water. Again, she’s stronger.

She’s extremely complex. Everyday I’m surprised by something she does or says. I think I have her figured out and the next day I realize I don’t at all. I’d like to pretend I’m like that too, but I’m just a hard-to-reach kind of simple.

My sister is very popular with people until they find out what a lying manipulator she is. She has terrible luck with men, always finding ones who mistreat her. She used to be very artistic and had a wonderful sense of fashion, but after years of abusing drugs, she can no longer concentrate long enough to do anything useful. She is on permanent disability.

I am just about the polar opposite of that, except the artistic part.

My brother has schizophrenia, so his life has been very difficult, but he is as kind and good hearted as I am, which has helped him a lot.