H/G too siblingish?

[Amy Z]

Ebony wrote on the main list:

>Family legend has it that the reason why my aunt's best friend has 
>never married is because she's still carrying that old torch for this 
>cousin... who is married with two kids and will never see her as 
>anything more than a *sister*.
>
>20+ years of pining.  Do we *really* want something like this for 
>Ginny?  Or do we want someone who will appreciate her?  

What a sad story.

One of my great-aunts and -uncles started out as sister and foster 
brother.  He was a Jewish immigrant kid, just off the boat, on his own 
in NYC, who was literally wandering the streets looking for his 
brother and latched onto this big family of recent Jewish immigrants 
(he eventually found his brother too).  My aunt's father regarded him 
as a son, and the kids all grew up together (though my aunt and uncle 
were already adolescents when he moved in).  After some years it was 
clear to the two young people that they were in love; they had to 
marshal the support of her siblings, his foster siblings, to insist to 
their parents that they could marry.  I don't know whether my uncle 
and aunt themselves found it difficult to switch from sister-brotherly 
feeling to romantic; perhaps the stirrings of romance were there from 
the beginning so that the sisterbrotherliness was secondary.  It seems 
to have been a long and happy marriage.

I don't think we can draw conclusions from your story or mine about 
Harry/Ginny, or any other relationship that starts with a more 
sibling-type relationship.  I would just throw this out there to say 
that people have a wide range of ways of dealing with the fuzziness 
between sisterbrotherly feeling and romance.  People can definitely 
appreciate someone they've regarded as a sister-why  must Harry fail 
to appreciate Ginny just because he spends a lot of time with her 
family?

Besides, I'd question the premise.  Harry isn't *that* much a Weasley. 
 He's Ron's best friend and a friend of the family, with plenty of 
maternal attention from Molly, to be sure, but not to the point yet 
that he is more a Weasley son than a friend.  I don't think that a 
romance would be jarring.  Hell, one of the primary ways people meet 
partners is by dating their siblings' friends-where it gets weird for 
some people, like your aunt's friend, is when *they* are seen as the 
sibling.  I'm not sure the Weasleys think of Harry as another brother. 
 And I'm sure that Ginny, who's had a crush on him since before they 
met, doesn't think of him that way, though she may come to.

Amy Z

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 Harry liked this clock.  It was completely
 useless if you wanted to know the time, but
 otherwise very informative.
                  -HP and the Goblet of Fire
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