[user104658]

Originally Posted by Livia

Someone close in my family. We all saw it play out...

Unless you lived with them in their house, and were in every room where every conversation took place, no you did not. You heard 2nd hand information from them about how it played out, and chose to believe one side over the other. It cannot possibly be any other way. NO ONE knows the full truth about what has been said or done behind closed doors. Again, you just (understandably) trust the account of events given by the person close to you, and saw the effect it had on them. You don't "know". No one "knows" about other people's relationships. It's purely observational.

Doesn't make me an expert but it shows me it can happen. And you can't really say that people don't abandoned family relations on a whim when I know they sometimes do. Not just their father but their aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents...

They don't abandon close, well maintained family relationships for no reason. They might sometimes abandon relationships with people who (wrongly) assume that family relationships are guaranteed and therefore low-maintenance. Those are the people who are "shocked" when the relationships break down, because they didn't do anything "wrong", while failing to factor in that they also didn't do anything "right". They just assumed all was well.