Family or friends?

I know by this time all of you must be thinking that I always have a question as the topic name. But these are questions for you all to think. If I make a statement then it will be like imposing my own thoughts on you but I want all of you to think about the question and analyze things that I have written in the blog. Ok, now coming back to the topic in hand; Family or Friends? I have a big extended family and loads of friends too... I feel that family is the support that you will have for life. No matter how much you fight with your siblings or no matter how much you resent your parents rules and regulations, you will always love them and they will always love you. They might criticize you but they will always bring out the faults that nobody else will. They will tell you things about you so that you can work on it and improvise. We can hate our siblings for being really mean or not being concerned about us but we will be wrong. When someone is close to us and we love them, we don’t see the need to tell them how much we appreciate their love and help in every step of life. We take our family for granted and that makes us hurt them also.... But if we look closely then don’t good friends do the same? Don’t they support us and scold us when we are wrong? We love our friends but don’t think twice before sharing everything in our life with them. Is it only because they are also facing the same problems as we are due to age similarities? We chose our friends but don't have the option of choosing a family... but on the other hand we can make many friends and some friendships fade away but relations don’t break easily... I could only conclude that friends cannot substitute family and family cannot substitute friends... they are both important and balance mutually exclusive parts of our life...