Abstract: The nuclear family ideal is failing to deliver on its promises. Not only are Americans choosing to delay and avoid marriage, but those who do marry and have children increasingly find the nuclear family structure isolating, fragile, and insufficient for caring for children and other dependents. One reason the marriage and nuclear family ideal may have hung on so long is the failure to develop a workable, modern alternative—not a second best to settle for, but a compelling, robust, alternative vision of how people relate that can accomplish what the nuclear family is failing to. This Article articulates such a vision and illustrates how the American legal system can support it. A new paradigm is necessary, one that does not focus so exclusively on one’s nuclear family but recognizes the web of connections every person has, which exist on a gradient of closeness and commitment. We call these connections a person’s parafamily and argue that both American culture and the American legal system should recognize, affirm, and support parafamilial connections that individuals choose to build their lives around. In particular, American law should shift away from assuming a person’s most important relationships are within one’s nuclear family and instead adopt a parafamilial framework, where the core questions are how close one person is to another and in what way, rather than whether one person is related to another by blood, marriage, or adoption. Inspired by extended and blended families, committed platonic friends, and polyamorous people who already live a life defined by parafamilial connections, this Article aims to rewrite the fundamental assumptions about family that underlie American law, replacing the focus on the nuclear family with a more flexible framework—a framework that is broader, more realistic, and more adaptable than the nuclear family ideal. Coupled with this big picture goal, however, is an intense and intentional commitment to practical law reform and a deep respect and appreciation for the value that nuclear families provide. Thus, the Article’s reform suggestions are all targeted toward developing realistic innovations in the law we already have, rather than toward reimagining all legal relationships from the ground up.