Sisters Jinger Duggar and Joy-Anna Duggar weren’t always close.
“I would say we were close in proximity but not like relationally,” Joy-Anna, 28, revealed on the Wednesday, July 29, episode of Jinger’s eponymous podcast. “The bond was not really there.”
Jinger, 32, and Joy-Anna are two of their parents’ Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s 19 children.
“There was an age gap, and I felt like the age gap was segregated by sections,” Jinger explained of the distance with her younger sister. “[Our family was] separated by an age gap of the older kids, the middle kids, the younger kids. I was, kind of, in the older section for many years [of] the six oldest.”
Jinger further recalled how the family would often be separated by ages whenever they attended “political events” or other group outings. Viewers got to know the family in 2008 on their TLC reality show 17 Kids and Counting, which was renamed to 19 Kids and Counting as the brood expanded.
“I was in the older half, and then I just felt like you were one of the little kids and you were sandwiched between, you know, a lot of boys or whatever,” the Becoming Free Indeed author recalled. “We also [have] different personalities, but I’m saying when you were little, that’s what I remember, like, you’re much younger than me. It’s crazy ‘cause you’re not like you’re really.”
While Joy-Anna wasn’t bothered by the four-year age gap with her big sister, she believes that their core personality differences did contribute to the distance.
“[We were] very, very different as kids,” Joy-Anna acknowledged. “I think part of it is because I was so, like, ‘I will not be a girly girl. I will not wear nice clothes,’ … and anytime we had to go anywhere, it was [a] constant battle, like, ‘We are going to get Joy out of this nasty T-shirt that she’s been wearing for 3 days, and she’s going to wear a nice shirt and she’s going to like it’ [because] I would always wear the boys’ T-shirts.”
By the time Joy-Anna began courting now-husband Austin Forsyth, she took more of an interest in dressing up.
“We just had very different interests and I was like, ‘I will never understand why they like shopping so much,’” Joy-Anna quipped. “But, it’s grown on me.”
After Joy-Anna married Austin, 32, in 2017, she got even closer to Jinger, who was already married to Jeremy Vuolo at the time. (Both Jinger and Joy-Anna are now each moms of three.)
“We live so far away, but out of all the sisters, I feel like I do talk to you the most,” Joy-Anna said, referring to Jinger’s home base in California across the country from the rest of the Duggars in Arkansas. “We are very, maybe, just chill and we are who we are. I feel like we’re in the same season of life. At least for me on my side, I feel like I can just pick the phone up, and there’s no pressure to talk to you, but also when we do it’s, like, there’s been no time between our conversations.”
