How to understand the sentence "Cousins are three thousand miles, cousins are five hundred years"?

Life is too long to escape a few old sayings. Even now, there are still some old sayings around us. Although these old sayings are good and bad, most of them reveal the philosophy of life of the older generation. Reading these old sayings is also beneficial to people! Here, according to my own understanding, I will talk about my understanding of this old saying from two aspects.

Before we say this old saying, we should first talk about the meaning of cousins. It is estimated that for many young people nowadays, it is not necessarily so clear about cousins and cousins.

I remember that before I got married, I didn't care about cousins, so I couldn't tell whether my usual brothers and sisters were my cousins or cousins in those years. Later, when I had children, I had to make up my knowledge.

Cousin: Generally speaking, what are our cousins? Their parents are their mother's brothers and sisters. For example, between your aunt's children and you, they are called cousins. On the contrary, the children of your father's brothers and sisters are cousins with you.

After understanding the above knowledge, let's take a look at the meaning of "cousins are three thousand miles, cousins are five hundred years". Here I make two explanations:

One is: literally, cousins are three thousand miles apart and cousins are five hundred years apart. It can be understood here that cousins have wide branches and leaves, and many cousins are particularly far away. In fact, what is explained here is that many women used to stay away from their brothers and sisters. But between brothers, the general circle of life is not large, and many brothers live relatively close. Even in the past 500 years, they have basically lived very close.

The other is: from the perspective of kinship, there is a saying that "cousins should not exceed three generations", which means that the relationship between cousins, that is, within three generations, will be closer, but after three, four and five generations, there will basically be no kinship, that is, strangers. Therefore, we use "cousins are separated by three thousand miles" to describe the relationship between cousins, as if they were strangers separated by three thousand miles. But the relationship between cousins is that after 500 years, everyone still has the same blood in his blood. Here, it shows that the relationship between cousins is well maintained and they walk more with each other.

So, is this sentence still correct now?

Personally, I think there is some truth in this sentence even now. Although many people don't have many relatives and friends, there are not many relatives, but because many people don't have a strong sense of extended family now, many relatives are unable to walk. This is the common phenomenon of "breaking off relatives" now. Today's blood relationship is not even as good as a unrelated friend.