Here is a question worth taking literally: if preservation works, what exactly are you preserving it for? Once you have decided that biostasis makes sense for you, a second question arrives that is harder than the first, and most people would rather not look at it directly. Should the people you love be preserved too?
It sounds like an add-on. It is not. It is the question of whether any future you might wake into is a future worth waking into.
Run the revival scenario all the way to the end
Imagine the good case, the one the whole enterprise is built around. Decades or centuries pass. Medicine advances. Revival works, and you open your eyes. Now finish the scene honestly: your partner chose conventional death. Your children did. Your parents and siblings did. You continued, and every relationship that gave your life its shape ended permanently while you were waiting. The payoff you bet on turns out to be more existence without most of what made existence matter.
That is not an argument against preserving yourself. It is an argument for not stopping at yourself. The value of a life is mostly relational, so preserving the biology while letting the relationships lapse keeps the container and pours out the contents. The dedicated piece on what if I wake up alone sits with exactly this fear; signing up your family is the practical answer to it.
Their choice is also a choice about you
It is easy to frame this as your preference for company. Turn it around. If you preserve and someone you love does not, they are not only deciding their own fate. They are deciding that whatever future you might reach happens without them. Most people, asked plainly, "do you want me to potentially wake up in a future where you chose to be permanently gone?", find the question reorders their priorities. They had simply never been asked it, because almost nobody frames mortality as a thing two people decide together.
That gives you a gentle, non-coercive opening. Not pressure, not guilt, which only ever buy resentment instead of commitment. Just the honest sentence: "I am arranging preservation, and the futures where I might continue feel incomplete without you. I would really like you to consider it too."
Children and partners change the math, in both directions
With children, the stakes are the sharpest. A parent preserved while a child is not means potentially waking into a world where your child lived an entire adult life and died. You missed all of it: the accomplishments, the struggles, the becoming. If a child is preserved too, the parent-child bond can persist across radical timescales. You get to see who they turn into. They keep you as a resource in a future neither of you can picture.
Partners face the same fork. "Until death do us part" quietly assumed death was non-negotiable. If it becomes negotiable, then one partner preserving alone is choosing permanent separation where continuation together might have been possible. A fair number of couples find that the preservation conversation clarifies the commitment rather than complicating it: "I want to face whatever comes with you, so let us both arrange it." Seen that way, signing up together is less a logistics decision and more an act of love. It is also a direct answer to the worry that the whole thing is selfish.
The cost is real, and smaller than the fear of it
Family preservation does cost more than individual preservation, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest pitch. Two adults double the membership; adding children adds more. But the funding structure does most of the heavy lifting. Preservation is typically funded through life insurance. Premiums scale hard with age. Coverage for children is usually very cheap, and young adults pay modest rates. For many families the total lands somewhere near a single car payment. The full breakdown lives in general funding methods and the membership fees article. Set against what households already spend to buy time together, vacations, the good house, the shared experiences, family preservation is the same instinct pointed further into the future.
And yet you cannot sign them up
This is the part that has to stay firmly in place, or the rest curdles. You cannot make this choice for another adult, the same way nobody got to make it for you. Pressure produces compliance, not conviction, and a resentful enrollment is worse than none. What you can do is share your reasoning openly. Offer to cover the cost if money is the only barrier. Tell them honestly what their presence in a possible future would mean to you. Then respect the answer.
Some will be in immediately. Some need months. Some will never agree, and you preserve yourself regardless. Even a no today is not always permanent: watching you treat this seriously, for years, plants something that can surface later when they face their own mortality more directly. The work is in explaining it well, not in winning.
Preserving yourself saves a life; preserving the people who make that life worth living saves the point of saving it.
The conversation has a quiet bonus regardless of how it lands. Families that talk about preservation end up talking about the things families normally avoid: what makes a life worth continuing, how much these bonds are actually worth, what future any of us is hoping for. Those conversations strengthen the bond on their own, separate from whether anyone signs anything. Which is fitting, because the bond was the whole reason for the question in the first place.