"I found out we're cousins": A woman gives her husband a DNA test and the marriage falls apart
Giving a birthday gift to someone you love is something that requires time and a lot of consideration. Imagine having thought of something unique and decidedly unusual for your partner, which would leave them speechless: a DNA test! But if this idea, instead of being brilliant, turned out to be harmful to your marriage, how would you react? The story of this English family gives us food for thought on the subject.
via mirror.co.uk
In the letter anonymously sent to Slate's Dear Prudence podcast, and later reported on the Mirror Online newspaper, a woman told how her husband's birthday party turned into a nightmare in a flash: "I wanted to surprise him by gifting him a DNA test but as soon as the results arrived we all had a the real shock. In fact, we discovered that we were first cousins on the paternal side. You cannot understand how much this news has affected our marriage, we are now in a complete crisis. We sleep in separate rooms and we don't know what to do. We alos have a child of only two years. From that moment on we have continued to leaf through our childhood photo albums in search of answers but we haven't come up with anything ".
As the woman later elaborated, her husband's parents have been together for 30 years and her father-in-law has always boasted that he married the only person he had ever kissed. If this news came out it would then end up undermining his entire family, bringing to the surface old stories of marital infidelity. It's precisely for this reason that the protagonist of this bizarre story could not even confide in her mother and sisters.
The host of the podcast and her guest, the literary agent Connor Goldsmith, on the one hand tried to cheer the woman by telling her that what happened to her is not that rare but on the other hand they still had to admit that in most cases like these, marriages end up failing. What do you think of it?
