Woman Fears Her Boyfriend Is Actually Her Cousin After Finding A Family Mystery But Ends Up Unearthing An Even Bigger Secret
Well-buried secrets kept unfolding at one family reunion.
TikTok The hosts of the podcast Two Hot Takes read and react to “crazy Reddit posts,” and one woman’s story had their jaws on the floor. A young woman wrote into Reddit to explain how her parents revealed a deep family secret so she could save her relationship with her boyfriend.
The woman in question is on the verge of turning 19 years old. Her boyfriend, who she’s been dating for almost 2 years, is also 19. According to the woman’s account of the relationship, “everything is going great. We got emancipated and now own an apartment outside of a very small town, and are soon to open a car wash together.”
But their plans for the future were nearly extinguished when the woman learned about her family's hidden secrets while attending a family reunion.
A family secret seemed to threaten the woman's relationship with her boyfriend when it was revealed their grandmas were related.
She explained in her post that at the reunion, her family was discussing her late grandmother on her dad’s side when her dad brought out photos of the grandma.
“My mother-in-law (I will be referring to my boyfriend’s mother that way) freaked out and looked super nervous when she saw pictures of my grandma. She left the room for a few minutes while the topic continued. She later came back with pictures of my and my boyfriend’s grandmothers, both not alive right now, together.”
The woman stated that her mother-in-law had pictures of the two grandmas together dating back to their late teens and early 20s.
“Apparently, my great-grandfather had an affair, where he had my boyfriend’s grandmother, and since my grandma was the oldest, she knew about it, apparently.
The woman notes that the two grandmas were raised separately, but their relationship would have made her and her boyfriend second cousins.
“Obviously, me and my boyfriend started to cry. I started to have a panic attack… but my parents seemed so calm,” the woman said. She stated, “eventually, my dad snapped,” and revealed the true nature of his relationship with her. He said, “We need to say something, you can all calm down.”
Her dad revealed that the woman was not his biological daughter, which made it okay for her and her boyfriend to date, as they weren’t actually cousins by blood.
“I stopped crying, but only for a second,” the woman explained. “Still, to this day, those words keep repeating in my mind.” Her parents’ big reveal was that they’d dated in college, then split up, and reunited a few years later when her mom was 5 months pregnant.
They explained that her dad had promised her mom to give the daughter his last name and raise her, “which he’s done a great job at,” the woman said. “He was the one to sign my birth certificate, making me unrelated by blood to him, therefore, unrelated by blood to my boyfriend.”
She noted that her mom didn’t want people to know that she wasn’t really his daughter, “so she made him keep the secret for 19 years.”
In a study conducted by Katharine Greenaway from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, over 600 participants holding over 10,000 secrets were interviewed to determine if the burden felt when holding a secret transferred to others when told to keep a secret, as well.
The study noted that “the closer one is to the confider, the more one's mind wanders toward the secret, predicting increased feelings of intimacy, but also a burden. The more a secret has overlap with one's own social network, the more one conceals the secret on the other's behalf, predicting increased feelings of burden.”
Greenaway reported that "we do seem to be burdened by other people's secrets… It can be really socially taxing as well as personally taxing."
Although a public reveal at a family reunion may not have been the best way for this woman’s family secret to come to light, hopefully, she and her parents can find some peace with its reveal.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.