Cousins dating/marriage

[Lanolin]

What do singles think of cousins dating..and marriage. Is it legal or illegal where you are?
Does it happen often?

The only time I've heard of it was in the movie/book Gone with the Wind where Ashley Wilkes married his cousin Melanie Hamilton. Scarlett was jealous as she was in love with Ashley so she married Melanie's brother Charles out of spite.

I suppose cousins with the same surname are somewhat more related than cousins with different surnames? Same male lineage or something? Also I'm sure it happened in the Bible, but can't think of who it was exactly, and if it was prohibited.

 

[Deuteronomy]

Abraham and Sarah married, even though they were brother and sister (half-sister).

In America, most of our 50 States allow 2nd cousin marriages (some have certain restrictions that other States do not concerning these marriages), but only 19 States allow 1st cousins to marry.

 

[Suze]

I have two step cousins ( they r the nephew and niece of my step father so , not my biologicals ) they r married to each other . I'm not convinced it's a good thing , I guess it's because I'm usually pretty good at putting myself in other people's shoes so , when I put myself in their shoes.......it's not a good fit for me .
They wanted to have children so had some tests but discovered that the female couldn't have them , maybe a good thing . In the UK , we have a lot of people from certain Asian countries that r married to their cousins , it's quite common in some cultures . They often have children that r mentally retarded . I'm not 100 per cent on the laws of the UK but , I know it's legal to marry your cousin here but not many of us natives do that . If u do and u want to have kids u have to have some kind of genetic testing first . A lot of the married cousins from Asia , come here already married to each other or , one of them , usually the man , goes back to his home country to get married then brins his bride back here and we don't necessarily get to find out that they r cousins until they have a retarded child .
I also have two step cousins that were sleeping together until , the female discovered her mum in bed with the male cousin that she was sleeping with again , I must stress , not my biologicals my extended biologicals have their own quirks but they mostly relate to mental health and addiction problems .

 

[JohnDB]

Once when I was in college I would go visit my grandparents in TN while I was living in AL. (Parents were either in Idaho or Delaware or maybe Washington....cant remember)
Being the skirt chaser that I was....I casually dated everywhere I went....I, myself was itinerant by nature. Not military....just itinerant.

The girl I was casually dating looked irish with fiery red hair, kinda tall, and very cute. We weren't serious....just having fun.
Then grandpa had to find out about her family from her dad at church. Yep, second cousins. He had a great laugh at me and her over it all. It's not like they were ever close enough to be invited to family reunions or anything....
But the joke.....uggggghhhhh.
Talk about killing a relationship....that "c word" comes out and that ended that. She wasn't thrilled about it either. Her dad teased her about it too. She was scared to even meet me when I got engaged a few months later and I was going to try and tell her before she met her at church. (Sigh....I was a skirt chaser)

Great grandparent siblings had kids and they had kids who had kids....are still labeled "cousins".
So.....it became a thing for a while that I asked the women if they had any family history in a certain area whatsoever.
Some of my known cousins were kinda cute when I was a teenager and young man...but I knew better than to try. P.O.F.....no need to date them.

 

[Lynx]

What do singles think of cousins dating..and marriage. Is it legal or illegal where you are?
Does it happen often?

The only time I've heard of it was in the movie/book Gone with the Wind where Ashley Wilkes married his cousin Melanie Hamilton. Scarlett was jealous as she was in love with Ashley so she married Melanie's brother Charles out of spite.

I suppose cousins with the same surname are somewhat more related than cousins with different surnames? Same male lineage or something? Also I'm sure it happened in the Bible, but can't think of who it was exactly, and if it was prohibited.

Why would you want to? There's a LOT of other women who are not so closely related.

However...

I did hear that in small populations such as in Iceland it can be a concern, to the extent that Iceland made an app specifically to prevent it. Bump your phone against her phone and the phones will tell you if you're cousins.

From google:

Google said:

ÍslendingaApp (App of Icelanders), often referred to as the "anti-incest" app, is an Android application created to help Icelanders check if they are related to a potential romantic partner. It uses the Íslendingabók database to check family ties, including a "bump" feature to compare relationships.

Key Details about the App:

• Purpose: To prevent accidental incest by checking how closely related two people are, as Iceland has a small, closely-knit population.
• • Functionality: Users can "bump" their phones together to see if they share a common ancestor, with an alarm feature to notify them if they are closely related.
  • Database: The app relies on Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), an online database containing genealogical data for 95% of Icelanders over the past 300–1,200 years.
  • Availability: Originally released for Android, it was developed by University of Iceland students.

While the app gained fame for its "incest prevention" alarm, it also serves as a tool for genealogy, a popular pastime in Iceland. The database itself can be accessed online at islendingabok.is.

 

[seoulsearch]

I follow a YouTube channel in which the host has mentioned that from the time they were little, her Egyptian parents had arranged family agreements for her and her sister to marry their (I believe it was) first cousins. She said this was prominent in Egyptian culture, but I haven't done any research into why.

She and her sister refused and married outside the family, which was seen as very rebellious.

The social channels I listen to have been doing episodes about people in the USA on social media who are open about being products of incest, and the mental and physical abnormalities some struggle with.

This makes me think of another type of "in-family" relationships and makes me wonder how prevalent they are -- step-siblings.

I knew of a situation in high school of a guy and a girl who dated, broke up, and then their single parents met, fell and love, and got married, meaning these two now had to live in the same household. They were still teens and couldn't just move out.

Could you imagine finding out your ex was going to be your new brother or sister, and then have to live with them?

I wonder how many in-house attractions there are in blended families... and how it's handled if it's discovered.

 

[Lynx]

I wonder how many in-house attractions there are in blended families... and how it's handled if it's discovered.

Well... genetically there shouldn't be a problem with it. But the "ick" factor would still probably be off the scale. Imagine the trouble it would cause in the Brady Bunch!

 

[Lanolin]

Isaac and Rebekah. Somehow. God told Abraham that his descendants were not allowed to marry Canaanite women, so I guess that restricted the gene pool? Ishmael did not listen and went ahead. As did Esau?

Jacob married Rachel AND Leah. What a two timer. And he also had children with their maids, like Abraham did with Hagar.

So if this is all God-ordained, how come it's all prohibited now?

Solomon had many many many wives.

This is when the Bible just doesn't make sense to me. Oh and Tamar and Judah. David had many wives, Michel, Abigail, Bathsheba etc. And the woman with five husbands. Maybe not all at the same time but still. That is a lot even by modern standards.

 

[seoulsearch]

Well... genetically there shouldn't be a problem with it. But the "ick" factor would still probably be off the scale. Imagine the trouble it would cause in the Brady Bunch!

Exactly.

Though apparently behind the scenes of the show, it was no-holds-barred (there are all kinds of stories that one of the sons was dating the mom.)

Bringing it back to modern, everyday families...

I wonder how the parents would handle things if they found out their children, who were all living under the same roof, were attracted to each other (and even later on when they became independent adults.)

I occasionally read stories about this, and I'm sure it exists, maybe more than we know, but I would guess the stigma generally keeps it in the shadows.

 

[Lanolin]

Well... genetically there shouldn't be a problem with it. But the "ick" factor would still probably be off the scale. Imagine the trouble it would cause in the Brady Bunch!

Brady Bunch movie - Marcia and Greg Brady.
But then there was also Jan and her invisible boyfriend, George Glass.

 

[Lanolin]

In the teen movie Clueless - Cher Horiwitz and Josh Lucas (ex step-brother)

 

[Lynx]

Isaac and Rebekah. Somehow. God told Abraham that his descendants were not allowed to marry Canaanite women, so I guess that restricted the gene pool? Ishmael did not listen and went ahead. As did Esau?

Jacob married Rachel AND Leah. What a two timer. And he also had children with their maids, like Abraham did with Hagar.

So if this is all God-ordained, how come it's all prohibited now?

Solomon had many many many wives.

This is when the Bible just doesn't make sense to me. Oh and Tamar and Judah. David had many wives, Michel, Abigail, Bathsheba etc. And the woman with five husbands. Maybe not all at the same time but still. That is a lot even by modern standards.

That's an easy one. Back in the day it was not so much a problem because our genetic code was still mostly fresh and whole. What we consider inbreeding probably didn't cause the same problems.

Now our genetic code is rather ragged and faulty. Entropy be like dat. We got some problems they didn't have back then. So we have to take measures to work around those problems, like not marrying too close.

 

[Lanolin]

What is the population of Iceland?
It's Pakistani families in the UK that have this problem. I thought Pakistan had lots of people. They are mostly muslim as well.
Koreans have so many Park surnames, that they have to check as well.

Marrying your own kind seems encouraged in many cultures. Up until modern day, intermarriage with different races was frowned upon, and even now some people don't want anything to do with what is foreign to them, so what are people supposed to do? Marry someone in their own family? Hello birth defects.

Hybrids are more vigorous, but don't always breed true ie. hybrids can't make exact copies of themselves as hybrids. You'll always have a different hybrid offspring. Is this a good or bad thing. Interbreeding is not a good thing, but Royal families tend to do this, I suppose to keep the money and property all in a few hands. Can't marry commoners.

Then why all the fuss about Prince Harry marrying Meghan Markle? Of course anybody Harry married would not fit in the Royal family, unless they were also royal themselves.

People/humans are inconsistent.

 

[Lanolin]

What is weird is, ok China has the biggest population in the entire planet, like a billion Han Chinese.
Some Chinese immigrate to other countries, due to lack of land etc. Then the Chinese diaspora are treated horribly as foreigners in another country, and told to stick with their own kind. How does that make sense. There are already billions of Chinese. Why can't they marry out?

 

[Lanolin]

Lynx wrote: Why would you want to? There's a LOT of other women who are not so closely related.

Well, in the book Gone with the Wind, the reason given for Ashley marrying his cousin Melanie was that his family always did that, and they were alike, like marrying like meant they understood each other same background and everything.

If Ashley married Scarlett, maybe his family would not approve, and Scarlett was a bit too wild/passionate for him.In the book, Southerners were proud of their lineage. Scarlett's own family were an Irish/French mix. Irish father, French mother. Probably had Catholicism in common.

I suppose also language barriers?

 

[Lanolin]

Aside from birth defects, like harelips, extra toes, haemeophilia etc if you marry an alcoholic or are one yourself your offspring could have FAS - fetal alcohol syndrome.
And alcoholism tends to run in families.

 

[Lanolin]

Is this now the reason for LDRs--Long Distance Relationships.

But they don't really work do they. If couples are not close, maybe they are TOO different from each other. And their extended families would not get along. I can imagine at those couples weddings they'd have sides that would never talk to each other or even could be enemies like Romeo and Juliet

 

[Lanolin]

About half the couples I know married outside this country. The amount of kiwis who married fellow kiwis (nzers) that stayed together is higher than those who married foreigners.

I think it's a culture shock for foreigners to marry kiwis. If they come here, they have to adjust, often to a smaller population. Many from the UK complain about this. We call them 'whinging Poms'.

I don't know anyone who's married their cousin though. We do call those in Australia our cousins - an affectionate term, but most are actually not real cousins. Though I DO have cousins who live in Australia, they are my female cousins, and I'm not marrying them.

 

[Lanolin]

I think same-sex marriage is kind of TOO alike...I mean biology tells us that won't work for reproduction. But these days, it can be artificial, and even hetero marriages utilise things like IVF.

I don't really want to get into that discussion, but say if you find out you are closely related to the love of your life and you want to have offspring, there's always the option of surrogacy.

 

[Lanolin]

Seoul wrote :Could you imagine finding out your ex was going to be your new brother or sister, and then have to live with them?

I think there was a movie about this, starring Lindsay Lohan. Our little secret? Or maybe I was thinking something else.

She was also in The Parent Trap, where she met her twin sister, who actually really was Lindsay Lohan playing her double. So she was sister to her sister, and their single separated parents got back together again.

Yea I watched too many Lindsay Lohan movies. I've seen Mean Girls a few times. I think in case of Lilo, it's because, she's a redhaired/ginger and she stands out. Gingers are not supposed to marry fellow gingers, because well, their offspring will be super gingers.