He was always doing the drive to see me because my mom wasn’t very fond of it - she wouldn’t even meet him halfway.Ĭan you remember much from your time with your dad when you were little? He lived about an hour away from us and my parents constantly argued about visitation. He briefly came back into my life when I was about 3 or 4 and I saw him on weekends until I was about 5. I think that’s part of the reason we’ve never been close: We didn’t bond when I was a baby.ĭid you have any contact with your father when you were a child? After I was born she had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t take care of me, so I lived with her grandparents until I was about 2. When she’s manic it’s hard to know what she’s going to say. They just weren’t happy and didn’t really keep in contact after I was born. She has bipolar disorder and some other mental health issues. I think my mom’s psychological problems meant the relationship never really worked out. They were serious for about six months but broke up while my mom was still pregnant with me. My parents had me when they were 18 - they met in high school and I was conceived on prom night.
What was your family like when you were growing up? Here, an 18-year-old woman from the Great Lakes region describes her romantic relationship of almost two years with the biological father she met after 12 years of estrangement. Keith Pullman, who runs a marriage equality blog, has personally talked to over 20 GSA couples and notes that he’s only had a few father-daughter couples speak out, speculating that many of them fear that others will assume the daughter must have been abused in childhood (it should be said that when these unions lead to children, those children can face potentially serious difficulties as a result of the genetic implications of incest, even if some online communities downplay these risks). Related StoriesĬan Split-Second Micro-Expressions Help Employers Hire Smarter?Ĭonsensual incest between fathers and their daughters remains the least reported and perhaps the most taboo sort of GSA relationship.
Perhaps GSA accounts for Kevin Gates’s attraction to his first cousin. Though the research is scarce, those who have studied GSA offer a range of possible explanations for it, including a primordial feeling of always having “belonged” to the estranged relative, a sense of wanting to experience the bonding missed out on during childhood, or simply an overwhelming closeness based on similarities: like meeting a mate who was designed for you in a science lab. According to an article in The Guardian, experts estimate that these taboo feelings occur in about 50 percent of cases where estranged relatives are reunited as adults ( GSA’s discoverer had herself become attracted to the son she’d adopted out when she met him 26 years later, but her feelings were not reciprocated). In the late ‘80s, the founder of a support group for adopted children who had recently reconnected with their biological relatives coined the term “Genetic Sexual Attraction” ( GSA) to describe the intense romantic and sexual feelings that she observed occurring in many of these reunions. Photo: Laurence Mouton/PhotoAlto/Corbis Illustration: Konstantin Sergeyev