Woman Slammed for Dumping Boyfriend After Finding Out He's a Distant Cousin

A woman has been criticized for ending things with her boyfriend after discovering they are distantly related.

According to a post shared to Reddit's "Today, I F***ed Up" subreddit, the woman was left "grossed out" after learning from her cousin her partner was part of her extended family.

"I'm the family genealogist," her cousin explained. "I have done hundreds of hours of genealogy research and have a composite family tree of well over 8000 individuals."

In the post, he explains that he said they got talking to her at a family wedding a few months back where she introduced him to her boyfriend. The cousin said "all was well" until she happened to mention her partner's name in passing.

The budding genealogist "immediately recognized" his surname from the family tree—so decided to delve into his family history.

"I asked who his dad and grandfather were," he wrote. "I pulled up my research and sure enough, they were 3rd cousins once removed."

At the time, he remembers both he and the woman's boyfriend having "a laugh about it" but even then he could tell she was "less than thrilled."

It's fair to say there was some pretty significant fallout from the revelations.

"I later found out that she just couldn't take that information and was grossed out by it," her cousin wrote. "She broke it off with him that night and it caused quite a bit of drama in the family."

To make matters worse she ended up "blocking" her cousin on Facebook and remains angry at him for "even telling her about it" in the first place.

The post has received over 14,000 upvotes on Reddit, where most users felt the woman had made a mistake in ending things over the discovery.

Zer1223 felt her response was "irrational" given how distantly they were related. Others like Trashboygold went further, branding her "an absolute moron" for breaking up with her boyfriend over it.

Some, like Bupod, suggested she was just "lashing out" after "the humiliation" of learning at a family get-together. "Not everyone could handle that sort of thing well," they noted.

ValanLucasCircus, meanwhile, suggested her decision could present problems in the future. "I'm not a genealogist, but isn't it just a matter of us all being cousins to some extent?" they asked. "Is she going to be single for the rest of her life then?"

One of the most enlightening responses, however, came from a user writing as Justliketexas who discovered he was distantly related to his wife after visiting her grandparents.

"My wife and I are third cousins," he said. "Our great-grandmothers were sisters. It was a little weird at first but now it's just a funny story I tell at parties and to strangers on the internet."

A study published in PLOS Genetics found that people often unconsciously tend to marry someone from a similar ancestry.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the Boston University School of Public Health, and the University of California San Francisco examined mating patterns from across multiple generations in the U.S. and genetic similarities between spouses across three generations.

They found that, of the 879 spouse participants examined as part of the study, those from Northern European, Southern European, and Ashkenazi backgrounds were found to be more likely to choose a spouse of the same ancestry.