There are some serious facts missing in the story here. When were his parents married? When was the half brother born? Was this a known fling? This was definitely something traumatic that happened, but we are left way too hanging for this to be an interesting story.
When George figured out his dad had conceived this child before getting married — that the child was not the result of adultery — he was excited. "I thought it was the coolest genetics story, my own personal genetics story. I wasn't particularly upset about it initially, until the rest of the family found out, and their reaction was different."
His mother and sister could not handle the information, and his father went against their wishes, dedicating himself to reconnecting with his estranged son. "Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart. We're not anywhere close to being healed yet, and I don't know how long it will take to put the pieces back together."
"George" says: "I would want a warning saying, "Check this box and FYI: people discover their parents aren't their parents, they have siblings they didn't know about. If you check this box, these are the things you'll find."
Yeah, like that would have kept George or anyone else from opening this particularly fascinating Pandora's box.
I believe with 90% certainty that "George" is female.
I have a complicated family background myself (not willing to go into it in public under this handle), but in George's shoes, I would not have pushed this; in particular, I would not have told Thomas about his father nearly as easily.
It's not important, but it's interesting that people reacted quite strongly to it. It was an off-hand comment based on the writing style, tone and perspective, a dozen or more things in the article. I should have parenthesized it, and left it at the end of my comment.
I had the same intuition, actually, and I can't really articulate it either. Interesting that someone else had the same notion.
To the extent that I can back it up at all, it seems to be something to do with the concern George has with how his family feels about this - the interpersonal aspects. Which, when stated this clearly, seems ridiculous, since obviously men can have just as much concern about their families breaking up as women can.
It was just a feeling I had while reading the piece.
* George Doe, rather than John Doe; an alias possibly chosen for gender ambiguity, bringing to mind George Elliot
* Uninhibited display of emotion with emphasis: "fell in love with", "so exited about", "so confused", "freaked out", "immediately felt empathetic", "really devastated" - there's loads more. Men tend to take much less vulnerable verbal positions.
Interestingly, a coworker just brought up this article beside me a few minutes ago (not knowing I'd already read it), and he too thought it was a woman writing.
More than emotions, it was that their lives were being affected in some form: something else was being added to it that was not there when they decided to enter into a relationship. Particularly for the mother, she basically entered into a relationship without all the facts known. Maybe she would have decided differently at the beginning.
Personally, I am not sure why the sister is so upset. It's just another sibling, which should bring happiness. But in a world where lawsuits are common, maybe she also feels threatened (sharing of inheritance, for example?).
I think it is fair that the mother is upset. She has to deal with more "baggage." But I don't think this is worth divorcing over. Things must not have been that solid for this to end up in divorce. A strong marriage should have survived this.
It's probably not a good idea to speculate on the relative strength of other people's marriages, especially internet speculation. We still don't know everything that happened; nor should we. So, let's not pretend that we know what is going on here.
The basis of the story is that with genetic testing with a service like 23andMe you can find things that you may not have wanted to have known or expected. Let's just leave it at that.
> So, let's not pretend that we know what is going on here.
Absolutely. When we make bold assertions like "X would Y" we are bringing a huge amount of personal bias, baggage and most of all ignorance to the table. It blinkers us to the vast range of possible realities that our impoverished imaginations (and our imaginations are always impoverished) are incapable of conjuring.
As an exercise, before posting "X must be Y" it is very much worth-while thinking of half-a-dozen movie scripts that could tell a story that would fit the known facts. In the present case they might look like:
1) Basil Fawlty-like character goes off the deep end upon discovering child from before his marriage
2) Uptight wife divorces husband for youthful indiscretion
3) Husband's former double-life as a spy revealed by accident of genetic testing
4) Husband's former criminal life revealed by accident of genetic testing
5) Christian wife divorces when accident of genetic testing reveals husband was not a virgin at marriage as he had always claimed
6) Radical feminist wife leaves husband when she finds out he once patronized--and impregnated--a prostitute...
The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that the reality is far weirder than anything we can imagine. It almost always is.
In none of the above cases would the marriage necessarily be describe as "not strong" prior to being put to the test.
To claim that "a strong marriage should have survived this" is vacuous tautology: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1087. It is true that a marriage strong enough to survive whatever happened would have survived whatever happened. It is also true that a big enough blow will disrupt anything weak enough to be disrupted by that blow (http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/risk_essay/hymn_strain.html)
True, you can't be exactly sure based on a single case. This might or might not have been a strong marriage. Even very strong marriages sometimes but rarely break up out of nowhere.
But the initial statement is true in a probabilistic sense. A strong marriage most of the time will survive learning about this kind of event that happened well before the marriage started. That the marriage didn't survive is not conclusive, but does suggest that it was probably not a strong marriage.
I don't see any problem with that, as long as there is a clear distinction made between what is known and what is weak likely conjecture (and it's anonymous).
Another article linked at the end of this one mentions a bit more. It says the unknown son was conceived before the writer's mother and father got together and that part of the upset of the family was that the father wished to connect with this new-found son against the wishes of other family members.
I'm sorry, this is just insane then. Divorcing someone on the grounds that they had a child before you were ever together and didn't know about it? Sounds like bullshit. Sucks that this guy thinks he's responsible for breaking up his parents.
If you think that's bullshit, you're not considering all the possible factor, or don't understand how a decades-old marriage works: through lots of compromises, that people sometimes feel unhappy about, but not enough to risk what they've gotten used to.
So maybe the mother had felt (probably for years) that the father wasn't appreciating her enough. And now he's making more effort to connect with this unknown child than he's spent on his wife and other children in years... suddenly the pent-up dissatisfaction comes out into the open, grievances are aired and people say hurtful things that make reconciliation impossible...
It doesn't actually make any implication that Tomas was conceived before they met. Maybe an affair early on in the relationship that the father managed to cover up.
>>Sucks that this guy thinks he's responsible for breaking up his parents.
In this situation I can imagine talking to my father about it, but talking to everyone else in a family was a decision he made. I'm not passing judgment either way, but he wasn't like he was passive here.
It's definitely not his fault, nor the fault of the test in question. No one should entertain a divorce based on circumstances from decades ago, and before you were even together. His parents aren't divorced because of the unknown son, nor his fathers natural inclination to contact him.
Thanks for pointing that out. How that was laid out makes me rather frustrated at Vox because one would expect that the "full" article would be more detailed than a sidebar story in the much longer article about 23andme and the various ethical issues it creates for adopted people and adoptees. Instead, the linked article gives less of the story and the emotions surrounding it, leading more to confusion than anything else.
The other article mentions that this process "uncorked" years of "repressed" feelings. Divorce is often the end product of a long process; it looks like in this case, the genetic discovery was the last straw that broke the camel's back.
The problem there is that lack of information gave way here to fairly extreme and charged claims. Elsewhere in the thread, there were people claiming that the half-brother was the result of adultery, which is pretty high up there on the soap opera scale. Not excising that from this article would have made it a better story.
I also found it strange that they were opening up (albeit anonymously) about something very personal, but not really telling the story in a way that could have engaged us more.
I think the meat of the article is not the human drama that ensued, but the fact that there was an online service, and a button in the UI, that caused far more greater effect to the life of the whole family than just sating 'George's curiosity. Like there was a hypothetical Amazon order form that had an innocent radio button at the end with the legend 'Order free drone strike to the recipients address'.
Not sure that's relevant - that's the reality show part of the story. The point is the product that 23andme sells and the risk associated with it is not understood by their customer. In this case it's lead to a family break-up and therapy for the author.
