You can't really help who you're attracted to, but what if the person you're the most attracted to ever happens to be a blood relative? Like your father? Such was the case for an 18-year-old woman who dropped some real talk about her now two-year relationship with daddio in a recent interview. BUCKLE UP, somebody's getting their deepest assumptions challenged!
First things first: You've no doubt heard of genetic sexual attraction, if not by name or abbreviation—GSA—then by concept. It's when two people who are related to each other experience strong sexual attraction—kissin' cousins!—but it's especially common when estranged relatives meet as adults, either in adoption or sperm donor scenarios, or when absent parents or siblings find each other later in life and become flooded with a witches brew of mixed-up longing.
It's also said to happen in 50 percent of such reunions, which is fairly bewildering. Some people theorize that it's possible because, in addition to the many reasons you might be drawn to someone genetically similar to you—they look like you, act like you, talk like you, share some of your interests and DNA—that because you didn't grow up together, you missed out on normal bonding, and also the so-called Westermarck Effect, a reverse sexual imprinting where familiarity breeds a kind of necessary repulsion that's thought to desensitize you to sexual attraction for your siblings and parents on purpose. Nature's defense against inbreeding.
Barbara Gonyo, who coined the term GSA and noted its emergence alongside relaxed adoption laws in the 70s and 80s that gave adoptees easier access to their birth parents and siblings, experienced the phenomenon herself with her son Mitch. From a 2003 piece in The Guardianby Alix Kirsta on the subject: