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r/relationship_advice
u/I_spell_badly
I may have accidentally been dating my sister and I didn’t know, what do I do?
I (M29) have been dating my current gf (F26) for almost three years, I was planning on proposing when I got back from my latest work assignment. I thought we knew everything about each other, but we found out today that my pops and her dad are the same person, and this might mean we’re actually half siblings. It also might not, and I’m really hoping we’re not, because my pops is my mom and dad’s boyfriend. Context: my mom and dad are married, but my pops has been with them my entire life. It’s possible that my pops is my father instead of my dad, it never really mattered before, and I look enough like both of them that we didn’t have to care. I knew my pops had other kids outside of me and my younger siblings (I’m the oldest) and I grew up partially with my older foster brother before he got into a fight with pops and left us all behind. I knew pops had another daughter out there, but we’d never met since she lived full time with her mom on the opposite coast.
My pops got hurt on a work assignment with me and my foster brother (who hasn’t talked to my pops in 10 years), so when we got back to our base all three of us got sent to the hospital together. My gf went there to see her dad and we literally ran into each other outside of pops’ hospital room. It kind of dawned on both of us that my pops is the same person as her dad. My gf made this kind of shrieking noise and ran away. I’ve tried calling her like, ten times, since we found out. I can’t face my pops with this, and I don’t know how to tell my mom and dad either. I’m hoping reddit can give me some advice before I have to go home and face them.
I’m seriously in love with this girl, and I’m not sure I could change to just being siblings, but I don’t think I could help myself if we stayed in each other’s lives, and I don’t want to sleep with my sister, but I also don’t know if I could stand never seeing her again.
What do I do?
Edit: No, my mom isn’t a beard. Both my mom and my dad dated my pops independently before they all three got together and my mom and dad decided to get married. They’re the ones who got married because they both had a lot of pressure from my grandparents to “settle down” and have kids. It doesn’t mean their relationship with each other is any different than their relationship with my pops. Why do people keep asking, that’s not the point of the post, I need help!
r/relationships
u/mathemakitten
My (F26) boyfriend (M29) might also be my brother, and I don’t know how to ask my dad about it.
Okay, I’m going to try to provide as much context as possible while maintaining anonymity, because I have been going over this whole situation by myself for days now, and I’m posting this from my hotel room because I can’t find a way out that doesn’t hurt everybody. It’s already incredibly painful for just me.
My parents aren’t together, they haven’t been for most of my life, I lived with my mom and my dad would visit on leave (he’s military). He has another family that I know about but I’ve never met, because he came to us and I never really went to visit them. His other family is a married couple that he's been with since he and my mom called it quits, and their kids. There isn’t any drama there, believe me, all the adults know/know about each other, I was technically born after my dad’s throuple thing started, but it was all talked out between the four of them. I was planned, my mom wanted a kid without needing a man, and she trusted my dad more than a donor so here I am. I think of the couple as my step-parents, and they always come visit us when they’re in town for any reason, I like them, we have a good relationship. But the upshot is I have these step-siblings out there that I’ve never met, because they live on the other side of the country, and it was always easier for my dad to come visit me by himself than for me to go visit all of them. In the interest of full disclosure; I also have an older foster brother through my dad, but he basically disowned my dad and the whole family years ago and I don’t talk to him anymore, so he’s not really relevant.
Cut to a few years ago, I’m starting my graduate program, and I meet my current boyfriend, J, at a bar near the military base in town. We hit it off, obviously, and we started dating. J’s active duty military, so he’s gone a lot, but we made it work. We did tell each other about our families, he talked about his parents and his siblings. I talked about my mom and dad. I mentioned I had a step-family through my dad, but I didn’t really tell him a lot about them, because I don’t know them that well, so I felt like it wasn’t really J’s business, since he’s a stranger to them and, again, we don’t really have a relationship. J mentioned an ‘uncle’, a really close friend of his parents’, who was around a lot when he was growing up. Eventually he told me that his ‘uncle’ was his parent’s partner, that he thinks of this guy as a third parent and he calls him pops. I thought it was a cool coincidence that we both had poly parents, but nothing he said sounded close enough to what I knew about my dad for me to be suspicious. My mom’s always been really open with me about her relationships throughout my life, and she’s also been in poly relationships before, so it was all pretty normal for me and I didn’t question it. The similarities at the time weren’t enough to start ringing alarm bells.
A couple weeks ago J got called for some kind of top-secret emergency mission thing (idk, J and my dad are both military, but I don’t know that much about the internal stuff). My dad was also doing some classified short-term thing on the same base at the same time, so I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce them. My dad got hurt on his classified thing bad enough to end up in hospital, and the doctors put him in a medical coma. I went to visit him before they put him under. My foster brother was also there with him, and we got in a huge fight about everything he pulled with dad and cutting us all out of his life and I left the room basically in tears. I ran into J right outside my dad’s room and I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my whole life. When I’d calmed down a little and I expressed surprise at seeing him there (I hadn’t told him anything, I’d basically stopped looking at my phone) he told me he was there to visit his pops.
My dad and my bf’s pops are the same man. I still can’t really process it. And there’s an even bigger issue than that I’ve apparently been dating my own step-brother for over two years. There’s a non-zero chance he’s also my biological half-brother. My dad and my step-parents were together before he was born, he told me himself they didn’t really keep track.
I don’t know what we’re going to do. I’m still in love with him, I think he’s the love of my life and I wanted to be with him forever. But I don’t think this is something that can be waived away. Even if we break up and just keep going as brother and sister we’re going to have to tell our parents. How can I tell my dad about this? It would crush him to know about us.
I thought maybe we could ask his dad for a DNA test before we talk to my dad about it, that way at least we’d know and we wouldn’t leave him not knowing, which I think would be a lot worse for him, with the way his mind works. But that’s also not something we can really ask for. His dad is a really important person in the military (they’re all in the same branch), and he’s thinking about running for public office in the near future. Having a DNA test out there for his own son could really hurt him if someone dug it up.
r/amitheasshole
u/nickinthemorning
Am I The Asshole for telling my dad about my siblings’ relationship?
This is sort of complicated, but basically my dad is my foster dad, he was a really good friend of my parents and took me in after they died. He’s got an adopted son J with the couple he’s been with since I was about 6, and a daughter O with his ex C. Dad was injured recently on an assignment for work (we’re both in the navy) and I caught O and J kissing in the hospital outside his room. I don’t think either of them saw me. It made me kind of sick, because J might also be O’s half-brother, since my dad got together with J’s parents, my uncle I and my aunt P, before J was born. J calls him pops, even if they’re not related, he's still both of their dads. I’d been nc with dad since I was 18 (we’re working on it) but this assignment and my dad getting hurt really made me think about how stupid we’ve both been. O stopped speaking to me after the fight that made me go nc with my dad, she took his side HARD. J I would see at work sometimes (he’s also navy), but he took dad’s side too, so we haven’t really talked in 10 years. I don’t know how long this has been going on. We took dad to uncle I and aunt P’s house to recover, and J and O came with us. There was this weird tension, and I could tell they were trying really hard to stay as far away from each other as possible and not look at each other. I ended up just telling my dad what I’d seen in the hospital while we were talking. I have a lot to make up for, and I don’t want to start our new relationship keeping secrets. He went white and it sounded like he was choking. I was worried something was wrong, so I ran to get I and P to go help him. I told J and O what happened, and they both started yelling at me. O said it wasn’t my business to tell dad before her, and she still needed time to process because she’d only found out she and J were siblings the same time I found out they were dating. J said I was an asshole for not coming to them first, and went as far as to say that this whole thing could have been avoided if I hadn’t had the fight with dad and cut them all out of my life. For the record, I didn’t. The only person I said I didn’t want to talk to was my dad, the rest of them cut me out themselves. I told J it could have been avoided if he was less of a dick every time we worked together, I wasn’t the one that cut him out, J and O were the ones who stopped talking to me. And I don’t think it’s on me to tell them they’re siblings? I’m not sure how they could not have known, wouldn’t they have checked?
Uncle I came back to get us all to go back to dad’s room to discuss the whole J and O are fucking, thing. J tried to stop me going with them. He said this was family business, and I’d shown I didn’t want to be in their family when I left. But the whole reason I was at I and P’s house was because I wanted to make up with dad. I thought J and O might want that too, but apparently not. I thought O might be on my side, but she didn’t say anything. I ended up waiting in the living room for a while. I heard crying, but no one was shouting. I thought maybe I should leave, but I didn’t want to in case my dad wanted to see me and I wasn’t there. I’d left him for ten years, I didn’t want to be gone again when he needed me. Eventually uncle I came to talk to me. He told me I shouldn’t have told dad before I’d talked to J and O, and he seemed pretty on their side about how I handled everything, he said he was disappointed in the choices I’d made in dealing with dad and J and O. None of this was my choice. The fight with dad is because of what he did. I probably shouldn’t have stayed away so long, but I wasn’t wrong to be angry with him. And I’m definitely not the one dating my sister. Uncle I told me I could go back to dad’s room with the family, but if I caused any more trouble he’d kick me out of the house.
I don’t think I’m the one who caused the trouble, but idk, AITA?