To not go to my cousin and cousin's wedding

[Refuse]

NC as I've posted quite a bit about this relationship over the years.

Two of my first cousins have organised a Christmas wedding and I refuse to attend it out of principle. There are millions, if not billions, of suitable partners for these two so why choose each other. We are all first cousins!

My parents, aunts and uncles and my siblings all intend to attend but I won't be moved. I know it probably won't make a little bit of difference to them (my cousins) but I can't go knowing full well how much I disapprove of their relationship.

My immediate family feel similar to me but will go regardless. They want me to attend and in truth there is nothing stopping me from going other than my dislike for their relationship. I know it's not unreasonable to not attend a wedding but I just had to get this out now that invites have come along.

startrek90 I can't believe I'm coming across as horrible just for having an opinion. I'd rather just get the thread deleted tbh as I've read every post and taken it on board. I don't want an ongoing saga, I can see that in the main IABU, according to this thread.

But you ARE being judgemental and prejudiced.

And it is your fault that you are losing your friend, and your cousins - you are making that choice for yourself.

You don't have to lose them at all. You can accept that, although you wouldn't want to, they do love their own cousin (bearing in mind that they did not have a close relationship when growing up, nor saw each other much) and and it is their life. Nut you are choosing not to accept that and you are throwing away the friendship. This is not the actions of a best friend I'm afraid.

No, I wouldn't want to marry my own cousins - but then I grew up along side them and saw them fairly regularly and knew them properly as closer family members. I doubt I'd have wanted to marry a close friend who I had known from birth/young childhoods either though - for similar reasons.

But the bottom line is that they are not doing anything wrong. It is not incest. It is not illegal.

Once you have made your decision to no go and not support your cousin(s) then I suspect that will be it - you will have lost your cousin/friendship, quite probably forever - and I would suspect you will also have to accept a reduction in your relationship with their parents, etc. too as a result of your choices.

Enjolrass I hope such a day never comes. I've lost a best friend and two cousins. Not by my own making.

It absolutely is 100% of your own making. You are the only person who isnt able to get past your feelings and paint on a smile for your so called best friend's wedding. Only you have a problem doing that. Only you are ending the friendship. Your cousin isnt saying "love my husband or leave my life" she wants you there. YOU are choosing to stay away. Which is fine, but it is YOUR choice. She isnt making you do that. You made her choose her husband or you. And that backfired on you. Risk you take. You lost. But due to your own actions.

I really wish your cousins a wonderful day surrounded by those who love and support them.

I cant honestly believe you would rather support her in marrying an abusive man than marrying a decent man who loves her.

What sort of fucked up are you? that isnt normal, you realise that dont you?

OP, I don't understand why you say "The only issue here is our family bond" in the context of the circumstances when you would or would not support your cousin by turning up to the wedding. Are you saying you would support her in every single circumstance except this one? Why? Is it really the case that you won't attend a wedding that you feel is icky but would attend one that made you feel afraid for the bride, or where you felt she was marrying someone inherently horrible?

I just want to stand up for the OP a little here. It's very easy to say that she's choosing to end the friendship.

However, imagine if your best mate did something that was legal but morally abhorrent to you. You wouldn't really feel like you had a choice in ending the friendship - it would be easy to feel that the best mate gave you no option, that it was, in a way, her fault that the friendship was ending.

Whether the OP should feel so horrified about the cousin thing is a different matter. The point is, the OP does feel that horrified, and it's this feeling that takes away her choice.

The more I read of the OP, the more the two cousins marrying comes to seem by far the least odd aspect of this overheated dynamic. The really odd part is how personally the OP is taking it - this is marriage as personal slight. Can anyone but a mid-Victorian stage Papa really think they should have a right of veto on someone else's marriage?

Maid, I'm afraid the obvious 'legal but morally abhorrent to someone' parallels that come to mind are someone finding a mixed-race or same-sex marriage abhorrent, and I doubt anyone would find that a legitimate reason to try to dissuade the friend from her 'legal but morally abhorrent' marriage and to end the friendship. The OP's robotic parroting of 'this is family marrying family' has the same outraged slogan-y ring to it as 'Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve'.

I agree it's a bit odd and I've told the OP that I'd have found it odd if two of MY cousins had married. But I would force myself to smile and nod and fake acceptance because acceptance will follow. So don't risk sidelining yourself OP

I don't mean that I'd have found it as hard as the oP is finding it though.

I sort of understand your reasoning behind this OP as it's not an everyday occurrence.

But you come from a large family, they don't know each other well yet have fallen in love.

It seems like you either strangely want a relationship other than platonic with your female cousin, or are a control freak, very prudish and moralistic and also where is your own relationship? Why are you so invested in this?

You are being very unkind and not thinking of this couple who obviously live and care for you yet you don't care about their feelings. If this marriage ultimately fails it fails for reasons probably outside intermarriage.

For what it's worth I know an Indian family (high caste) who intermarried for a few generations for exclusivity and caste reasons (the woman I knew told me this) and her brother was born with Downs Syndrome and she cared for him. The family were told it was due to inbreeding that there were birth defects and so her and her DH (both first cousins) made a decision to have no children which did upset her. She also wished she'd been allowed to date/marry outside that circle so not to have those problems.

The thing is, all I've gathered from the OP is that she doesn't like it. There's no reasoning behind it at all. Very little explanation

She's entitled to feel how she feels, but we're entitled not to feel the same way, and to try and get her to examine how she might change the way she feels, or at the very least, see the implications of how she *behaves8 as a result.

OP we don't know you. I am sure you're very nice. But You can't expect people to just agree with you on the basis of what you've written here

AFAIK, Down's syndrome is not caused by inbreeding, as it results from non segregation of the chromosome, which is why it's more frequent in older mums.
The problem with inbreeding is that a higher percentage of offspring is homozygous for recessive alleles that wouldn't normally cause disease. I.e. they get two copies of "defective" genes.

Narp she's repulsed by it... It turns her stomach.

It's not as if it's brother and sister incest is it??!!

Op yanbu. I'm astounded that so many on mn seem to have no problem with cousins marrying.

The thought of one of my ds's marrying one of my sisters dd's makes my stomach churn to be frank and there's no way I could support a marriage between cousins in my family.

OP, I wanted to understand your point of view because I do have some sympathy. But I've lost any desire to see where you're coming from now, having seen that you're really only interested in sentimentally raking over how close you used to be, and interested in nothing but what you've lost.

You and your cousin may be relatives, but the truth is you're a rotten friend.

One of the many things I find worrying about some responses on this thread is the attitude to cousins "breeding" and "taking a risk by breeding". As oddlylogical says, should we be trying to breed out disability? If so, why? Do we mean that people who we know carry genetic risks - dwarfism, say - shouldn't "breed" in case they pass on their disability? Does that include multiple layers of cousin marriage? Where does that end? We know where that ends, so let's not go there.

Try to keep a sense of perspective - after all, a lot of the way our society works today has come about because Henry VIII thought he had committed incest because he married his dead brother's unrelated wife - incest reached into the spiritual as well as the physical realm back then.

Maid, I'm afraid the obvious 'legal but morally abhorrent to someone' parallels that come to mind are someone finding a mixed-race or same-sex marriage abhorrent, and I doubt anyone would find that a legitimate reason to try to dissuade the friend from her 'legal but morally abhorrent' marriage and to end the friendship. The OP's robotic parroting of 'this is family marrying family' has the same outraged slogan-y ring to it as 'Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve'.

Mild You've made a very good point here that has reminded me of something.

My cousin was one of the brides at the first ever lesbian wedding in [insert big UK City here].

Attending the wedding included parents and aunts and uncles for whom all of their childhood and some of their adulthood being gay - even behind closed doors - was illegal. A crime.

Do you know what they said when invited but told not to come if they didn't want to:-

"Of course we will come - it's your wedding!"
"So lovely that you have met someone - it's so hard to be alone"
"Such a lovely day! Congratulations!"
"So happy for you."

Because they love my cousin and her wife makes her happy. And nothing else really matters.

I can't believe I'm coming across as horrible just for having an opinion.

It's not your opinion, it's your behaviour - snubbing your cousin for not immediately calling it off, calling your family traitors for not doing what you're doing, deciding not to go to their wedding. There's a saying" There are no bad thoughts, only bad actions. We can't really control how we feel about things, but we can control what we do with those feelings and how we let them manifest.

So MaidOfStars - OP is a devout catholic. Her best friend/cousin has an abortion for some reason (reason shouldn't be relevant if all abortion is sin). OP says "I can't be in the same room as her at and will not be attending. I have told her she must have the baby but she won't listen to me."

Relatives all say "No we don't like abortion either, we are Catholics too but we love her and want to show her support despite not agreeing with what she's doing/done"

SO many people have said that OP should probably not go to the wedding rather than turning up in a black veil and wailing and many have said they would feel odd about it but would suck it up and put on a brave face because in the end you can't make people do what you think is right and it is very dogmatic to be so convinced that you are 100% right that you will lose people you love over it.

I don't see how in the situation above you can honestly say that it isn't OP's choice to end the relationship but the cousins.

But yes there really are people this dogmatic in real life too - they have their morals to keep them warm I guess - they dont need imperfect people to have relationships with.

Maidofstars You make a good point. Whether or not the OP is a bit cracked in how she's responded to this relationship, she does feel like something morally repellent has taken place (or genuinely believes she does) and does not feel she can be friends with her cousin now. Trying to persuade someone like this to be relativistic is like trying to persuade a dog to share a bone.

stopping Exactly.

others I'm not defending the OP's feelings on cousin marriage. I share the general 'ick but who am I to say' principle. I am defending her against the onslaught of posters who are telling her that how she feels is invalid. Educate, inform, but telling her she's wrong to feel how she feels isn't helpful.

And yes, I'd say that about someone who was struggling with Adam and Steve (however repelled I am by their opinion). Shutting it down with 'You're a dick' isn't always right (although it can be sometimes right).

I'm not really clear why OP cares so much, so I don't know if I think she's being unreasonable or not to have the feelings she has. Have the cousins grown up together? Is she the third wheel? Is it just the loss of friendship? She hasn't clarified her feelings on the biological aspect.

And anyone that tried to start up a eugenics argument, even under the coy fucking banner of 'you know where this ends up', well....that annoys me.

I reckon it happens more than you'd think. Not marriage! but a relationship of sorts. Just watched a film where there were two first cousins pretending they weren't in a relationship. I know that's only a film, but it made me think, that's what you would do, you'd hide it. so i reckon it's not as UNcommon as some other strange things.......