Would you tell your husband if a child was not his? Or would you take the secret to the grave if there was no way anyone would ever find out?

[PalmaBeach]

Lets say you are married and already have one child with youre husband. Say if you cheated on a bussiness trip it was a short fling and the man lives in a diffrent city you will definetly never see him again.

Let's say you get pregnant by the other man. If you (like it's not possible in real live) but if you knew it would never come out that the baby isn't youre husbands. Like the child didn't have any health issues where it could come out.

Would you tell him anyway or take the secret to the grave.

I found out by something someone else let slip years ago when I was a teenager. My mother confirmed it was true but wouldn't give details and forbad me to bring it up again.
I think it has damaged our relationship as there is a lie at the centre of everything. I feel the need to protect my mother but m also angry that I don't know. Even though it feels like a betrayal I have just done a DNA test in the hope of finding some relatives.

I think you need to consider the damage to the child more than the potential damage to the marital relationship.

Well that's not what you wrote in the title.

I was thinking about this the other day (I think about lots of random shit) and how I’d had to have lied not only to dh but his parents as well who love ds2 so much. It’d be a terrible secret to keep but at what stage do you tell, if ever?

Yep this is what my mother did. Unfortunately I did a dna test 2 years after she passed and found out the man who i thought was my father isn't. I wish she had told me.

It will come out somehow, these things always do. What if the baby comes out looking nothing like you or your husband, there will be questions. What if the real father doesn't have any other children? You are taking away his chance at fatherhood. What if he does have an underlying, asymptomatic or undiagnosed genetic condition that he didn't know or didn't tell you about? My Dad didn't know he had the condition he passed on to me and my brother, he was asymptomatic. What about the child, would they forgive you if they suddenly found out that the man who raised them isn't their real father? They may want to find their birth father. I think the truth from the start is the best policy, you risk damaging your marriage but thats karma for sleeping with someone else.

I would never do this to my child, let them think someone was their biological father and lie about it.

whatever the rights and wrongs these days there is more chance of people finding out who or who not is related to them. years ago paternity tests were unreliable, expensive and few bothered so they often took the secret with them.

Which Booker prize nominee was that?

Has your father ever said anything?

how did he find out??

Because she doesn't look like the others? That is like everyone saying Prince Harry's father is Hewitt because they both have ginger hair, when in reality she didn't even meet him until after Harrys birth in 1984

@ShowGirI never and he and my brother are extremely close! It’s all very odd like none of us acknowledge that he looks like a completely different race to the rest of the family

A friend of mine who works in public health says it’s generally accepted that you can’t do big scale research about conditions being passed through families back more than about three generations, because on average globally one in ten people are not the child of the person they think are their father.

I would never try to pass off a child that possibly isn’t my husband’s as his. So unfair to the DH, the child…and so stressful to live a lie for possibly a lifetime.

I’m quite a ‘grey area’ person about a lot of things, but this is black and white to me.

Maybe your mum has told your dad and he is ok with it? I mean, I would have to ask my mum! I couldn't not

You say you couldn't not because presumably you have an open relationship with your mother. When the whole relationship is based on secrecy you sense very young that there are things you can't ask..

I’ve known two women who discovered their ‘dad’ wasn’t their dad, later in life. They had become really interested in genealogy, and unfortunately that led to the ‘surprise’. In both cases, the mothers were dead.
The women, one who is my mum, was absolutely raging about the deceit. She was left very frustrated because she couldn’t get answers from her mother. My mum says that she now views her whole relationship with her mother as a lie. She absolutely hates my grandmother for it.

Hideous thing to do to a child.

Very outing to the tell the original story of how... but someone told him.. not my Grandma.

I have a friend that this happened to - it was devastating for him. He knew something was off, the little girl didn’t look anything like him (I know, not always a marker) and most importantly he didn’t trust his partner. This was pre-23 and me, but he took the child to have their DNA tested. And when the results came in the mail, sure enough, they weren’t related. It was such a horrible situation - he loved that little girl, he was so sad and miserable with the whole situation. He broke it off with his mother, but continued to take the responsibility of a father…until his ex met someone new and moved across the country. And since he wasn’t the biological father he had zero legal rights to stay in the little girl's life. Such an awful situation all around.

I would tell my husband and let him decide if he wanted to remain married. And terminate most likely.

My friend had an affair with our boss and had a blonde girl who did resemble her mum but she also looked just like our boss. She went on 10 years later to have a boy who luckily did look like his dark haired dad so effectively got away with it. Then she moved over water to escape.!

Khloe is certainly not Robert Kardashian's daughter. If you look at pictures of her with her sisters when they were children, she looks like Will Ferrell in elf. You can't compare that situation with Harry who actually looks like Charles and William.