The couple interviewed below should be free to legally marry, or simply to be with each other as a couple without having to hide, yet they can’t. Prejudice can be deadly. They are consenting adults who aren’t hurting anyone; why should they be denied their rights? In much of the world, including 47 US states, they could be criminally prosecuted for their love, and might be persecuted severely in addition.
Read the interview below and see for yourself what they have to say about the love they share with each other. You may think this relationship is interesting, or it might make you uncomfortable, or you might find it ideal, even highly erotic and romantic, but whatever your reaction, should lovers like these be denied equal access to marriage or any other rights simply because they love each other this way?
Also please note that someone you love, respect, and admire could be in a similar relationship right now. Should they be attacked and denied rights because of the "incest" label?
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FULL MARRIAGE EQUALITY: Describe yourselves.
Ethan: We grew up in a city of 10,000 people. Our parents grew up in a city of 3,000 people, and a town of 300 near there. We are going to the University in a city of 350,000 people. Our parents were introduced by a mutual friend because of their very similar “weirdness," meaning an academic interest.
Emma is 19 and I am 21, we are of Western European heritage, similar in appearance, with tall athletic builds. We share most interests including one that makes us very employable. I'll fictionalize it and say that we are both very accomplished jazz musicians who get paying gigs at local clubs most weekends.
We are our parents' only children, something that may serve to minimize their anger with us if they figure out our relationship. We grew up in a nice house in a safe neighborhood with good schools, our parents alternately being professionally employed and running their own businesses over the years.
FME: How would you describe your genders? How would you describe your sexual orientation and your relationship orientation... are you heterosexual, bisexual, what? Are you monogamous, polyamorous, or....?
Ethan: While we both think that a lot of unnecessary societal baggage that's attached to the terms, and that much of gender is social construct rather than biological reality, I am male and my sister female.
Both of us feel that intimacy and sexuality are deeper and fuller means of communication with somebody you already have a significant bond with. I have only had relationships with females. Emma has enjoyed a few special female friends, playmates first, but also with a romantic sexual element to the relationship. We have shared experiences with two of them.
Emma: Just two whom I felt could handle the situation. Neither worked out long-term. In both cases the other girl felt like the third wheel because it was apparent to them that my relationship with Ethan was primary.
FME: You currently live with...?
Ethan: We share a one-bedroom apartment. Everyone - landlord, neighbors, people at school - knows that we are siblings. It has a fold out sofa bed which anyone who visits thinks is where I sleep at night.
FME: To confirm, you are in a sexual/romantic relationship with your full biological sister/brother, correct?
Ethan: Yes. It is sexual and it is romantic. But it's so much more than that. We have always been great friends, one another's playmate of choice, and mutual confidants. Because we have such similar interests and skills we weren't of tremendous help to the other in high school. We either both did something really well, or neither of us had a clue. But trying to figure out some of those things that were incomprehensible actually forged another bond as well.
We often enjoy activities as just the two of us because it is something that we both really want to do and other people don’t, and didn’t, want to participate. Sometimes, after we were both dating, girls would tag along because they wanted to be with me, and guys would tag along to be with Emma.
As a funny aside, sometimes they would get bored with the whole thing, in a couple of cases the guy and girl would pair off together, leaving all four of us happier.
FME: What was your childhood like? What was family life like?
Emma: Our parents grew up in towns smaller than where we did. They learned how to keep themselves busy and amused. They told us that we should always be true to ourselves, that we shouldn't change or modify our core beliefs or anything that was important to us in order to fit in or gain acceptance. Because in that situation you aren't being accepted. The façade that you're presenting to the world is what’s being accepted.
FME: Were alternative lifestyles and sex discussed in your family, and if so, how? Can you describe your sexual awakening?
Emma: We have a family member who moved to what I'll call Urbanopolis after graduating from high school because she identifies as a lesbian. The family's reaction was one of sadness that she left. We've known a few people over the years who had non-traditional lifestyles. One of the small towns near our home town became a summer spot for people in the LGBT community, it has theaters, antique stores, bed and breakfasts, and trendy restaurants.
Ethan: We were told about family history which included a few first cousin marriages that took place generations ago, when, as we were told, it was common. That it was frowned upon today has been something of a mixed message-
Emma: -Coming as it did from parents who literally told us not to allow our friends or society to dictate our feelings while keeping in mind that certain harmless behaviors could put you at odds with the legal system.
Being 19 months younger than Ethan I went through puberty shortly after he did.
Ethan: Girls mature faster than boys in most things. So we figure that our effective age difference is less than 19 months. She was a year behind me in school, so 12 months is probably more realistic.
Emma: Sometimes 12 days.
FME: How did sexual affection become a part of the relationship? Was it a sudden event or a gradual process? Did you know ahead of time it was going to turn sexual or was it more spontaneous? Is it clear who made the first move?
Emma: Like all of the kids we grew up with, we did all the normal things. We explored and experimented, We played house and doctor as a cover for that curiosity. If we had to lay money on it we are going to guess that another brother and sister that we knew from high school developed a long-term sexual relationship with one another. They never told us. But we recognize the signs.
Ethan: Our initial relationship was one of being close friends and playmates. Some of that play was physical in nature. All of it was psychologically intimate. We would sit around and talk about what we thought was wrong with other people in that we wondered why they weren't more like us.
We played those adolescent games of sexual curiosity and experimentation but there was something a little bit different in the way that we interacted with one another. The other kids were limited by fear, the concern that they would be discovered and condemned for what they were doing.
Whereas we never felt that we were doing anything wrong. Our limits were based on our genuine affection for one another. Wanting first to "do no harm,” so to speak, to the other. Then, in wanting the other to have the best possible experience as a result of what we were doing.
Emma: It wasn't all of a sudden. It was very gradual; a thousand baby steps. Neither of us really made the first move.
Ethan: It was and it continues to be a dance. One of us takes a step forward and the other takes a step backwards. Usually, but not always, in concert with one another. Sometimes one of us has moved the wrong way and we bump heads. But we remember all the good moves, we repeat them, and our dance gets faster and our moves become more coordinated and natural.
Emma: As far as pre-sexual attraction to one another is concerned, I remember missing my big brother, not having him around to play with, and waiting for him when he started kindergarten.
FME: Can you describe your feelings during that process? How about “the day after”? How did that go? How were you feeling?
Emma: Wow the day after … There were like a hundred “the day afters.” That might be an exaggeration – but not by much.
There was the day after our first kiss, Me wanting him to do it again, and him letting me know that it was okay to kiss him first. The day after the first time my big brother shampooed my hair in the shower, and how I got him to play “magic fingers” on my scalp outside the bathroom. The day after the first time that he placed his palm on me and created a surprising physical response from my body.
The way that nothing ever upset him; how he always moved at my pace and let me absorb each perfect moment before adding another perfect moment on top of it. How nothing about me disgusted him, gave him pause, or made him want to stop.
How his appallingly bad eyesight – responsible for his thinking, and even saying out loud, that I was the most beautiful woman on earth – was never caught by optometrists, or worse corrected.
Ethan: We never really thought it was wrong. Although at first we did think that it was a phase of development, or something educational and temporary in nature. Each of us has always wanted nothing but the very best for the other and each of us has always seen the attributes that the other has to offer. This resulted in a time where each of us acted in the role of matchmaker for the other.
At that age girls are just more social than boys. Emma had a lot of friends whom she had lots of information about. She was able to match known information about her friends to suggest to me and her friend that we might explore the possibility that we would be good together.
Emma: Ethan had fewer close friends but just as much information.
Ethan: Most of it was bad. Emma: So he was able to say, “Well, this is what's wrong with so-and-so,” and “Stay away from whats-his-name.” But he did have a couple of good friends who were “almost good enough for his sister” and he encouraged me to go out with them.
Ethan: We both dated because that was sort of what you were expected to do. But in each situation the person we dated was a less perfect match and a less perfect person than the person who suggested that we date the person we were dating.
FME: Before this had you ever thought this would be possible or enjoyable; did you have any opinion one way or the other about close relatives or family members being together?
Ethan: Growing up we had heard the lies, “If you reproduce with relative the kids will have thirteen fingers and two heads,” and we heard the chauvinistic little stories about how incest was something that happened in trailer parks amongst the poor, or in rural areas amongst the non-urban, or in the South since we lived north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Emma: But of course it's like telling airplane passengers that the plane will crash if you use your cell phone. Yet everybody knows somebody who's used a cell phone on an airplane and they are still alive because there was no crash.
Ethan: We've always been really careful not to expose ourselves which is a double-edged sword. It’s something people in the LGBT community have written libraries about. How certain things are the norm and accepted –
Emma: Like how the public schools promulgate the idea that nobody under 18 should have a single sexual thought in their head while at the same time organizing elementary school dances and promoting boy-girl pairings.
Ethan: We've often wondered about how much of this is nature versus nurture and obviously with GSA cases are academically interesting for this reason. Being of a certain physical type leads you to enjoy certain activities. Gazelles like to run and chimpanzees like to swing from tree branches, you don’t see many gazelles in trees.
When you add nurture to nature, taking two people who have similar physical traits and similar skill sets and place them in an environment where they have similar stimuli, opportunities, and challenges it's a no-brainer that they are going to develop similar likes and dislikes.
Emma: Based largely on our own observations we think that most people operate on a continuum, only the outliers being exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. Most of the population falls into that middle ground where they are mostly heterosexual. So as we developed sexually, we became sexually involved with our emotional confidants.
FME: How do you describe the sex or lovemaking now? Taboo? Natural? Especially erotic?
Emma: Our physical relationship, our sexual and emotional bond, seems like the most natural thing in the world to both of us. There just isn't anything intrinsically taboo about it. However, it is something that is highly disapproved of by society, which makes hiding it a priority. We have a good relationship with and share most things with our parents. This is pretty much the one thing that we do not.
Ethan: Our parents, of course, know that we love one another. That we completely support one another. They are aware that we have tried to play matchmaker and set one another up with the best possible match –
Emma: Well, the best possible match outside of one another. They don't know that.
Sexually, we are probably the most boring people that you've met. We enjoy doing very mundane things together, shopping for groceries, cooking, going on hikes, kayaking, as well as doing very mundane things with one another sexually; no lingerie or catsuits, we don’t own a trapeze, or engage in role-playing.
Ethan: I much prefer to gaze upon my smart, talented, beautiful, sister without any of those fake accompaniments.
FME: Describe your relationship now. Is this a marriage, a union, girlfriend and boyfriend, what? Are you more like spouses or family-with-benefits or something else? How long have you been together? Do you see each other as brother and sister, or lovers, or are those two roles inseparable at this point?
Ethan: To the people at the University, our neighbors, our parents, and the rest of our family we are and always will be brother and sister. We live together, which can easily be explained by the distance between the University and our parents’ home. We've come up with a couple of ideas on how to explain our continuing to live together after we graduate.
Emma: We've seen enough of the world and of other relationships to appreciate what we have and not to think that anything better exists out there. With one another we are “all of the above,” brother and sister, helpmates, confidants, and lovers. We are both resigned to the concept that we aren’t able to publicly admit that last one, “lovers.”
Ethan: That possibly we’ll never be able to admit it.
FME: Do or have you ever involved anyone else? How does that happen?
Ethan: We talked about trying to play society's game. For me, other potential mates were pale limitations of Emma. How, in threesomes, it was not really fair to the third party, because they weren't and would never be primary for either one of us.
FME: Do actually sleep together, or what are the sleeping arrangements?
Ethan: Nothing on earth feels as good as sleeping - and I mean really sleeping - naked and spooned under the sheets with Emma.
Emma: We share a one-bedroom apartment. His dresser and a fold-out sleeper-sofa is in the living room. That’s where he supposedly sleeps. Mom and dad have been over, they understand that we are busy with school and don’t have time for social lives. And the apartment is too small for them to stay overnight.
Ethan: I was a gentleman and gave Emma the bedroom.
Emma: And I love him and can’t let him sleep on that awful sofa.
FME: Does anyone in your life know the full, true nature of your relationship and how did they find out? How have they reacted? What kind of steps, if any, have you had to take to keep your privacy?
Emma: “Dee” - not her real name - my closest female friend from kindergarten until her family moved away when we were in high school, knew the extent of our relationship back then. She was part of our “playgroup”, was my lover, and the three of us made love a couple of times.
“Kay” - also a pseudonym - was likewise a member of our “group”, and my lover, the three of us made love together more than twice, but she understood that my primary relationship was with Ethan. She went away to college out of state. We get together when she comes home on vacation, but are no longer sexual with one another.
Ethan: We are smart. We have a logical cover story. We don’t do PDAs or other things that tip our hand, we save it for later when nobody is watching.
FME: Having to hide the full nature of your relationship from some people can be a disadvantage. Can you describe how that has been? Are there any other disadvantages? Conversely, do you think consanguineous relationships have some advantages and some things better than unrelated lovers, especially between siblings?
Ethan: Obviously, we feel that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Each of us lives with and loves somebody who totally and completely accepts us for the person that we are, someone we never have to pretend with, somebody we can speak our minds to, s person who makes us feel safe and loved because that person always looks after our best interest, and does genuinely love us for us. And not for something they can obtain from us whether it's sex, or status, or money, or security.
Emma: But those disadvantages, they are really real. We can hide the fact that we are lovers as well as brother and sister through economic measures and excuses. It was economically prudent for us to share an apartment near the University. It was economically prudent for us to obtain a small one bedroom apartment because they are cheaper.
We needed a sofa anyway, so there wasn't that much additional expense in buying a sleeper sofa to maintain the fiction that it's where Ethan sleeps.
Ethan: After we graduate, and when we start out on our own, it will make economic sense for us to share a residence. Since we are studying the same subject matter at the University it will make economic sense for one of us to lead the way and the other to follow, to remain in the same community.
Emma: When you start out you don't have the higher income levels that you'll have later. So, time spent not dating other people can be explained away as time that you spend working, even if it's really time that you spend together as a couple.
FME: What do you want to say to people who disapprove of your relationship, or disapprove of anyone having this kind of relationship? What's your reply to those who would say that this is one of you preying on the others, being exploitive?
Emma: Exploitive? That's a laugh. Coming from the same family, being raised together, with Ethan being 19 months older than myself, we are probably closer together in age, athletic ability, physical attractiveness and desirability by members of the opposite sex, educational level, economic status, racial background and religious affiliation than 95% of people out there.
Ethan: The only way that I can think of that you could create a system where people were better matched on their abilities, desirability, and level of relative power in a relationship would be to have a computer program evaluate a couple hundred different painstakingly chosen variables and spit out a weighted list giving you a group of four or five potential suitors that it had picked out for you; a system which roughly 100% of people would probably find objectionable.
Emma: There are plenty of people in this world who find all sorts of different things to be objectionable. Both of us hate okra, and we have a very simple system to accommodate the fact that both of us dislike that particular vegetable. We don't buy it at the grocery store and we don't order it in restaurants. It has worked pretty well for us all these years. Perhaps other people should try that.
Ethan: And my eating or not eating okra doesn’t affect your relationship with broccoli. In addition to everything that Emma said, if either of us is ever mean to the other one we can just tell mom.
Emma: Would I get a spanking?
Ethan: Yes, followed by oral sex - obligatory Monty Python reference.
FME: If you could get legally married, and that included protections against discrimination, harassment, etc., would you? Or is this a different kind of relationship than that? Or is it too early to tell?
Ethan: Both of us are totally in agreement on the concept of full equality for all citizens of the United States, and for fair and equitable treatment of all residents and visitors to the United States. The problem seems to be in meshing the patriarchal religious traditions of marriage and the egalitarian legalities of a secular republic.
Marriage was created as a way to ensure that children and spouses were cared for economically. There are ways to do that without marriage, trusts, incorporation, medical power of attorney, interlinking and joint bank accounts and insurance policies. That is the way we are handling it and the way that we will proceed.
But as citizens of the USA, there should not be any legally recognized and government subsidized institutions that are not equally available to all.
FME: Do you have children together, and if so, how are they?
Ethan: It's early at 19 and 21, we’ve discussed a couple of different possibilities in this regard. One idea that we entertained for a brief time when Kay - not her real name - was part of our threesome, was that after graduation I could marry her and the three of us maintain a household and raise our children together.
Emma: Should I choose to have a child, we’d use donor sperm, or something like that.
Ethan: We haven't delved all that far into the subject of whether or not it would be dangerous to reproduce from a medical point of view. We've seen a few political, erroneous, and poorly controlled studies that purport to say that it is.
Emma: But the actual risk factors can be accounted for in the environment; brothers and sisters who squat on a cold-war superfund nuclear waste disposal site. Stuff like that.
Ethan: You can only pass along traits that already exist. So two people who have no genetic issues but are related have exactly the same risk factor as two people who have no issues and who aren't related at all.
Emma: But the fact that the “evidence” it’s dangerous is fraudulent doesn’t prove that it’s safe.
Ethan: The big issue would be the social stigma were the underlying relationship to be known. And the potential that depending on where you live the state could step in and take a child away from its biological parents because of the way that discriminatory laws might be enforced, especially to gain political points.
Emma: And over time, even though it was my idea, I came to realize that it really wasn't fair to the third member of the triumvirate to be in a permanent relationship with two people who were primarily attracted to each other and not her.
Ethan: Personally, I would have no aversion whatsoever to the idea that Emma would use well-vetted donor sperm to conceive our child sometime down the road.
Emma: Far enough down the road to figure out what we’d tell our parents.
FME: What advice do you have for someone who may be experiencing these feelings for a relative or family member?
Emma: While neither one of us feel particularly comfortable giving advice to others, the one thing that I will say is that you need to go into any important decisions that you make in life with your eyes wide open. Some people may be able to have casual sexual relationships with other people. That's just not the way either of us are wired. I found a deep emotional connection with all of the people who I've ever had sex with, and loved each of them before being a lover to them. It hurts when those relationships end. Right now I'm in a relationship with the person with whom I have the longest and deepest possible emotional connection. Were that to end – particularly if it were to end by choice – it would be a soul-crushing disappointment and an unbearable pain.
FME: What advice do you have for family members and friends who think or know that relatives they know are having these feelings for each other?
Emma: Support the people you love whether you would make the same choices that they have or not.
FME: Do you consider yourself consanguinamorous in orientation, or could you be fulfilled in a relationship with someone who isn’t a close relative?
Emma: Dissecting our relationship, I don't think that it is the blood affinity that is the root cause of our attraction to one another, although it certainly did play a huge part in the similarities that cause us to mesh seamlessly. I think that we could both imagine having this sort of relationship with somebody that we grew up with – like right next to them for 18 years – but whom we weren't familiarly related to. But we both also think that the odds of such a thing happening are far less than that of being in a fulfilling sexual relationship with somebody you are related to.
Ethan: We are each in love with somebody that we have known our entire lives and have no doubts about. Which to my mind is pretty much an impossible thing to duplicate with a non-relative.
FME: Have you met in-person or do you know anyone else who has experience with consanguinamory or consanguineous sex that you know of?
Emma: Growing up we fooled around and experimented with other people in our age group. There were varying levels of sexual contact between some siblings and cousins in the group. We suspect that this is a normal occurrence in the US but it isn’t publicized. We strongly suspect that one brother and sister whose situation is very similar to ours in outward appearance is also very similar to ours behind closed doors, but we haven't asked them.
Ethan: We also know of two first cousins who had a child together, which while not legal everywhere is legal in most states. Although they deny it publicly and call it the result of a “youthful fling” we strongly suspect that their relationship continues. It is a sad cautionary tale about how that sort of negative public attention can have a detrimental impact on relationships.
FME: Any plans for the future?
Emma: We have made many plans for the future. But in the interest of anonymity we are not comfortable discussing them publicly.
FME: Anything else to add?
Emma: One plus one can equal more than two, if you find the right person to “play math” with.
Why should they be denied their rights? There’s no good reason. We need to recognize that all adults should be free to be with any and all consenting adults as they mutually consent, and part of doing that is adopting relationship rights for all, including full marriage equality sooner rather than later. People are being hurt because of a denial of their basic human rights to love each other freely.
You can read other interviews I have done here. As you'll see, there are people from all walks of life, around the world, who are in consanguinamorous relationships.
If you are in a relationship like this and are looking for help or others you can talk with, read this.
If you want to be interviewed about your "forbidden" relationship, or that of someone you know, connect with me by checking under the "Get Connected" tab there at the top of the page or emailing me at fullmarriageequality at protonmail dot com or see here.
If you know someone who is in a relationship like this, please read this.
Thank you, Ethan and Emma, for sharing with us about your consanguinamorous relationship. We wish you well in your studies and live and that you'll have equal protection under the law and a welcoming society sooner rather than later.
Great interview. Definitely need to look at laws and change things
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