So, what're you going to do if you fall in romantic love with a family member? Marry them? Tell me how that works out.

[deleted]

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 7 2018, 6:57 am by DavidJCobb.

Well? I've never heard of someone exploding from bottling up their love.

Unless you plan on marrying them at a very awkward, if not empty, wedding- and having illegal children with them, you're going to have to end it eventually. (Unless, you don't believe in having kids, or plan on adopting.)
Now, it's a lot easier to never start then it is to break something up that's been going.
And, if you don't have the intention on having relations for your whole life, then it's not love.

I'm going to make a bullet-point list of why incest is not worth while:

• Ruin your social life
  
• Illegal to marry siblings
  
• Illegal in some states to marry first cousin
  
• Illegal to have sex with anyone blood related
  
• Doubles chances of deformation
  
• Your kids will be ridiculed their whole lives
  
• Pretty sure they won't let you adopt
  

Some items on the list assume that you break the law

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Apr 8 2010, 4:57 am by Leeroy_Jenkins.

This is funny.

Plenty of people leave their families and never go back. I have a sister that I haven't seen in a decade. Also: "Love = blind" applies to more than sight. There may be 3.5 billion women in the world, but that doesn't mean that you can date all of them. Say that within my area there is 1,000 women. Within that 1,000, 300 of them are lesbian or bisexual with female preference. That leaves 700. Probably about 500 those have severe character incompatibilities. I could go on and narrow it down with age and other things, but the point I'm making is, there may be 3.5 billion women, but I still don't have a girlfriend.


Who says you have to have a wedding to be "married." You could just commit to each other by word rather than by a church (or whatever way people are marrying themselves today). So you are saying that people cannot be in relationships unless they have children? I guess there's no fighting crazy people.

That's assuming you're both part of the population that doesn't want kids or marriage.
That's also assuming you'll feel that way when you get older.

...and (chances are) if you don't feel that way when you get older, you'd wish you never started it in the first place, because it's going to be five times harder to say goodbye to the relationship than it would've been to never start it.

So you shouldn't reproduce with someone who has any sort of heritable disease because you'll pass it down to your children and they'll become "deformed?" That's easily avoidable, yet people still do it, why? Because you can't choose who you love, sometimes it just happens. Stop acting like all people can just choose who they love. Stop being so systematic about love, it's not about the numbers. Just because a relationship may have to end, doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue it. Yeah, it might suck, but it might suck even more not knowing what could have happened.

If there's one thing I hate it's contradictions. If it's so god-damned impossible to resist the "love" you have for your relative, then how would dating them for a little bit and then having to end the relationship down the road be any easier. And how would that even be love? If you're not planning on actually spending the rest of your life with that person (and I'd like to hear someone's plans on doing this), then you're just building a ladder taller and taller as time goes on- that eventually you're metaphorically going to have to jump off, face first when it ends.

It's also very naive to pretend the immediate and long-term social repercussions do not exist. How is your family going to view this, how are your friends and co-workers going to treat you? Now I realize someone is probably going to post something straight out of a romantic novel/fairytale about how as long as you're with this person nothing in the world will matter. And then I'll reply that life doesn't work that way and nothing but bad things are going to come out of this, wake up.

So when you go into a relationship, you automatically know how long it's going to last? Relationships are slowly built up, most people don't go into a relationship thinking "This is the person I'm going to marry." I'm not saying that this person will be the one you'll marry, but if you go into every relationship thinking "oh man, we'll just break up down the road, so let's not do it at all" then you're going to be denying yourself a lot. But before we go any further, please define for me, what you think love really is, because it's apparent that we don't agree there. Yes, there will be consquences, but if your family and friends really cared for you, they can accept you for who you are, in most cases, it's not like you are committing mass murder or genocide, you act like incest is the end all to everything. If your family really cares so much about that, then I guess maybe you'll have to live with it. How would you feel if one of your close friends started dating a sibling or cousin? Would you treat them any differently because of it? It might be weird, but really, are they any different from before you knew this? Because if you do treat them differently, I don't think you're a very good friend.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 8 2010, 6:27 am by Taylor Swift.

First of all, I wouldn't treat my friends differently, but I know there is people out there that would. It wouldn't help at gaining friends, either. Mainly this would hurt your family and work life.
Second of all, I'm not saying that if you aren't 100% sure a relationship is going to last forever you shouldn't do it. What I am saying is if you're 100% sure a relationship isn't going to work, you shouldn't do it.

And I'm not going to define love for you because that would take an entire essay to explain. What I will tell you though is there is a certain type of love you have for your family. This is, as we can agree, usually different than the love you have for a partner.

Now, you are saying that a dating situation with your relative could arise if there was first "love" present.

One of the points brought up is that you could fall in love with a relative that you hadn't been raised with. So, this would be a case of "love at first sight". Do you believe in that?

The other option, would be love after getting to know them in a family way, which would contradict the above statement of a "family member you hadn't been raised with"

All of that aside, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Just to clear things up, I don't think we should be burning people at the stake for this. That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I don't believe it should be illegal, seeing as how we have a so-called "secular" government. I'm just saying with all of the complications involved I would never do this, and if a close friend of mine was considering it, I'd give them a million reasons why they shouldn't and try to talk them out of it. If they went through with the decision, I wouldn't think of them and/or treat them any less respectably, it's their choice.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 8 2010, 7:24 am by Leeroy_Jenkins.