Ask Amy: in which both partners should run t. f. away

[lemonsharks]

Ask Amy: I wouldn’t have gotten involved if I knew the child was his

Dear Amy: I have been with my live-in boyfriend for over three years. He has two children, and I have three.

The issue I’m wrestling with is that he recently found out that he has a third child, a 5-year-old.

When we met, he told me he had already established that the child wasn’t his, via his mom taking a DNA test, which showed that this baby had no DNA connection to his family.

Well, surprise … the child is his.

Now I feel betrayed and duped. I wouldn’t have been with him had I known about this third child.

I am in love with him, and the best way I can describe my current emotion is to say that, to me, it’s the equivalent to being cheated on.

He doesn’t understand why I have such strong feelings about this situation. He said I am supposed to support him.

I’m not sure how I can do that when I feel second-rate to three women who have his children, and yet I don’t have a child with him. He has told me he has no desire for marriage.

So I am supposed to be his girlfriend for the rest of my life, while these women have a solidified place in his life and a bigger connection to him than I am going to have?

I don’t want to end things with him, but how can I help these feelings I have and find a way to accept this and move on?

So Many Feelings



Dear So Many Feelings: I urge you to re-examine your choices — and for now to only do so from the vantage point of what would benefit you and your children.

In the short term, your reaction to this situation is to want what these other women have: a baby with this man.

From my perspective, if you did have a baby with him, you’d be joining a fairly crowded club.

I hope you double up on birth control, because this man is extremely fertile and also someone who has to be dragged into fatherhood.

He either outright lied to you when you first met or is too dim to understand that DNA does not lie.

Furthermore, he responds to your shock about this third child by insisting that your role is to support him.

Well, his role is to support you, too (and, by the way, all of his children).

People are somewhat predictable. Your boyfriend has established a pattern of overall selfishness.

Well-matched partners grasp hands and ride life’s roller-coaster together. If you don’t feel that you two are able to do that, then you should carefully reconsider staying with him, long term.

You say you want to stay with him. If you do stay, you should accept that you might be riding this roller-coaster alone.

Comments

[shanaqui]

I think LW needs some therapy for her obsession with kids being what creates a bond between people. That isn't really what's going on for them; the child existed before this relationship, and maybe (just maybe) there's some innocent misunderstanding going on re: the DNA test.

(DNA tests can be wrong, sorry Amy. Cross-contamination, labelling mistakes, insufficient DNA, DNA too degraded for whatever reason by the time the test is actually done... and someone lying/providing the wrong DNA sample deliberately/etc.)

The guy may have lied, but the LW doesn't actually say so. She doesn't explain the situation there at all.

So we could also have a situation where a mistake was made or the liar was not LW's boyfriend, and she just refuses to forgive him for having a child with someone else before meeting her. What?!

[castiron]

I'd also like to know more about the DNA test; I'm assuming it's an Ancestry/23&Me/FTDNA/MyHeritage test given that it's the potential grandmother and not the potential father who tested.

It's possible that there could've been a testing error, particularly with trying to get a good sample from a small kid. But if grandmother has other matches who fit with known relatives, and kid has matches who fit known relatives (presumably kid's mom would've tested?), then that indicates the individal tests are valid.

And that said, the range for grandparent/grandchild match also covers auncle/nibling matches, so just because boyfriend's mother and the kid have a match in the right range doesn't necessarily mean boyfriend is the father. Maybe boyfriend has a brother; maybe his mother has a much younger brother who's the father of this kid; maybe the kid's mother is an unknown close relative of the boyfriend's mother -- a lot depends on whether this is a relatively small endogamous community or a community with lots of in- and out-migration.

(None of which takes away from the main point that LW should not be having a child with this man.)

[ethelmay]

But I thought the point was that the grandmother didn't have a match with LW's boyfriend's child? (Which could mean LW's boyfriend isn't her biological son!) Or the whole story of the DNA non-match could be bogus, and either they actually show a match or neither was tested at all. LW never says how she knows the kid is the boyfriend's.

[castiron]

This is an excellent point. Who really tested and who shows up in each other's matches?

If they all tested at the same service, and boyfriend matches his mother and his kid but the mother and kid don't show up in each other's matches, then there are a bunch of genetic genealogists who would love to talk to these folks and examine their test results.

And yet again, in any case, and to reiterate LW should not scramble her DNA with this guy, at least not unless she wants to be a single mother of *four* kids.

[lemonsharks]

If the mother and kid don't match each other as parent/child, and mother used her own egg to grow the kid, then the mother is a chimera whose reproductive DNA is actually that of a fraternal XX sibling. And she should get that on record to avoid any custody nastiness that may arise.

[ethelmay]

The potential non-biomom situation I saw was the boyfriend and the boyfriend's mom. Boyfriend is surely far too old to be in his mother's custody. We don't have any data on whether the five-year-old's mom was tested.

[lemonsharks]

This is why English should never have dropped properly declining its nouns