Hacker News Reader

Comment by burrows | Hacker News Reader

What are the compelling reasons not to get a DNA test as a man (when a woman is claiming, “You are the biological father of this baby.”)?

Is it expensive or illegal or will your friends shame you or the woman will be angry?

View on HN

In this case, it would show that he doesn't trust his wife.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, if it's truly his child, why would his wife be opposed to verifying that? Not to mention that it can likely be done without her knowledge.

Suggesting that not only do you not trust your wife but you also don’t trust her so much so that you get a paternity test without her knowledge shows a huge lack of faith in the relationship, and I would caution against this. Please remember the original circumstance is that a woman ends up pregnant on an imperfect birth control; there’s no reason or contextual evidence for any sort of cheating behavior. Assuming your partner is cheating with no evidence sucks. Assuming your partner might be cheating so much so you have to get a paternity test sucks even more for the non-cheating partner.

This is in situations where a heterosexual woman gets suspicious if her partner has literally any female friends. What if she started going around and wanting paternity tests of your friend group if they happen to be pregnant, just to make sure you didn’t cheat with any of your friends, despite you remaining faithful the entire time?

It’s very kind of you to write this all out, but frankly if you’re the kind of person who worries about stuff like that you’ll poison your relationship with distrust regardless. If not this than something else.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say someone can’t worry about stuff like this. Emotions like worry can happen as a result of prior trauma, generalized anxiety disorder, and several illnesses that have paranoia in their symptom profile. It’s fine to have worries and that manage your worries in a healthy manner, such as therapy, medication when appropriate, meditation, and speaking transparently to your partner to try and figure out what is triggering your worry response (rubber ducking your own brain!).

It’s important to separate emotion from action. You can experience an anxiety inducing thought (such as my partner might be cheating on me) and behave in a variety of healthy and unhealthy ways.

Like OP said: trust but verify. Speaking from experience, lol.

I’m sorry your trust was violated. Your traumatic experience where your trust was violated shouldn’t be used as a warning label for others. There is no reason to advocate that other people behave as if their partners are unfaithful without prior evidence because you personally were wronged in a deeply hurtful way.

It is important to healthily evaluate what is a relatively uncommon but seriously hurtful thing that happened to oneself and how that distorts one’s understanding of what’s normal behavior in intimate relationships.

But how else are you going to get evidence? Doing a paternity test is the act of gathering data which could further be used as evidence of faithfulness of your partner.

Or else it's just blind trust without any firm footing in reality.

If you can't be arsed to do the test for a ONCE or TWICE in a lifetime kind of event with long term consequences because you somehow feel hurt that your partner isn't a fool who builds his life around blind faith.. well, there's not much to be said...

This is a trauma response style logic where the bad/harmful thing is the default and the healthy thing needs to be proven. The fact of the matter is that cheating to the point of clandestinely having children is abnormal and unusual. It isn’t blind faith that your partner is faithful; your partner will show you their faithfulness just by the act of being your partner. It’s not staying out without explanation. It’s emotional engagement with the relationship. It’s transparency when things get boring. It’s the labor in keeping the relationship fresh and interesting. Overlooking this to lean towards mistrust also devalues the labor of your partner and shows your bias towards past trauma. I understand this thing is big stakes and is very hurtful, but even grand hurts doesn’t justify no longer paying attention to basic reality for over-cautious behavior.

There's no trauma response, data suggests that cheating is common. Thereon following through with the baseless assumption that this totally won't happen to you is downright foolish.

All this wishy washy pretense about "emotional engagement" comes off as super dishonest, just to weasel your way out of doing a test (which should be a standard procedure anyway).

That's one of those times where the faithfulness has to be put to test.

Trying to weasel your way out of doing it via emotional manipulations is more of a red flag than anything.

IMO you make a wise point:

Doing a paternity test may necessarily or inadvertently reveal to his wife a limit of his trust for her.

What are compelling reasons to get one? Worst case scenario, you have baby.

I do not want to invest significant resources into progeny that is not my own. Doing a paternity test reduces the possibility of this.

Although I realize there are people that think this way, this is totally removed from the way my mind works.

You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

> You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

Thinking about raising a baby from some other father activates my disgust reaction. But maybe it’s more related to the idea of the woman’s (hidden?) infidelity than the baby itself.

> There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

I don’t see other people’s difficulties as relevant to my preferences.

For example, homeless people eating from trash cans doesn’t affect my dietary choices.

Your intuitions about family and human relations are deeply abnormal and you should be aware of that for the future when you talk to people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com