The genetic testing didn't cause the divorce, keeping secrets did.
This is also a very good argument for honesty - it's very hard to figure out when and how you'll get called out on lies.
This is also a very good argument for honesty - it's very hard to figure out when and how you'll get called out on lies.
Keeping secrets didn't -- the marriage ended as a fairly direct result of the secret failing to continue to be kept.
If you fuck up and no one knows about it shut up and don't make your family go through it. It's your guilt, be an adult and live with it.
'conscious clearing' is childish and selfish.
That's very much not my point, which is rather that the proximate cause of the result here was secrets being exposed.
Of course, if secrets aren't kept in the first place, they can't be exposed, and lots of time, while not risk free, a timely voluntary disclosure can produce a lot better results than a involuntary revelation (and involuntary revelations happen a lot more often than people trying to keep secrets think they will.)
There are, additionally, moral issues to consider. Concealing facts material to other people's decisions denies them effective consent, a basic fact which underlies fraud laws, but whose moral scope extends far beyond commercial transactions.
If the secret/lie comes out later, then the consequences are often far worse than they would have been if you had been honest.
If you have lied or deliberately misled, everything you have ever said might be up for questioning.
Whether secret or known, why should any woman want a man that would be so careless with his own offspring that they end up being adopted by strangers and searching for their parents all their life?
Whether secret or not, why should any woman want a man who has children by another woman?
Whether secret or not, why should any woman want a man who is apparently really bad at using contraceptives?
Maybe it wouldn't have been a divorce, it just would never have been a marriage in the first place. But whatever the eventual result, the problem was that the father was a piece of shit.
Are you trolling? Marrying someone with pre-existing children is so profoundly non-scandalous that it was the premise for The Brady Bunch.
Either way, I think the author being a geneticist should pretty much understand that if you're trying to find relatives, you might actually find relatives.
I tend to think this should be opt-in, but as long as both parties have the box checked, it seems like perfectly valid functionality to me.
Because in the grand scheme of things all of the above are insignificant BS, that could happen to anyone, especially at a young age, without precluding that the man/women who had that would turnup a wonderful person to be with and a good husband.
I mean "why should any woman want a man who has children by another woman"? What are you, 15-years old?