Hello & let's go

[cous...@gmail.com]

Hey all,

So I've been here a while and am a little bummed that there's no
traffic. I thought maybe I could kick something off by giving the
incest part of my history.

I'm a mid 30s white guy and am in a relationship with my cousin who is
11 years my junior and whom we'll call A. That's first cousin, as in
my mother's sister's daughter. A and I didn't really grow up together
though we saw each other one every year or two. It wasn't until she
was in her early teens that we began to develop a friendship. We're
the black sheep of the family (even before we became a couple) and as
she was entering her early teens she started 'acting out'. Since I'd
done the same thing a decade before and had gone on to have a 'normal'
adulthood her parents asked me if I could 'help'. I don't know what
they were looking for but what it meant to me was to be there so we
became close. She could confide in me the things she certainly wasn't
telling her parents (drugs, sex, drinking, etc.) and I could tell her
that I'd done the same stuff and tried to keep her away from the worst
of it.

She'd moved out at 15 and started college (after getting her GED).
The summer she was 17 she took a trip out to near where I was living
with her then boyfriend. They were supposed to be visiting his
brother but since the boyfriend hadn't told the brother that A was
comming he was pissed and she was uncomfortable so she spent a bit
more than a week with me. This was the first time for me that there
was anything more than the typical feelings one has for a cousin. She
felt it too though, as I learned years later, she'd had a crush on me
for years by this point. We had one very oblique conversation about
how we felt without coming out and saying it. After she left we kept
in close touch on the phone and our conversations became increasingly
intimate and even discussed incest in an abstract way, not directly
about us.

Then when I was 31 or 32 we both went through some intense times
(unrelated to each other). The upshot was that we fell out of touch
and didn't see or speak to each other for about 4 years. It was
unclear to both of us why we fell out of touch but apparently both
felt that we might have made the other uncomfortable as a result of
our romantic and sexual desire for the other.

Late this past fall A sent me an email to tell me that she was going
to visiting my part of the country and was wondering if I'd like to
get together. I was very excited to see her again, not because of the
attraction but because I missed my cousin (we're from a small family
and to fall out of touch with any of them always seemed very tragic).
I will admit to a lot of trepidation before her arival and was hoping
that the attraction I'd felt would have passed and even up to a few
minutes before we saw each other again was hoping that perhaps she'd
become fat or mean or ugly. She hadn't.

The moment she stepped from the car the attraction washed back through
me. I won't lie, I was freaked out. We went to dinner that first
evening and caught up. We were both clearly uncomfortable in the
beginning but by the end of the meal and then later back at my place
fell into a very comfortable cousin-y place. She spent the night in
my bed and I on the couch.

The next night we went to a party at a friend's place. We drank a
bit, generally had a good time and after getting home had a night
cap. The 'liquid courage' opened A up and she asked me why we'd been
out of touch for so long. I hemmed and hawed a bit and she said she
was afraid that she'd freaked me out all those years ago by talking
about incest. I told her I had felt the same way. She asked me if
I'd wanted her back then and I confessed that I had and that I still
did. She said the same. We slept in my bed together that night.

It's half a year later and she's moving in with me tomorrow. We're
not rushing things (much) but hope to marry eventually.

So those are the 'facts' but of course there's a lot more to the story
(parent's reactions, friends reactions, etc.). I'm not going to lie
and say that there isn't part of our mutual attraction that's driven
by our familial relationship but since I put myself out there I'm
hoping that other's will do the same and perhaps I'll have more to say
over time.

So come on, post your own histories or if you're not lucky enough to
have a family member to bonk tell us why you're here.

-Cousband