A woman with three kids responded to trolls after she discovered her ‘sick’ relation to her husband of 10 years.
Four months after they met, Celina and Joseph Quinones married and happily went on to becoming parents together.
After becoming a mum, Celina decided it would be interesting to look into her own family history, you know, to see how big the family tree is and all that.
However, after the Colorado pair sent off their DNA swabs to 23andMe, they found their trunk didn’t quite branch out as far as they thought.
Advert
Yep, turns out the happy couple are cousins.
Celina naturally described the moment of realisation as devastating as she was left ‘a little sick to [her] stomach’.
Discovering they are third to fifth cousins, she recalled on the Love Don’t Judge podcast: “I was thinking, 'Should we get a divorce? Are we even supposed to be together?’”
The pair had been married for a decade when they did the tests back in 2016 and after a while of coming to terms with her ‘cousband’ match-up, they decided to share their tale on TikTok.
Unsurprisingly, this went viral and sadly, led to a whole load of trolls slamming them in the comments.
"My kids and my husband are my everything and we looked past it. All our kids have 10 fingers and 10 toes. It's a good ice breaker lol. No, we didn't know till we did a DNA test,” Celina explained on the app.
And she added how the pair were still loved up: “I ain't gonna let a little bit of blood destroy what we created, this beautiful family."
While commenters slammed it as 'disturbing', with some even saying they ‘feel bad for the kids’, the mum-of-three hit back.
"Let me divorce him because we didn't know. Let me just tell our kids their parents are not together anymore because of other people's opinions,” she responded to one troll.
"No thank you, we will just be staying cousins, spouses and lovers forever. Now go throw up in your mouth some more."
When the pair got married about 18 years ago now, none of the relatives recognised each other at the wedding. And it turns out Joseph’s grandma on his dad’s side had adopted, meaning a family link was missed.
Despite this close discovery, Celina and Joseph couldn’t be happier as she ignores the trolls and pointed out: “Colorado seems so big, but it’s really not that big.
“Everyone knows everyone, and most likely, everyone is related.”
Jess Battison