Married couple took DNA test that left wife 'sick to her stomach'

At-home ancestry kits can teach us a lot about ourselves: what our ethnic roots are; whether we’re predisposed to certain illnesses and even whether we have secret relatives.

However, sometimes the details we learn about ourselves are uncomfortable to say the least. And no one knows this better than a mother-of-three from Colorado.

Celina Quinones took a 23andMe DNA test to find out more about her origins. But, rather than enjoy a fascinating insight into her distant heritage, Celina was left feeling “sick to her stomach.”

Upon reading the results, she and her husband Joseph, who have been married for 18 years and have two sons and a daughter together, instantly considered separating.

The reason for their extreme reaction? They discovered that they are, in fact, cousins.

The pair said they were inseparable from the moment they first met at a Halloween party nearly 20 years ago(@celinaq/TikTok)

“In my head, I thought we were supposed to get divorced,” Celina told Trulylast year, recalling how online trolls branded their relationship “disturbing and disgusting”.

She explained that the earth-shattering revelation came about simply because she wanted to learn more about herself.

“I started really diving into my DNA because I wanted to find out my heritage – my daughter is really dark-skinned, and my son has curly hair, my middle child is light-skinned,” she explained.

“And when everyone would ask ‘what are you?’ I couldn't really give an answer besides, hey, I’m Native American.”

She stressed that she and Joseph had “no suspicion whatsoever” that they might be related, so they were stunned to discover both their names on a database, which revealed that they are “third to fifth cousins”.

After instinctively believing that they should maybe part ways since “you’re not supposed to [even] look at your cousin,” Celina decided that, for the sake of their children, they needed to “keep it together and stay together”.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Understandably, their kids were confused at first, with their middle child asking whether this now made them cousins as well as siblings.

However, asked how they felt about everything now, their daughter replied that she viewed it all as “kind of normal” because “they’ve been married for a long time”.

Their eldest son admitted: “Sometimes I felt a little bit weird about it because it's not something you want to brag about or put out to the world.”

But, he added: “If they’d found out before they got married, I think there would be something obviously wrong with that. But since they found out after, there's not one single problem I see wrong [sic].”

The couple's children seem largely unphased by the revalation(Quinones family via Truly)

Despite their son stressing that the news wasn’t something you’d want to “put out to the world”, that’s precisely what the couple did.

Celina recalled how, one night, she decided to open up about the discovery on social media, and had no idea it would all “blow up”.

She and Joseph were swiftly subjected to a torrent of abuse from people who viewed their marriage as an aberration. However, Joseph said the worst part was when people started bringing up the kids and suggesting that they’d get bullied as a result of their unorthodox bloodline.

Nevertheless, the couple said they stopped reading the comments and just got on with their lives, with the full support of their close relatives.

These included Celina’s father, who insisted that he had “no suspicions” that his daughter and her partner were related but, at any rate, he would “always be there for them both”.

And for anyone wondering why no one put two and two together at their wedding, it turns out that Joseph’s grandma on his father’s side had been adopted, meaning that a family link was missing, so none of the relatives knew each other.

Despite it all, Joseph stressed: “Nothing’s really changed since it all came out,” and both he and his wife agreed that their future together looks bright.

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