One of my friends found out four or five months in that her boyfriend was secretly married. He’d made up some story about his wife being dead when in reality the wife was alive and well and they were living together, allegedly divorcing but who even knows. I know that’s not second family level lying, but he’d created, for instance, a second FB profile to support the lies he was telling. I met him and so did a bunch of our college friends. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him. He was quiet, a bit standoffish, so I just thought he was a dull, boring guy. He seemed fa-haaar too boring to be the kind of person he turned out to be. I thought it was wild. And sad. She was pretty upset despite it being a shorter relationship.

The vast vast majority of men do not have two families so the people who do are pretty significant outliers.

I imagine most of them start off as having affairs and it just progresses. They don’t start out with a conscious intention of having two families. They just don’t want to give either relationship up.

One of my ancestors got pregnant while single. She was courting one man openly and another one man not openly, and either could have been the father. She ended up claiming the father was the one her family already knew about, since she was getting a lot of push back for being pregnant outside of marriage already without their knowing there was more than one possible father. People were really harsh about unwed pregnancies at the time – she took a lot of flack, lost her job, and had to move out of the area. Well, that guy her family knew about ended up secretly already being married. She had no idea. We later found out this guy had 10 kids by his wife and at least 3 by other women during his marriage.

He broke things off with my ancestor when she told him she was pregnant, but then introduced her to his best friend, a man who’s wife had recently died and left him a single Dad to 6 children. The man he introduced her to agreed to marry his best friend’s pregnant mistress and raise the child as his own if she would be a loving stepmother to his 6 existing kids. It was some bizarre situation where her married lover didn’t care enough to leave his wife or provide for his own kid, but in some misogynistic way wanted to make sure he found a guy who would claim the kid and provide for them. So she got married to the guy she’d been set up with, they ended up surprisingly compatible, and she and her new husband had 6 more kids together for a total of 13 kids. Later when their child was seeking her roots she was told about her Mom’s married lover. Once DNA testing became common, it was discovered that man wasn’t even the father. But our entire family setup would have been different if married dude hadn’t thought she was his kid – my ancestor wouldn’t have met her husband and had the 34 grand kids and great grandkids she ended up with by the time she passed.

My Grandmother ran away from home when she was 15, met a boy, and gave birth that same year. He dropped her out onto the streets like a hot potato when he found out she was pregnant, and her parents took her back in and raised my Dad as their own son for a few years. While my Dad was still being raised my his grandparents (my Great Grandparents), my Grandmother met a man and married him after knowing him for three days. Her new husband insisted that she needed to take responsibility for her own child and he and she came and got my Dad immediately after marrying and raised him to adulthood. They also had another daughter together. My Grandmother became blind and wheelchair bound due to drug use before dying of cancer, and (step) Grandpa was her caretaker through it all. Her new husband, my Dad’s stepdad, was Dad’s helping hand out of that whole lifestyle. My Grandpa used to say marriage was all about devotion. He took those vows after only 3 days, but he spent the rest of his life living up to them. This story has always amazed me.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Akeath.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Akeath.

Right, most of history for women was like, having to marry some guy and have a lot of babies. Until hormonal birth control in our mothers’ lifetimes, there weren’t a lot of options. Both my grandmothers went to college and had aspirations, but the only thing really in the cards for them was to be the wife of a business guy and have kids. And before that, people weren’t really sending girls to college. My great-grandmother really wanted to go to college but her dad wasn’t willing to let her go even though he paid for her brother to go. She ended up going and begging the neighbor farmers for money to go to college just to embarrass her father, and then he relented. I think she got to be an engineer for a while, of all things, but then, you guessed it, housewife. And her daughter actually went to grad school and wanted to be an actress, but she ended up with my sexist ass of a grandfather who treated her like a child. And she had to keep having kids until she had a boy, my uncle who’s such a tool.

My mom was just tryna go to school one day and her dad was going to hit her and she had to hide in the bathroom to not get hit.