DNA or paternity tests can be requested for various reasons. However, the following five stories show how it can end marriages and damage relationships.
Being able to take DNA tests has changed how people handle pregnancies. In the following stories, five Reddit users share how taking DNA tests affected their lives in a significant way.
Both Parents Discover Their Child Isn’t Biologically Theirs
A 29-year-old woman revealed on Reddit that she started dating her husband, 31, in college and loved him immensely. The couple shared a daughter, five, and things in their relationship were going well until her husband decided to get a DNA test.
The test was negative, and the woman’s husband started changing toward her. The original poster (OP) was shocked by the results because she’d never cheated on him. She said no one else could be their daughter’s father as she and her husband were already married when they tried to conceive, with her insisting:
“I never cheated; I never would cheat.”
Before dating her spouse, OP had only slept with two other men. In retaliation to the results, OP’s husband began spending more time at work and wasn’t talking to his wife like before. He told her he’d taken the test because he’d always been suspicious of the little girl having brown eyes while they both had blue.
At one point, he wanted OP to leave their home, but when he finally calmed down, he agreed to discuss the issue further. They settled on doing a couple of tests to get to the truth. The husband vowed to lose his mind if the tests didn’t prove his wife’s innocence.
One of the tests they took was a blood paternity test that shockingly proved the couple were both not the little girl’s biological parents! The family’s lives were turned upside down, and the authorities were involved with a police officer coming over to take their statements.
OP and her husband presented a united front when suing the hospital where she gave birth. The thought of her birth daughter terrified her as she contemplated where the child could be. However, what frightened her the most was the thought of what would happen after the little girl was found.
As much as she was curious about her birth daughter, she was still a protective mother to her five-year-old and didn’t want the child to know they weren’t her birth parents because it would ruin her childhood. She also worried about the child telling her friends and school, leading people to gossip about her.
OP returned to Reddit a few weeks later to reveal that they’d found their biological daughter, and she was in foster care. The child’s fake parents took her straight from the hospital, but the police placed her in foster care after discovering she wasn’t their biological child.
OP and her husband applied to adopt their biological child from her foster parents. From their court filing about the hospital’s negligence, they got around $2 million as settlement money. The couple explained to the daughter they’d lived with all those years that she had a sister coming to stay with them.
OP and her husband told the little girl they still loved her despite all that was happening. She and her spouse now planned on relocating to another town for a fresh start with their children. Luckily, that story had a great ending, but how did this one about a father taking a test because of his child’s darker skin end?
Man Secretly Takes a Paternity Test to Appease His Family
In 2022, a female Brazilian/American Reddit user, 30, reached out to the “Relationship Advice” subreddit seeking assistance with her situation. She revealed that she and her Serbian husband, 29, had a three-year-old daughter who looked different from them.
Her husband’s family had fair skin, while hers looked more light brown with mixed ethnicity. The Redditor and her husband were close to their extended families and often visited them to give the child a rich cultural experience.
When the couple’s daughter was born, she had smooth hair and fair skin, but she started turning darker brown as she got older. Even her hair has become curlier, leading the rest of the family to show interest in the child’s changing features.
The Redditor’s husband’s family was consistently involved in their lives and curious about their daughter. A year before writing her post, her husband’s family had started joking about “the milkman” and that she’d gotten too much sunshine while pregnant.
The jokes continued and were passive-aggressive, but the child’s mother ignored them until they stopped. Days before putting up her Reddit post, she scrolled through her husband’s phone’s gallery, looking for a specific picture while they sorted out a fencing issue.
Thinking she’d found what she was looking for, she clicked on the screenshot of the document only to realize it was a paternity test result! The test confirmed her husband as their daughter’s father. She confronted him about it, and he confessed that he had taken it a year before because of his family’s constant questioning about the child’s darker skin.
He revealed that his family demanded he get the test, insinuating that his wife might’ve cheated on him. Every time he visited his family, the topic of his child’s paternity came up, and she now recalled how unusually irritable and stressed he’d be when he returned home.
He usually excused his behavior by blaming it on work or family issues. The Reddit user became angry and asked why he even considered the idea and how disrespectful it was to her and their daughter. The man claimed he’d never entertained the matter seriously and only took the test to appease his family.
He tried defending himself by showing her older messages where he supported her and tried to shut down his family’s suspicions. However, his effort to seem innocent didn’t dispel his wife’s anger, especially since he’d chosen to keep the test a secret.
She realized that the memories of whenever they spent time with his family were now tainted by their false outlook on her and her daughter. Her husband said he didn’t tell her because he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
The Redditor’s guilty husband apologized sincerely, but she couldn’t find comfort in being around his family anymore. She felt distressed, but simultaneously, she struggled to let the issue go for her daughter’s sake.
The child’s mother questioned if her husband trusted her, and the incident left her shaken. The couple was no longer intimate, open, and vibrant like before, as the breach of trust overshadowed everything. The incident was their first significant disagreement, and she was unsure how to proceed.
