In her self-published memoir, I’m His Mother but He’s Not My Son, Gonyo saw similarities between the bonding of a mother and child and feelings of sexual intimacy. They reunited when Barbara was forty-two and he was twenty-six. The term emerged in the 1980s when a woman named Barbara Gonyo went public with the feelings she experienced following her reunion with the son she was forced to relinquish for adoption when she was sixteen years old. In those forums and communities many described experiencing something they called “genetic sexual attraction,” or GSA.
But at the same time, I was thinking, is it a good thing that people are gathering to talk about this? Does sharing their experience so candidly lead to an atmosphere where acting on these feelings is normalized? And more broadly, what is the downside of a completely virtual and anonymous community? They seemed confused, distressed, and overwhelmed by emotions that didn’t make sense to them and were not the sort of thing they could comfortably talk about to people who they knew in real life. I was very surprised when I began to feel empathy for their situation. They said the attraction was so fierce it was almost as if there were something in their shared DNA pushing them together. Many claimed that when they were in these relationships, they finally felt complete. Like magnets, they had to be together it was as if the pull were too strong to resist.
They described it as like having the perfect match designed in a science lab, or looking into a mirror and falling in love with your own reflection.
Their narratives used a common language to describe the intensity of the attraction, and the familiarity of their partner they said filled a void that had left them feeling empty for their whole life. It’s as if it had sat there at the back of my head for nearly thirty years, and when I was researching ideas for “What It’s Like,” my column on New York Magazine’s human behavioral vertical I was curious if it was happening more in the hyperconneted era given that so many biological family members were finding each other with the help of social media, so I’d gone online to find out. I’d watched biological relatives estranged by adoption discuss how they developed intense sexual feelings for each other when they reunited as adults. It wasn’t exactly a brand-new concept to me in fact it was something I’d first heard about when I was a kid, in the 1990s on an episode of a daytime talk show. I was on Reddit when I discovered a subgroup discussing a phenomenon called “genetic sexual attraction”. Some names were changed by the publisher to protect the privacy of individuals. In this edited excerpt from Finding Normal, Tsoulis-Reay describes what it was like to interview Shelly, and the responsibility she felt in the aftermath.
He told me to consent… he manipulated and groomed me until he got what he wanted.” “Deep down, I think I knew it was wrong the whole time, but he convinced me it was okay. “It’s sad and scary how in denial I was,” she says. In the years since that story was published, Shelly ended the relationship, telling Tsoulis-Reay in a more recent interview that she understands now it was abuse. They were going to get married, she told Tsoulis-Reay for the initial column. Tsoulis-Reay found this story deep in the internet, on forums where people discuss a phenomenon called “genetic sexual attraction,” or GSA, where relatives who have been estranged from early childhood or birth meet as adults and experience sexual attraction to each other. At 17, Shelly had reunited via Facebook with her father, who initiated a sexual relationship with her. One of those interviews was with “Shelly,” an anonymous 18-year-old girl who was in a sexual relationship with her father.