Hear me out. My cousins are hot. Ok. And not “hot” in a Pam Anderson in Barbed Wire kind of way. Gross. And, dumb. No, my cousins all (or all except those creepy athlete girls from Nebraska we hardly see ‘cept at funerals) have this attractive combination of wit, class, and legs. Dynamite legs. And I feel like modern sensibilities are to blame for me not being able to even indulge these thoughts without, like, the fucking Human Services getting involved.

K. Have you read Wuthering Heights? Have you seen the family tree (insert redneck joke about mutated tree metaphor, like the tree with one branch or whatever) of Heathcliff and Catherine? I’m JUST SAYING. There was a time and a place, ok?

But now the moment I say anything, remotely politically incorrect, like, I fantasized about my cousin’s sports bra as a horny teenager, well, jesus mary and Aunt Josephine, they’ve got me lined up to meet the old lab technician and the venn diagrams.

Listen. I’m not going there. I’m not going to tell you that since my female cousins and I reached the proper drinking age, and as we’ve gone through more and more consternation in our personal, romantic lives, and as more and more backyard family BBQs in Chicago have gone late into the night, and booze has flowed, and you’re looking for a guy just like Grandpa, and I’m looking for a gal just like Grandma, well, I’m not going to pretend anymore that your hand is just leaning accidentally against mine. Or that I had a hard-on at your graduation when you wore that dress.

What?! That would be tawdry and crass.

But it looks like Uncle Saul locked the door so we gotta share the fold-out bed. HA. OH MY GOD. EMBARASSING. I’ll let you use my blanket. No? You’re cool? K. Whatever. I was just offering….

But I will say that the older I get, the more I search this earth in vain for a woman who has just the right bit of goofball humor, beautiful curls, and oh-I-don’t-know a sense of shared intuition like you’ve known that person your whole life. Which leads me to just wonder, you know, maybe I SHOULD have taken you, cousin Jessica, to prom!?

Or as my betrothed.

I mean let’s be real: we’re genetically hardwired for each other. Your dippy, “gonna-leave the babyseat on the car” is meant for my “dropped-the-fork-down-the-drain again.” Our grandparents were in love at one point—and we have their traits! It’s really quite romantic that we honor their tradition by continuing it onward. Carrying these genes. Exclusively. And, look how tidy keeping it in the family will be. No awkward in-laws. Less expensive wedding bills. And we won’t need to fight about who to visit over the holidays!

Dating your cousin is just like dating a total online stranger you’ve been paired with—EXCEPT WE KNOW EACH OTHER ALREADY!

Ha!? Isn’t that great. What?! No, no no, Grandma won’t mind. Look, she married a guy with the same last name as she had anyway—all those immigrants were banging their cousins and siblings and stuff. Ya, it’s all on that History Channel show with Sarah Jessica Parker.

Just give it some thought. I won’t pressure you. Just send you a lot of late-night Facebook emails on our family’s private page. And see you at Christmas. Yeah this time it’s at your guys’ place. And don’t say a fucking word to Grandma.

~Dunstan McGill

Photo courtesy bonaircat