Throughout her life, Jane Brown had always sensed an absence, an intangible void she couldn’t quite define.

Adopted as an infant and brought up as an only child, Jane’s connections often seemed lacking, as if she were on a quest for an elusive bond.

Reconnecting with her biological mother and siblings in her late twenties provided some solace, yet it didn’t completely bridge the gap she felt.

It wasn’t until her late forties, when she found her birth father and eventually met her half-brother, that her world transformed in unexpected ways.

The connection with her half-brother was instantaneous and intense, a kind of relationship Jane had never before encountered.

It felt effortless, a profound sense of familiarity and recognition that was both comforting and overwhelming.

‘Our connection was just easy – I felt seen by him,’ said Jane, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. ‘I had found the missing piece.’

But alongside the joy of that discovery came something far more complicated and destabilizing – a fierce and unwanted physical attraction that Jane could not contain or explain.

‘I was struggling with a feeling of really wanting to be close to him – in a physical way,’ she said.

Jane declined to describe exactly how far the relationship went, calling it natural but also deeply unsettling and one that brought profound feelings of shame to them both.

For the clinicians who have studied cases like hers, it was a textbook example of what is known as genetic sexual attraction, or GSA.

It describes the intense romantic or sexual feelings that can arise between close biological relatives such as siblings or parent and child who meet for the first time as adults.

It is thought to be extremely rare – in fact, some experts contest the concept entirely.

But it has been reported across different cultures and usually occurs in adoption reunions, where those involved did not grow up together and never developed the natural psychological barrier that prevents attraction between family members, known as the Westermarck effect.

When relatives are separated at birth or in infancy and reconnect in adulthood, that biological mechanism never forms – leaving them, in neurological terms, as strangers who happen to share DNA.

Such relationships are universally taboo, and in the case of sexual contact, illegal in all 50 US states regardless of whether those involved were raised together.

That means those affected rarely come forward.

When Jane confided in a close friend about her own experience, the reaction was immediate and crushing – strongly negative, leaving her feeling isolated and ashamed.

But she learned to reframe their bond as a deep and committed friendship of enduring emotional intensity.

Jane revealed they remain in regular contact and support one another as they work to establish boundaries and pursue conventional relationships elsewhere.

Jane shared her story with Adoptees On, an award-nominated podcast where adult adoptees share frank stories about how adoption affected their lives.

Its founder Haley Radke, a Canadian who reunited with her birth parents in her twenties, launched the podcast in 2016 and it has had more than 1.5 million downloads.

Radke told the Daily Mail that after releasing episodes featuring adoptees who experienced GSA, she said she received a wave of private messages from listeners sharing similar stories.

‘It was more common than I anticipated when I went into researching it. It’s so taboo that most people never talk about it,’ Radke said, describing an issue that often remains hidden, even within the adoptee community.

She does not see it as deviant, but rather as a misdirected form of curiosity, longing, and the desire for connection.

‘When you meet someone who has some kind of similarity to you… it’s what you’ve wanted your whole life,’ she said.

‘I think that it’s just kind of this offshoot of misdirected curiosity and attraction and hope for closeness.’

But GSA is even more uncomfortable when it affects parents and their biological children.

Sophia, who was adopted at birth and raised in California, finally met her biological parents at 21.

But within weeks of meeting her father, Sophia found herself grappling with overwhelming and confusing feelings toward her father, despite her being gay.

‘It was like our hearts just matched,’ she said, describing a bond she calls both ‘openhearted’ and ‘otherworldly,’ amplified by eerie similarities in their personalities, shared trauma and parallel struggles with addiction.

‘I felt like I was falling in love with the man of my dreams… and it was my father,’ said Sophia, using an alias to protect her identity.

‘I wanted to go off and have a child with him – and I knew that was entirely unrealistic,’ she told the podcast.

The emotional whirlwind soon collided with reality and Sophia found others with similar experiences and never acted on her desires.

But some do.

Monica Mares and Caleb Peterson, from New Mexico, are among a tiny number of parent-child couples to go public about their romance.

Mares had Peterson at 16 and placed her son – who was then named Carlos – up for adoption.

They reconnected on Facebook roughly 18 years later, quickly developed romantic feelings and began a sexual relationship that resulted in third-degree felony incest convictions.

Kim West and her biological son Ben Ford from Michigan also made international headlines in 2016 after reportedly reuniting after three decades apart and entering into a sexual relationship.

The Daily Mail tried to contact both couples, but they appeared to have stopped sharing about their personal lives.

Radke’s advice to adoptees is to seek support before reconnecting, warning that reunions can be emotionally intense and unpredictable.

‘Preparedness is the best advice I can give. If you’re picturing that Hallmark airport reunion, it’s not always like that,’ she said.

‘Just because you make first contact doesn’t mean you’re going to get the reunion of your dream.’

Experts warn GSA could become more common due to the rise in at-home DNA tests like 23andMe and AncestryDNA.

These tests do not merely reveal ancestral origins, they identify siblings, parents and cousins and allow users to contact them instantly.

As of 2025, roughly one in five Americans – around 60 million – has taken a consumer DNA test.

Betsie Norris, 65, an adoptee who reunited with her own birth family in 1986 and went on to found the Adoption Network Cleveland, described the advent of at-home DNA testing as a ‘complete gamechanger.’

‘People are finding each other left and right,’ Norris told the Daily Mail.

She sees it as a net positive overall – but one that has also opened what she calls a ‘Pandora’s box’ of family secrets for millions of unsuspecting people.

Reunions can carry the emotional rush of ‘new relationship energy,’ mirroring the dizzying highs of romantic infatuation, she said.

Usually the root is not sexual desire – it’s something deeper: a long-buried hunger for connection, identity, and belonging, easily mistaken for romance.

That’s where the danger lies. For therapists, the challenge is not denying these feelings, but managing them before they spiral.

Victoria Hill of southern Connecticut was 35 when an at-home DNA test revealed that her ex-boyfriend was actually her half-brother.

‘I instantly gravitated towards him,’ Victoria, now 41 and a married mother of two, previously told the Daily Mail.

The emotional fallout has been profound and ongoing.

‘Those feelings were present before we knew this information,’ she said, ‘and they don’t just go away.’

She described the experience as surreal, marked by cognitive dissonance and deeply difficult to navigate.

‘We have to figure out how to turn that into a sibling sort of love,’ she said. ‘But we both struggle with it.’

It is a struggle, experts say, that is only going to become more familiar as DNA databases grow, reunions multiply, and the full human consequences of the testing boom continue to unfold.