In Defense of Cousins Who Fall in Love

On June 18, Mallika Rao wrote an article for Vulture, a pop culture website run by New York magazine.  She talks about the Hulu show Ramy which is about a Muslim in New Jersey who is attracted to his cousin.  Rao also talks about a real wedding she attended between first cousins that her father had encouraged, and also she took her own first cousin as a guest.

I watched this scene on a recent trip to my childhood home, after which my father unwound what sounded like the plot of a slightly off Nicholas Sparks movie: the story of a woman who visited her brother’s house regularly after her husband died too soon. Her young son got to know his first cousin during those visits and, eventually, the two first cousins married each other. My father spoke in a way meant to open my mind, it seemed. He needn’t have tried so hard. I wasn’t gagging at the thought. But I got why he assumed I might: The rightness of marriage between cousins constitutes one of the most quietly heated debates on the planet.