Sophia Greenwood said she met her biological father, Michael, for the first time when she was 24, then went on to have a five-year relationship with him. She said the connection felt immediate and unlike anything she had experienced before, even as she later realised it resembled romantic attraction.
Greenwood said she had been adopted when she was five-weeks-old and grew up in Yorkshire. She reunited with her birth mother at 23, then tracked down Michael soon after. After they first connected, she said they exchanged letters and phone calls for several months before arranging to meet in England about a year later.
Michael and Sophia Greenwood
Greenwood said that first meeting changed the shape of the story quickly. “I felt understood in a way I never had before,” she said. She also said, “From the moment we met, it felt astonishingly easy between us, as though - rather than having never met until now - we had known each other forever.”
She said the relationship that followed was emotionally overwhelming yet completely natural. Greenwood described moving to Australia and living with Michael “like any couple would,” while both of them worried about someone finding out. She said the relationship lasted five years.
genetic sexual attraction
The account is being discussed as an example of genetic sexual attraction, the term used for romantic feelings that can arise when closely related biological relatives meet as adults after being separated at birth or early childhood. In Greenwood’s telling, the lack of an early parent-child bond meant that boundary never formed in the usual way.
“What frightened me most was not that the connection felt wrong, but that it felt so natural. I realised with horror that what I was experiencing resembled romantic attraction. I had spent much of my adult life thus far searching for this kind of effortless emotional connection with a man and now, impossibly, I felt it for the last person I should,” she said. Greenwood added, “He was of course aware of the biological reality of our relationship and wrestled with it intellectually, but emotionally we both experienced a profound sense of connection and belonging. We felt understood by the other in a way neither of us had experienced before, and for a long time we believed we would somehow find a way through the difficulties.”
How the five-year relationship between Greenwood and Michael ended is not explained in the account. What it does make clear is the sequence: adoption at five-weeks-old, reunion at 23 and 24, months of letters and calls, then a relationship that crossed into territory both said felt natural before it became difficult to contain.
