Why did my boyfriend and I break up after reading an article on ChatGPT?

When I was seven, I realized I could see sounds. Not metaphorically, I literally saw them. My mom’s voice was warm amber, honey dripping through the air. Thunder was deep purple explosions. I thought everyone saw the world this way until my teacher sent me to the counselor for drawing the colors of math class.

Turns out I have chromesthesia, a condition where sounds trigger colors in your vision. Only one in 3,000 people have it. By college, I’d given up on dating. Every time I mentioned that someone’s laugh looked like golden fireworks, they’d give me that look. The one that screamed, “You’re insane.” So, I stopped mentioning it. I stopped mentioning a lot of things.

Then, last year, my roommate dragged me to a silent disco. You know those parties where everyone wears wireless headphones? I went alone to the dance floor, just wanting to lose myself in the colors only I could see. That’s when I noticed him. This guy standing completely still in the middle of all the dancing. Tears streaming down his face. We bumped into each other, reaching for water, and our headphones fell off.

“Sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. “That song was just… it was like silver waterfalls.”

My heart stopped. “You see it, too?”

The way his eyes widened told me everything. “You can see the colors.” We spent the rest of the night comparing what we saw. His voice was emerald green to me, like forest light. Mine was rose gold to him, he said, like sunrise. We both saw rain as powder blue droplets. Thunder was always deep purple.

For the first time in my life, someone understood why I cried during certain songs, why I had to leave restaurants when the background music clashed with the conversation colors. Dating him was like finally being fluent in a language I’d only whispered to myself. We’d go to concerts just to watch the light shows only we could see.

Six months in, I knew I loved him. I loved how he’d hum specific notes just to paint colors in my vision when I was sad. I loved how we could sit in complete silence and still be sharing an entire conversation through the colors from the background noise around us.

One random Tuesday night, we were scrolling through ChatGPT together, asking it ridiculous questions about our condition. That’s when we found it. This article about chromesthesia having genetic markers traced back to an ancient tribe in northern Finland, the Sami people. The article said it was incredibly rare, like only a handful of bloodlines worldwide still carried the gene.

“No way we’re both from some ancient Finnish tribe,” I laughed, but he was already pulling up more articles.

“That would explain why we match so perfectly, though,” he said.

And something about the way he said it made my chest warm. Like, what are the odds of two random people seeing the exact same purple for thunder?

We joked about it for weeks. Every time we saw the same color for something new, we’d say it was our ancient Finnish connection. It became our inside joke. So, when those DNA test ads started popping up, we joked, “Let’s see if we’re really descendants of the color-seeing tribe.”

We ordered two kits, made a whole date night of spitting in tubes and sealing envelopes. We were so excited, like kids waiting for their birthdays.

“When we get the results, we should compare our ancestry percentages,” I said. “Bet we both have some Finnish.”

Three weeks later, his results came first. I was at work when he texted me. All caps: “23% Finnish, 31% Norwegian. We were right.” I couldn’t stop smiling. My co-workers probably thought I was insane, grinning at my phone like that.

“Mine haven’t come yet,” I texted back. “But that’s amazing.”

Two days later, I got the email that my results were ready. I was about to open them when my phone rang. It was him, and he was crying. Not the happy tears from when we first met. These were different.

“Just come over,” he said, his voice shaking. “Please.”

I drove over with this sick feeling in my stomach. The kind where you know something’s about to change everything. He had his laptop open when I arrived, and his face was pale.

“My mom called,” he said quietly. “I told her about the Finnish thing, and she got weird. Really weird.”

He turned the laptop toward me. There it was, on my results page under DNA relatives. His name. His picture. First cousin. 12.5% DNA shared.

The colors in the room seemed to dim. “That’s not possible,” I whispered.

“Your dad is my mom’s brother,” he said. “They haven’t spoken in 20 years. Some fight about their parents’ inheritance. That’s why we never knew. Different last names, different cities.”

I sat frozen on his couch, staring at that screen, showing our names next to each other with those numbers underneath. First cousin, 12.5% DNA shared. My brain knew what the words meant, but it refused to make them connect to us, to what we’d been doing for six months.

He was crying next to me, and I could hear these awful choking sounds coming from him. But I couldn’t turn my head to look, because if I see his face right now, this becomes something I can’t take back. I needed just a few more seconds where this wasn’t real yet.

His voice cut through the silence. “My mom told me because of some fight when their parents died and left them money and property. That’s why we never knew. Different last names because my mom got married. Different cities because they stopped speaking decades ago.”

The colors in the room looked wrong now, like my chromesthesia was glitching out. The hum of his laptop sounded muddy brown instead of the soft blue it should be. And the traffic noise from outside looked like sick yellow instead of pale orange. Everything was distorted and broken, just like us.

I stood up without saying anything because words felt impossible right now. I grabbed my keys off his coffee table. He said my name, but I was already walking to the door. I couldn’t stop moving because if I stopped, I’d collapse. I drove back to my dorm, and I didn’t turn on any music because even silence had colors right now, and I couldn’t handle seeing anything.

The drive took 15 minutes, but it felt like hours. I kept seeing that DNA results page every time I blinked.

When I walked into my dorm room, Melinda was sitting on her bed, doing homework. She took one look at my face and immediately closed her laptop.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice sounding concerned and scared.

I sat down on my bed, and she came over and sat next to me. Then I told her everything. I said the words out loud for the first time: “We’re cousins. First cousins. We share grandparents. His mom is my dad’s sister.”

Saying it made it real in a way that just thinking it hadn’t. Hearing my own voice say we’re cousins made denial completely impossible.

Melinda didn’t know what to say. Honestly, neither did I. Because what do you say in a situation like this? She just sat next to me, and when I started crying, she held my hand and didn’t try to make it better because there was no making this better.

I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that DNA results page with our pictures next to each other and those numbers: 12.5% shared DNA. First cousin. My brain kept trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out how the person I loved could also be my cousin. How everything we’d done together was now something different and wrong.

At 3:00 a.m., I finally gave up on sleeping. I grabbed my phone and started searching. I typed “genetic counseling center campus” into Google and found the University Health Center website. They had emergency appointments available, and I filled out the online form requesting the earliest slot they had because I needed someone to explain what this actually meant.

The genetic counselor fit me in the next afternoon as an emergency case. When I walked into her office, she was professional and kind. She explained that first cousins share grandparents and that we each got 25% of our DNA from those grandparents. So, we share about 12.5% with each other.

She talked about biological risks and said the things people worry about mainly apply to having children together—genetic disorders and birth defects. She was being so professional and clinical about it, but I could see concern in her eyes when I told her we’d been dating for six months.

She asked if we planned to continue the relationship, and I realized I hadn’t let myself think about that question yet. I told her I didn’t know, and she nodded like that was a reasonable answer, which somehow made me feel worse.

Before I left, she handed me a paper with referrals for therapists who work with complex family situations and trauma. He texted me constantly over the next two days, but I couldn’t make myself respond because I didn’t know what to say. Every time my phone buzzed with a notification, my stomach hurt and I felt sick.

On the third day, she gave me this apologetic look and then left us alone. We sat in the common room because I couldn’t be alone with him in my bedroom anymore. And that realization made everything hurt worse. He looked as destroyed as I felt, with dark circles under his eyes and his hair messy like he hadn’t showered.

He said, “We need to talk about what happens next.” And I finally admitted out loud that I didn’t think we could keep doing this, even though I still loved him.

He argued that the love was what mattered, that we didn’t know. So, it wasn’t like we did anything wrong. But even as he was saying it, I could see he didn’t really believe it either.

The way his voice sounded desperate and broken looked like emerald green glass shattering, and I realized my chromesthesia was turning everything about him into something painful now instead of beautiful.

I told him I needed some space to think and process everything. He nodded slowly and stood up from the couch. As he was walking toward the door, he turned back and leaned in to kiss me goodbye. Just automatic habit from six months of dating.

I flinched away before I could stop myself. My whole body just reacted and pulled back from him. The look on his face when I did that absolutely destroyed me because I could see exactly how much it hurt him. But I also knew in that moment that the flinch changed something big between us, something we can’t take back.

He left without saying anything else, and I sat there alone in the common room feeling like I just broke something that was already shattered.

The next morning, I pulled up the referral list the genetic counselor gave me, and I found Cormarmac Reynolds near the top. His office had an online booking system, and I grabbed the first available appointment, which was in three days.

Those three days dragged by in this weird fog where I went through the motions of existing, but nothing felt real. When I finally walked into Cormarmac’s office, he was an older guy with kind eyes, and he gestured for me to sit down.

I started trying to explain what happened about the DNA test and the results and my boyfriend being my cousin. But I only got about two sentences in before I completely fell apart and started crying so hard I couldn’t talk.

Cormarmac just sat there quietly and let me cry. He handed me tissues and didn’t try to rush me or make it better. After a while, when I could breathe again, he asked me what I was most afraid of right now.

The question made me stop and actually think instead of just feeling everything at once. I realized what scared me the most was that I still loved him exactly the same as before. Nothing about my feelings changed when I saw those DNA results. But now that love felt wrong and dirty and contaminated by this knowledge. I could never unknow it.

I told Cormarmac this, and he nodded like it made perfect sense. He explained that my feelings were completely valid and normal for this situation. He said, “Grief for this kind of loss is really complicated because the person is still alive and you still love them, but the relationship has to die anyway.” Hearing him say that out loud made it feel more real somehow.