can we ask about ur family's curse
according to my great grandma it was cast on her grandma by a neighbor with the evil eye - "your daughters will marry their fathers and your sons will become them"
which is really just a fancy way of describing the cycle of abuse and therefore worked very well, generally going into effect before the kid in question turned 21
so my matrilineal family tree winds up a fractured, miserable mess, lots of young marriages and parents falling apart generation after generation, serial toxic marriages with generations of kids scattered across the whole state in foster homes - very nasty stuff
until it gets to me (firstborn in my generation of cousins) and by the time im twenty one i am 1. both daughter and son and neither 2. extremely aspec and queer
which apparently this neighbor did not conceive of when casting her eye and seems to have simply error messaged the curse into oblivion. no one born after me has had this problem. all their romantic relationships are loving (though i would never claim them perfect) and their children adored. fairytale loopholed so hard the damn thing disintegrated. its the funniest magic story i have lmao
The curse had been going on so long that we'd pretty solidly determined it went into effect before a certain age (21)
I came out as nonbinary and ace at 18 and a couple of my cousins made a joke that i was now immune and we all had a good laugh and forgot about it. its hard to explain the kind of like.... hopeless-but-amused misery that comes with having a curse this bad in the family for so long. everyone tries to beat it, and everyone knows its not going to work. even the people who dont believe theres a curse (or indeed magic at all) as kids have generally conceded by like 24
like, there was the typical 'you'll find someone someday' that you get as an ace, but it wasnt (completely) an assumption based in aphobia. no one believed it was even possible for me to not be married and a mom and miserable by 21. it would have been like arguing the sky was green.
but i got to 20 and wasn't even dating anyone and started getting side eye, and when i finally got to 21 everyone was so happy for me, it was crazy. my grandma cried.
but everyone assumed i'd just broken it for me (and honestly, it went a long way in unraveling a lot of transphobia in my maternal family - if my gender was enough to break the curse, it must at the minimum be real, right?), and then the next oldest cousin (my sister) almost got got, got all the way to living with and being engaged to a dude who was a fucking nightmare, and then just. woke up one day packed her stuff and walked out. no one could believe it, they thought she go back any day, but she never did.
next was the oldest male cousin, D, and as he approached 21 that was where (i, at least) start to suspect the curse was gone. we were really poor and so our families shared a house for most of my childhood, he's like my brother. I knew him well, and I was certain there was no way he was going to become an abusive husband or father.
and then he didnt! he did get a wife and kid before he turned 21 but he's a huge simp and so so good with his daughter, even with her being autistic which so many parents might have taken as a flaw.
at that point me and all the cousins were chatting about it one day and D pointed out that the only thing that changed between the previous person to get got (my uncle /neg) and everyone who didnt was me. We had something of a back and forth where we tried to figure out if my sister's ex-fiance counted, but we eventually came to the consensus it was curse death throes lmao. and no ones got got since.
(of course if you do want to take a hard line against magic or argue it's confirmation bias, you can, it's not gonna bother me - it's arguably possible that the belief that the curse could be or was broken was what gave my sister and subsequent younger relatives the confidence to leave/break the cycle)
