exactly. i keep saying this but people here have a hard time with reading and comprehension and therefore miss the jist of most posts.
marrying a cousin, in the UK at least, is not illegal and therefore not considered incest. the heredity diseases thing is also largely a red herring. but despite both these things the attitudes of non muslims towards it are incredibly negative and bigoted. non desi’s think i’m a coconut so that it’s okay to tell me their true feelings in regards to our culture and religion, especially in regards to this topic; it’s shocking, and full of disinformation (like some of the opinions in this thread).
i had a hard enough time just convincing people i work with and even some friends that marrying a guy from pakistan was 100% my choice and that he was the right one for me. given their assessment of the kind of person i was, they thought it must have had some element of being arranged or that i was conforming to what my family wanted. it’s like ‘hello? do you see me being a pushover? so why is it so hard for you to comprehend that this was my own decision?’.
so i can understand where the OP is coming from. on one hand why should she have to hide this but on the other hand she shouldn’t have to deal with the judgemental attitudes and having to convince people that she didn’t have a forced cousin marriage, which is exactly what they will assume.