‘I FELL IN LOVE WITH MY SPERM DONOR’ A modern-day love story
In the most modern of romantic twists, Jessica Share met her partner of 12 years after giving birth to his daughter
It was a few weeks before Christmas in 2016 when Jessica Share began getting questions from her daughter Alice. The then 11-year-old knew that she’d been conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, but now she wanted to know more. “Her grandma is always talking about genealogy and what countries her ancestors came from,” says Jessica, 43. “And Alice would get annoyed because she didn’t know any of that.” Finally, Alice asked her grandmother for a high-tech Christmas present: a 23andme DNA test. Weeks later the results came back showing that Alice was 48 per cent German, 15 per cent British and a mix of other European ancestries. But there was more. In the section labelled DNA relatives, it listed one Aaron Long as 50 per cent related to her. Recalls Alice, “My mom said, ‘Damn. This is your father.’ ”
“It’s a strange feeling knowing that you’re walking a path that no-one else has walked before” —Jessica Share
Jessica tracked down Aaron Long, now a 53-year-old Seattle-based musician and writer, on 23andme, and she and Alice travelled to meet him in July 2017. Then something unexpected happened, something Jessica insists that she “never in a million years” could have imagined. “I fell in love with my sperm donor,” she says. “I felt like I already knew him – the way he smiled and his sense of empathy reminded me of Alice. It was like I’d been spying on him for years.”
In August 2017, Jessica and Alice moved in with Long in Seattle, sharing a downtown apartment with another child fathered by Long. They’ve also learned that he has at least 10 children, and calculates that his sperm could have created as many as 67 kids. “It’s definitely,” laughs Long, “a pretty modern love story.”
The improbable story began in 1994, when the then 28-year-old Long, a graduate of a Johns Hopkins University creative-writing program, had just returned to his hometown of State College, Pennsylvania, after a year spent teaching English in the Canary Islands. One day while working as a taxi driver, he spotted a newspaper ad from a local sperm bank looking for healthy men, 18 to 35, to participate in a semen-donation program to help infertility patients. “I was in a longdistance relationship with a woman in Germany, so donating sperm seemed like a good thing to do with it at the time,” recalls Long, who dropped by the facility twice a week for the next year. “They paid $40 a visit.”
Ten years later Jessica – then married to a woman in Eugene, Oregon, and eager to have a child with her – came across the description of Donor No. 2008 in a directory from Virginia’s Fairfax Cryobank. “He listed his occupation as taxi driver and musician and said he had a degree in creative writing,” recalls Jessica. “We both said, ‘That’s the DNA we want.’ It just seemed romantic thinking of him driving a cab and writing a book.”
The couple purchased two vials of his sperm in September 2004, and Jessica, who works in marketing for hi-tech start-ups, was soon pregnant with Alice. “Nine months later we’ve got this perfect baby,” she recalls. Two years after that the couple purchased more vials of Long’s semen, and Jessica’s wife gave birth to their second daughter, Soren, in 2007. But their relationship ended soon afterwards, and Jessica’s wife moved out with the couple’s other daughter. (Under Oregon law, Jessica has no parental rights to the child.) “Alice misses her sister a lot,” she says.
In fact, that heartbreak only makes their new unconventional family feel all the more precious. From the moment Jessica reached out to Long – “I said, ‘Hey, I’m the parent of a child who 23andme matched as your daughter. If you’re open to trading pictures, we’re available,” she recalls – Long welcomed her and Alice into his life. He immediately sent them a 50-page autobiography and invited them to visit. He also shared some stunning revelations from his own DNA test: he had a son, Bryce Gallo,
23, whom he’d also fathered as a donor, and Gallo had recently tracked down several more of Long’s children, including 21-year-old Madi Saunders, who moved in with Aaron in May 2018. “I went from finding out I had one child, to having six,” says the never-married Long with a laugh. Alice and her sister, he learned, were No. 7 and No. 8. “It’s actually really fun every time we get a new one,” says Jessica. “They all seem so familiar. It’s like, ‘Come in. Have a sandwich. Here’s your toothpaste.’ ”
Jessica insists that falling in love with her sperm donor wasn’t something she took lightly. “He’s a very open, soft-spoken person,” she says. “But I had a lot of hesitancy at first. I didn’t want anything to ever interfere with his relationship with Alice.” Still, she says, they had an immediate connection: “He was already family in so many ways,” she says. Adds Long: “Our relationship began backward by having kids first and then meeting 12 years later. But as we played our roles of mom and dad, we found we enjoyed them and each other.”
The pair have already had several offers for a reality show about their life and joke about getting married on TV. But for the moment they are taking things slowly. And they say they are most grateful that Alice, now 13, seems happy with all the strange twists her life has taken since she became interested in her genealogy. “Aaron’s more of a friendly acquaintance than an actual father-figure,” she says, “but I like it here.”