Yes, you do have a point about distance causing what might perhaps be a welcome unfamiliarity with one's first cousins in terms of future intimacy. I hadn't thought of that. I grew up in an area of Seattle known as Capitol Hill. I had two complete sets of first cousins in the same Catholic parish and they had multiple sets of first cousins on the other sides of their families, all also in our same parish. So I was inundated with family--aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins' cousins, and cousins' cousins' parents. Knew them all so well. Nowadays I tell people I grew up in the ``village'' of Capitol Hill. And no way would I have looked at any of my cousins at all in terms of dating or marriage. They were all too much like brothers and sisters. But in Queen Victoria's time, and even, in some cases more recently, things were clearly different for the royal families.
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