I compared myself with you, Edie, using the Gedmatch default threshold of 10 cM. Gedmatch tells me:
Kit 1: M162952 (*Enviroellen)
Kit 2: A346257 (*EdieK)
Found 3864 matches for kit M162952.
Found 6404 matches for kit A346257.
Out of those thousands of matches, Gedmatch found only 49 kits (in several cases, there are multiple kits for one person, but I did not adjust the kit count to account for those duplicates) that match both of us at the 10 cM threshold or higher. That is a very small number, and the closest calculated relationship either one of us has to any of these matches is 4.1 generations. I assume that a good-sized fraction of these matches are spurious (basically, coincidences), so maybe there are about 25 people in the Gedmatch database who share a common ancestor with both you and me (but may not share the same ancestor with both of us) within 8 generations or so. That did not seem at all far-fetched to me, particularly considering that we both live in the United States and our ancestries include some of the same national origins.
After I did that, I discovered that Relationship Finder shows that you and I map out as 9th cousins once removed, but to my way of thinking, that is a relationship distance that would not be discernible in DNA and is basically the same as saying we have ancestry in the same populations.
Have you compared with anyone who is, for example, a Chinese person living in China?