YABVU, I am in my 20’s gay and it still took me 19 years to accept and embrace my sexuality despite living in a place where being gay would have little (saying zero is a lie) repercussion to my life.
Coming out is a MASSIVE thing, teens still get kicked out of their house for it or sent to conversion camp (in the US), you can still lose friends and family, you can still be assaulted or raped for it, it’s not THAT easy.
Internal homophobia is a massive thing and the brain can do wonderful things, including burying your actual feelings and who you really are.
Technically I always knew I was different, but it’s only in insight now and putting every little thing together that I can tell “yes, I guess I have always been gay.” But it wasn’t always like that. Growing up I just knew I wasn’t excited about men the way my friends were but that didn’t really worry me, I figured they were acting more excited than they felt, I also figured I would meet someone eventually. I also noticed that I would notice girls more and that I enjoyed lesbian encounters in media a bit too much but my brain always had good excuses for all those reactions, never did it come to the conclusion that I was gay. I even had sex with a girl first, at 13, and even then my brain justified it as “ you liked it because of what was done to you not because it was a girl and you would feel the same with a guy”, when I had my first real crush on a girl at 18, my brain just justified it by thinking that she was an exception or that I mostly wanted to be her rather than be with her.
In the meantime I didn’t want to be gay so badly that I convinced myself I was straight. And for a while I genuinely believed it. I even felt attraction to guys for a bit, which would always fade as soon as we would get intimate (and yes the thought of dating them and waking up to them everyday wasn’t appealing in the least) but I had NO clue what being straight was like. It’s only now I live openly as a gay woman that I know that I never actually liked men the way I do women but at the time that was the closest to liking men I had ever felt in my life and how could I have known that my feelings weren’t to the same intensity straight women felt? All I ever heard from straight women was complaints about men and how majoritarily crap they are in bed and yada yada so sex not being great (and me wondering if it would be better with a woman) didn’t make me feel like it was a me problem. I have met plenty of men who would make really good /husbands/father and it would have been easy to settle for them and not think I was misleading them. It’s easy to mistake strong friendship and strong love and appreciation you have for a friend for love when it’s the strongest thing you have ever felt for someone of the opposite sex and you are looking to feel something for them (because society tells you, you should).
It’s also not that hard to brush off gay feelings and attraction, until one day (like is happening for him) you can’t not acknowledge them anymore. I am sure during my “straight” years, I saw plenty of attractive women but I was only confronted by my sexuality when I developed crushes on specific women and it only took me two of them (at 18 and 19) to come out, but had I not met those girls I am pretty positive I would still identify as straight. In fact for the first 4 years of my coming out I identified as bisexual, because it is SO hard to accept to give up on heteronormativity it’s also confusing to identify as gay when you thought you had liked men.
When I came out I mostly received positivity but I still had friends acting weird, comments from family members opposing to gay people having children, guys harassing me for being gay and sometimes telling me they would “cure” me.
I don’t think it’s fair for someone who knows is gay to marry someone of the opposite sex without letting them know. But it’s not as easy as assuming that everyone who come out after a marriage always knew they were gay and were being deceiving sometimes it’s their own brain deceiving THEM until 20 years and 2 kids down the line they wake up realizing they actually are gay and stuck in a marriage they can’t fulfill. It can’t be easy for the wife/husband but it’s bloody
brave to admit you have done a mistake and make the hard choice to decide to break a family apart instead of doing the coward thing of staying, it is HARD to take that step of telling your spouse you are gay and having to risk losing your children and knowing you will hurt all of them no matter what. It’s brave to want to give the spouse a chance to find real love where they will be loved truly and instead of staying with them to keep the peace.
It might seems like it’s selfish but it’s pretty brave to look someone you love in the eye and tell them something you know will hurt them but need to know when the solution could be to stay silent.
Plenty of spouse also knew, deep down, that their spouse was gay, some still chose to stay when they find out because they have real love for their partner and don’t mind them being gay (not that it doesn’t hurt them). Things like that aren’t black and white, he had two kids with her so obviously he was having sex with her so I doubt it’s as simple as him knowing since before the marriage and betraying her. He said himself that’s it’s only semi-recently that it started consuming him from inside and personally it wasn’t until it started consuming me (and it took 19 years!) that I genuinely stopped to think and acknowledge I am gay.
If you are straight you CANNOT potentially understand, so don’t judge and just be grateful you never had to go through it.