Husband after 26th is gay

[Haley1826]

i just need to vent!!!
27yrs and now he comes clean…
what was wrong with me,
yes we had lots of up and down moments. He says we are best friends, yes I agree but how can I switch off the romance sexual feelings I have?
i feel worthless unloved and stupid that I didn’t see the signs.

Dyou know I think it is because we are fed this narrative that 'you are born this way'. When people say my 10 year old came out as gay is it a phase? You are told well when did you know that you were straight? Sex is such a natural thing for most of us, it's hard to imagine that someone could be so out of touch with themselves that they didn't realise that they liked cock for nearly 50 years. Like getting turned on is something you have no control of, it's something that just happens for most of us, your body literally takes over and you get aroused. I think it is difficult to imagine that some people's bodies don't work that way, that you lack that natural thing that most of us are born with. It must be difficult not to be born with that no doubt but I don't think you can blame people for finding it hard to imagine that for 50 years he lacked natural urges then suddenly a flick switched and he gained them.

“Marginalised” 😂😂 name one other group of people that gets celebrated nonstop for a month across Europe America and Australia with flags in the street in every city and themed lessons in every school etc etc.

Anyway, OP, your husband is an arse having a middle-aged crisis. He’s suddenly decided that he wants to go off and shag young men, and he’s trying to make this into some noble journey of self-discovery when it’s just an old old story. Middle aged man discovers he wants to shag around but still wants to be best friends with his wife and expects her to be his emotional crutch while he fucks others 🥱 😡

More seriously, I’m so sorry. My advice is don’t allow him to make this all about him. If the marriage is dead, it’s dead. Focus on sorting out your finances, reaching out to supportive friends, and self-care. Do not waste anymore of your life listening to the navel-gazing whinges of this narcissistic cliche.

"bye bye hun..." OH GOD, IT BURNS 😂

Run along, there's a good lad, your mam's that way ➡️ ✌️

@eraseddad
I see you're still not addressing the question of how this man might have finally figured out he was gay or the question of whether the OP should get STD tested.

I think those using this post to go on a homophobic rampage are being ridiculous. Yes it’s an awful situation but it’s far from uncommon. There is a chance he actually did not know or that he was hiding it ( second choice is unforgivable) . But the real issue here is the betrayal and possible cheating ( I’m sure if he is so sure he is gay he must have had sex with other men ) .
I posted earlier that my partner was cheated by his ex wife , they had children and suddenly she left him for another woman ( partner is a man ) they had been married for over 10 years .
This was 8 years ago and the cheating was what bothered him to this day , nit the fact it was a woman , if anything he came to accept they would never be happy because she was gay .
I was talking to him about the OP and he said the same the betrayal is the worse, but there is a chance he didn’t actually know . His ex wife to this day says she didn’t know , she had in fact been married prior to him too . In his words she used to even be slightly homophobic.
So please don’t make this a homophobic thread . This is about betrayal and cheating . The op deserves an explanation and above all deserves happiness with someone who loves her .

Apart from the cheating, it’s hard for anyone nit to look back at all those years and wonder where you fit it wrong

If those men were coming out as bi, fair enough. But how do you explain the ‘i love You’, the sex, the orgasms, HIS orgasms, and wonder what was going on his head then. Was he thinking about a man when he was shagging you? was he thinking about you? A Woman he isn’t sexually attracted to?

That would be plenty to shatter any self confidence tbh.
That would be plenty to questions ANY of the Good times you had and look at them with a different lens.

And yes maybe he was lying to himself. Many do. But in lying to himself, he also lied to his partner. He sold them a Life and an image that wasn’t the truth. And there is no doubt this is extremely hurtful, cheating or not.

I think your "homophobia" comment sadly reflects the reception the OP is going to receive when she starts talking to people about the betrayal she has experienced. So there's at least one positive to it. It prepares her for the hard road that lies ahead for her.

Many years ago, when I first made the discoveries on the home PC that revealed the truth about my exH's sexuality, I joined an online support group for people who had experienced similar betrayal. Almost to a man, the men whose partners turned out to be lesbuans had a far less difficult time with that than the women whose partners were gay.

The reasons for this are very likely complex and perhaps related to how much male privilege the women decided to put up with in their relationships in order to make their relationships work. There's a good deal of rude or entitled behaviour that men get away with in many relationships that falls short of abuse but nettles all the same, but female partners choose to be kind/ see the glass half full/ decide 'he didn't really mean to be such an arsehole', etc.

We are conditioned to see the big picture when it comes to men, and we put up with a lot of low level crap until the day our lives fall down around our ankles. It is harder for most women to deal with this comprehensive betrayal than it is for most men.

I think the OP has every right to feel hurt and angry by the way. And the falling away of the marriage and her view of what they have will feel devastating. A relationship ending after more than 2 decades is really stressful.

As someone who came out later in life (though I didn’t feel gay in my youth), I will note that it was really unusual for people to be out in 1996. I knew one openly gay person at school and no-one at Uni, which is statistically impossible! If you add in possibly religious parents or parents who would have been born in the 1940s, you n may well find very powerful messages not to be gay.

@Darhon genuine question here as I’m trying to understand.

My understanding is that sexuality is somehow set in stone. People who are gay often know from a very early age that they are - notwithstanding the lying to oneself-
If you don’t feel gay as a teen or in your 20s and have her relationship and then start to be attracted to people if the same sex, are you not busy rather than gay? On the ground that your sexuality hasn’t changed and what’s going in is that you are attracted by both sex rather than one or the other?

I’ve noticed few people (or is it fewer?) people say they are bi. It often feels like it’s not a well accepted position iyswim. So I wonder if people don’t jump to the ‘im gay’ rather than ‘im bi’ because of that.

Or actually your sexuality isn’t as set in stone as I seem to believe?

I don’t agree it’s easier , if anything will be harder in our experience . He got a lot of bad reactions like it was his fault she” suddenly turned “ gay and he had a lot to deal with with no fault if his own doing . She on the other hand got a lot of understanding for coming out . Thankfully my partner is the less rancorous person I know and in time he completely got over it and they coparent really well .

I can only speak for myself and I note, though, that a lot of women come out in their 40s after they’ve had kids and head towards perimenopause. However, I genuinely switched and just stopped fancying men in my very early 40s. It was very odd for a year as I worked through it and looked for signs in my youth. Apart from not knowing anyone in my youth, who was openly gay, I was from a liberal and non-religious background and work in the public sector, so in my adult life, nothing to make me feel bad about being gay. I’m with a woman now. I possibly could have stayed with my male partner but for many reasons that relationship ran it’s course.

All that aside the loss of my long, long relationship and my life as I knew it was a massive thing and it took me a couple of years to get over it, even though I was out and dating. So for the poster, I understand that she will feel awful and hurt and have an adjustment to make. She may come out the other side and feel ok about her ex, she might not. It will depend more on how he handles it. She owes him nothing.

I don't think your post contradicts my assertion. Your partner got over it and moved on.

It is harder for women because so much of ourselves so often gets pushed to one side over the course of a relationship. There's a good deal of biting one's tongue and compromising and putting up with what I have called low-level crap. We put up with it because on balance the man you have is a decent bloke on the whole, and who among us is perfect, yada yada. Then it all comes crashing down and you initially think you've been the biggest mug in the history of the universe because we women are hard on ourselves, and feel a deep sense of humiliation and shame when we are betrayed.

Then there are the barbs along the lines of "lol, you turned a man gay." Despite advances in our legal status - we are now full people in our own right all our lives! We can vote! We can work after marriage! We can open bank accounts in our own names! - women's worth is so often measured in our society according to whether we can get and keep a man.

There are many subtle and not so subtle ways in which we are conditioned to accept the centrality of men in the world and our role in orbit around them. This makes it all the harder to put up with the "life is so hard for gay men/ be kind" comments.

We put up with so much from men in general, and then when an individual man turns out to have used us and society still expects us to roll over and accept the unthinkable - that our lives have been htterly wasted. We are reminded to be kind, and told that our experience as a woman in a relationship has been trumped by the collective experience of gay men as a whole and the individual experience of one particular gay man.

Never mind that this is the man whose skid marks you might have patiently scrubbed off the loo for twenty years, whose tightly whities you have picked up off the floor where they landed almost in the laundry basket time after time, when you've cleared up hundreds of empty coffee cups after him, whose snoring has woken you from sleep countless times - in short, you've chosen to not sweat the small stuff for years, to the point where you've spent thousands of hours of the one life you'll ever have making his life comfortable and building what you understood to be a greater good, a lasting marriage. There is a huge amount of privilege associated with being a man. Most men have no idea how privileged they are relative to women.

Get angry Op he's deceived you for nearly 3 decades. He's a disgrace of a man!
Than get a solicitor and take him to the cleaners; your whole life & marriage has been a complete sham because of him.

For the vast majority of homosexual people, they know they are gay from a really early age. There may be exceptions to this, but I only know women where this has been the case - where they genuinely haven't had any sexual thoughts/feelings towards their own sex until later life. This just isn't the case for most people, especially not gay men. They may have repressed their sexuality, but they will have been aware.

Almost 30 years of your life was a lie. It's inconceivable that posters are sympathetic to your (hopefully) ex. Poor him. Poor him living a life. Poor you and any children you may have- unless he stole your fertile years too. If he had had affairs for nearly three decades it would be unacceptable but because he's been 'suffering the difficulty of nothing being his true self' it would be unacceptable. He's been riding around like a rabbit without a doubt. Please please get an STD test.

He is an absolute cunt and deserves fuck all but misery for 26 years in return.

Well I can only speak for myself, but I had sexual feelings towards women I saw on tv since I was about 7, but I convinced myself that was normal because everything I read told me it was normal for straight women to sometimes crush or fantasise about other women. I confused thinking a man was attractive and liking his personality with having a crush on him or being attracted to him, so what I thought were crushes on men were just me thinking a man was good looking and being flattered by attention from them. I didn’t have crushes on any girls or women I knew in real life because I don’t think I allowed myself to think of them in that way because I thought it was perverted and shameful.

The only lesbians I saw on tv in the 90s and early 00’s were nothing like me, they were butch and I’m feminine so that also made me think I was straight. I just thought when I met the right man I would get sexual feelings towards him and that maybe I was one of those people that needed a deep emotional connection to feel true sexual attraction. I also read a lot of things which said it was normal to not enjoy or be that interested in sex, so again I thought me not wanting to have sex with guys I thought were attractive and was dating was normal because I didn’t have a high sex drive. I physically sometimes enjoyed the sensation of sex with a man, so would cling onto that as I thought if I was gay there was no way I could have sex with a man and definitely not enjoy the sensation in any way, I now realised I was just zoning out at that point (because deep down I did not want to be doing it) and it was just my body responding to the sensation.

I had a lot of internalised homophobia too so the thought of being romantic with or dating a woman genuinely made me feel disgusted and that it was wrong and perverted, I believed my thoughts about some women I saw on tv were just a harmless fantasy I had or admiration.

You can convince yourself of almost anything if you really really want to believe it.

I know that doesn’t fit the narrative of what a lot of people want to believe, but that’s the truth of how I felt and it might help people to understand how some gay people can find themselves in long term relationships with the opposite sex before accepting or realising they’re gay.

@Elsiebear90
A lot of the things you were told were normal elements of women's sexuality were classic female conditioning around sex.

Men are conditioned differently.

So literally every decision you make in your life is absolutely perfect, is it? You’ve never had to make a horrible decision where BOTH outcomes would cause hurt?

He’s been in an awful situation too. I’m not saying OP needs to show him compassion. She can be angry and furious and hate him. But what I am saying is that all of those people making out that the husband is some kind of sneaky little liar, are probably wrong.

For a start, sexuality is fluid. Some people genuinely are NOT gay … until they realise they are. So we don’t know that this wasn’t the case for him. Secondly, it could be as I mentioned before - he was always gay, but didn’t realise that he was until after he was already married. Staying with OP could have been a compassionate decision, or his attempt at one. He loved her despite being gay and didn’t want to hurt her so chose to stay.

Or he could have known he was gay all along but been scared to admit it. He might have loved OP and thought he could build a happy life with her and suppress being gay. As I mentioned previously, you can be gay and love someone of the opposite sex, just as you can be straight and love someone of the same sex. That, of course, would be the only decision where he was being actively a bit selfish, if he married OP knowing he was gay.

But that’s just one of three options, and we are all leaping to conclusions and deciding that this is the case and slagging him off when really, we could be totally wrong. He’s probably in an awful lot of pain too. Try having some compassion and not just going on the attack.

@babysharkdoodoodedoodedoo

So literally every decision you make in your life is absolutely perfect, is it? You’ve never had to make a horrible decision where BOTH outcomes would cause hurt?

No, to the first question, yes to the second. I am divorced after all. I've never stolen someone else's life either by means of a massive lie, a fundamental betrayal lasting over twenty years.

He’s been in an awful situation too. I’m not saying OP needs to show him compassion. She can be angry and furious and hate him. But what I am saying is that all of those people making out that the husband is some kind of sneaky little liar, are probably wrong.

This despite living a massive and comprehensive lie for over twenty years, probably the best twenty plus years of a woman's life, during which he may or may not have seen her or possibly even encouraged her to put her career to one side to attend to parenthood while his advanced unimpeded. She made a decision to marry him and shut the door on whatever other choices she had at that time. She can't now turn the clock back.
This man is not a victim here. And he's not a "sneaky little liar" - his deception and betrayal go far, far beyond that grotesquely inadequate description.

For a start, sexuality is fluid. Some people genuinely are NOT gay … until they realise they are. So we don’t know that this wasn’t the case for him. Secondly, it could be as I mentioned before - he was always gay, but didn’t realise that he was until after he was already married. Staying with OP could have been a compassionate decision, or his attempt at one. He loved her despite being gay and didn’t want to hurt her so chose to stay.

In choosing 'compassionately' to stay, he robbed her of the chance to make up her own mind as to whether she would stay in the marriage. It wasn't compassionate. It was cowardly, and it was selfish.
And FWIW, sexual orientation is stable and fixed for the vast, vast majority of people. This is why homosexuality can't be "cured" and such "conversion therapy" is rightly denounced.

Or he could have known he was gay all along but been scared to admit it. He might have loved OP and thought he could build a happy life with her and suppress being gay. As I mentioned previously, you can be gay and love someone of the opposite sex, just as you can be straight and love someone of the same sex. That, of course, would be the only decision where he was being actively a bit selfish, if he married OP knowing he was gay.

In other words, he chose to go ahead with a plan that was all about himself. He didn't give her the information she needed in order to make an informed decision about HER OWN HAPPINESS, which is equally as important as his, only in this scenario his chance of happiness trumped any interest she might have had in building a happy life for herself. It is utterly and gobsmackingly selfish (not "being actively a bit selfish" - WTAF?) to lie to someone you allegedly love about as basic part of yourself as the fact that actually you are sexually attracted to men. Withholding vital information of that magnitude when you know the woman you allegedly love is making the biggest and most far-reaching decision of her life based on the assumption that you are straight is evidence of selfishness on a scale that is off the charts.

But that’s just one of three options, and we are all leaping to conclusions and deciding that this is the case and slagging him off when really, we could be totally wrong. He’s probably in an awful lot of pain too. Try having some compassion and not just going on the attack.

Never will I have compassion for anyone who would do this to another human being. You are asking me to agree that this woman's right to a happy marriage with someone who loves her in every way a heterosexual man would love her isn't absolute. She should be what - glad she was so special that even a gay man loved her? Angry but not too angry? Her anger at having her life stolen, other marriage prospects foreclosed, and her career possibly impeded should be tempered by an assumption of good intentions or pain on his part? Because that's how narcissists want to be judged - not on what they actually did or said but on their intentions or their background or the context. You're asking me to throw this woman under the bus.

Great Post @mathanxiety

Why on earth should the op need to focus on the experience of her h. He caused the situation. She needs to focus on her experience of this news.
Let his mother stroke his hand and say oh pooooor you.

It'd be very bad for op's self esteem to face this with compassion for him. A bit of anger alerts you to a situation that yout didn't deserve
Pete walker in the tao of fully feeling explains it very well. It's not pointless bitterness, it's reawakening that sense that you deserved better.

👏

Yes, a great post@mathanxiety . It' s not something that can be put right by an apology is it?

It looks like the OP @Haley1826 is not coming back.
I hope she finds peace of mind in time.

Thank you all for the comments. I am not a hater so can’t hate him. We have done a lot of crying and talking. I do believe we can be friends after I have sorted my emotions. I still can’t see myself with anyone else but time will tell.
much love for all the people going through this…