Hi OOHC,
Thank you for the words of comfort and advice. It’s all so new to me, I want to offer more support, but it’s always hard to find words.

Cindys - glad you are here because everyone is so supportive. I know how devastating this is, you will find your strength.

OutofHisCloset wrote:

Cindys,
    My situation is somewhat analogous to yours.  I'm 64, a professional woman, with only one more year to work before I begin to phase out of my job (working half time).  My stbx, after an initial enthusiastic embrace of his newfound sexuality (he decided he was a transgendered woman, and therefore wanted to remake our marriage along those lines, with him acting as a lesbian woman), is back in the closet, and as far as I can see intends to stay there.  His disclosure, now three years ago, hit like a bomb and blew up my life, past, present, and future.  
     Although I initially said I wouldn't stay married to him, in my devastation and grief and disbelief and hope I fell prey to his requests for me to help and comfort him.  Trauma boding sex and my own sense of guilt re-secured me.  Only last month did I say I wanted to divorce.  We are now in the early stages of negotiating our uncoupling; luckily he is being fair and reasonable, although as half our assets are in my name, and I have my own retirement and savings that have never been part of marital property, recalcitrance on his part wouldn't gain him much.
    I look back on the last three years I spent in the agony of trying to decide whether to stay or go and wish I had carried through on my early resolve and left the marriage as soon as I could.  I don't think that "I had to go through what I did to ensure I felt that I did all I could and that this was the right thing to do."  I think my earliest impulse was the right, best, and most self-protective one. I lost three years of my life--three years of my 60s and the precious time I have left on earth--to agony when I could have been re-building my life. Yes, it felt terrible then, and I was grieving, but it's not as if I haven't been grieving these past three years while staying with him. Better to have done it while building something else that would have softened and then eventually overshadowed the grief.
    In order to leave, I had to reach the point where I could see and admit to myself that I have lost my husband.  There is a term for women like me whose husbands decide they want to live as women: trans widows.  It's as if our husbands are dead. Perhaps it would help you if you think of your husband that way; your heterosexual husband is dead.  In his place is this new being, one that can no longer be to you what (you thought) he was.  Knowing that my stbx was willing to go behind my back, expose his secret to others while keeping me in the dark, act out his sexuality with others and without me, and be willing to bind me to an inauthentic life in his closet for the rest of my life helped me to get there.  Your feeling of betrayal is real, and when you find your anger over it, that anger can help propel you out of the marriage.  It may not be courage, exactly, but it is your friend, in that it can help accomplish the same task. 
   Here's the thing: you do not have the love you want now.  As long as you stay, you will not have that love; nor will you be free either to look for it or to be in a position that it will find you.
   I don't know why it is that we professional women, competent, independent, capable, and strong in so many other areas of our lives, find ourselves seemingly paralyzed and dependent emotionally, even when we are married to men who don't deserve us, but I know in the depths of my core, and in my heart, and in the actions I am taking every day, that I have the strength and the capacity to get through this, and to come out on the other side better off, free of the weight of his disorder and free to live the life that his disorder has kept from me for a long time--if not the entire 35 years of my marriage. 
   One thing I would say is that a short term separation, getting away from him so you don't have to see him, every day, would be immensely helpful; it gives you the necessary space to allow for a change of perspective, and you don't have always in front of you the confusion being with him sows.  A therapist, too, can help you acquire the mental tools to move forward.
  
 
  
    

'Rob wrote: Alone is ok.. And yes we were alone in the marriage also...looking back I never saw the gay...the narccism sure.   But if I had to put my finger on it..I was happy but always felt a tinge lonely..   One may think that is normal but I wonder if that the difference between being,married to an authentic straight person as opposed to a gay person that was never quite "all in".'


Wow, I read this myself and it really hit home (all except the narcism thing). I want to believe that we are soulmates but just reading this advice makes me feel that in our 12 years together he was never "all in". I really wanted to make it work, I wanted us to continue to be best friends, share the house we live in and our pets. Now I'm considering divorce and moving across the country for a fresh start so I can find what it means to be truly happy...

Last edited by Lonelyheartsclub (January 16, 2019 11:43 am)