I desperately need help. This is a long story and I am doubtful anyone will care to read or give advice... but it would mean the world to me. I am confident my boyfriend is gay and I feel alone and cannot ask friends or family without compromising his anonymity. I do not want to ruin his life or force him to deal with being outed, because as hurt as I am I still care about him immensely. It would be much easier if he wasn’t in such strong denial. He makes it feel impossible to leave him because he swears he loves me and has no attraction to men. So why am I so sure that he is in denial? Please read on...

I have been in a relationship with him for 8 months - the blink of an eye compared to the stories I’ve read of 20+ year marriages with in kids being ended for this reason.. I can’t imagine, and my heart breaks for these women.. I want to escape before it comes to that for me.

Upon meeting him (he is 30, I am in my late 20s) he was very open with me about his travels. His entire family are frequent travellers. Around age 26, after breaking up with his ex girlfriend of 6 years, he began making yearly solo trips to Thailand for months at a time *queue the lady boy remarks*. He is a very unconventional, hippy sort of guy. He works construction (very masculine, doesn’t exude any feminine traits) during the warm months and flees for the the winter. He already had his yearly Thailand trip booked when he met me, but shortened his trip to 2 months instead of 4 because he didn’t want to be away from me for so long. He was eager for me to join him but I could not due to work.

The beginning of our relationship was very passionate. We were immediately enamoured with eachother, fell in love abnormally quickly, and were equally convinced we were to get married and start our forever together. I have never been doted upon so much - he could never get his hands off me, everyone remarked on how much he clearly adored me. Then it went wrong...

About a month into his trip, things began to go awry. He was out partying until 3-4am every night and drunk, and we would argue. It felt like he began to resent me. By the time he came back, it was downhill from there. He was never the same, and although ALWAYS maintained he loved me and had never loved anyone so much, his behaviour was different. I attributed it to post-vacation depression, winter blues, and finally.. I concluded he might have cheated on me and his guilt was the driving force of his almost mentally abusive behaviour.

Finally, I took it upon myself to view his phone. I found excessive amounts of porn, but the most surprising part is that half of it, potentially even most of it, was gay porn. I found through his app history that he had been downloading apps like grindr, growlr, daddy hunt, scruff, and the like since before he met me... and continued doing so throughout our relationship. These downloads happened as frequently as almost every other day, I am not even sure how he found so much time in privacy because we were inseparable. I found he had looked up a gay only hostel and a gay bar within his first week in Thailand. In an emotional rage, I continued to search his emails and found that in the past he had responded to and posted adds for gay personal encounters - it was clear in his posts he was interested in playing the submissive role, by being a bottom or providing oral. There was no evidence that he had ever followed through.

Upon confronting him - he reacted with rage and anger. Accusing me of invading his privacy, trying to ruin his life. Finally, he admitted to what he could not deny, but maintained strongly that he has NO attraction to men emotionally and that it was his deepest darkest most perverted secret that he has been ashamed of for the past few years. He vows he has never acted on these “kinks” or “perversions”, and it was the taboo that made things exciting. He claimed any time he searched these things, he felt remorse and guilt and disgusted with himself. He maintains that he wants a life with a woman, he loves me and is extremely sexually attracted to me, and he never thought of this behaviour as cheating although now he can see that it was, even if he didn’t actually engage in gay sex.

I have told him that whether he is gay or not won’t change the fact that he is a best friend to me and I care for him immensely. That I will not abandon him and judge him, or reveal his secret. I have tried to make him feel comfortable enough to be transparent. The furthest I have ever got with him is him agreeing that he may be “5% bicurious”.

As for our sex life, it started to fade in the last month after this coming to light and has become much more mechanical and much less passionate. He has always been a toker and has since started smoking ridiculous amounts of weed all day, and falling asleep on the couch.

No matte how many times I try to open up the discussion, it gets brushed under the rug and I am made to feel as though I am crazy, or as though I just don’t understand. It’s true- I don’t understand. But I have read about men who spend their entire lives with a woman, loving them even, having healthy sex lives, and then revealing that they are in fact gay. I think I know the answer I am looking for. I more so need to hear someone else say it to me. He is gay and I am being dragged into the closet with him... right?