Phoenix,
 It's unlikely my ex will ever come out. Personally his coming out would be a relief to me.  His coming out, which would no doubt be accompanied by an open revelation of his narcissistic behavior and attitude, would demonstrate to others why I left him, and even though I know some would sympathize with him, I suspect they would understand why I felt I had to leave.  It would be a relief, in fact, if I knew that others were experiencing even a soupçon of the disjunction I did seeing him dressed up in women's clothes and acting out in his mannered way. I currently have little to no contact with him, and this wouldn't change if he came out.  Seeing him now is traumatic; seeing him dressed up in women's clothes if he did come out would also be traumatic.  The trauma would be shaded differently, is all.  When I see him now, continuing on as he always has, I have flashbacks of him acting out his fantasy of being a woman, and the disjunction of seeing one thing while knowing another--knowing only I have seen this, is painful; if I saw him kitted out as if he were a woman, I would not have the pain of seeing the man I loved, yet knowing this other secret side of him.  
  I learned just last week that a friend, who knows the truth, had shared the truth with her husband, whom I also counted as my friend, and he refuses to believe it. (I told her I could provide her husband with photos and letters sent to me by my ex if he'd like to see them...) This means that he must believe I am lying about my ex, that I am the kind of person who would do this.  This bothers me a lot, because apparently her husband--a man I considered a friend, and who was my friend for years before he began hanging out with my ex--believes that I would lie about my ex to make people think badly of him.  
   For me, it's the unfairness and the injustice, and the fact that I am continuing to bear the consequences in my life for his decision to continue to hide in his closet.  In order for me to "move on," I have to dismantle my entire life--to end friendships and professional relationships, to move away--while he continues on as he always has, with no one the wiser (and some refusing to believe even in the possiblity because they have not seen it), and those who do know able and willing to look the other way because he daily presents to them his false front.  I am the only one who has ever seen his secret self--the one he insists is his real self--the only one who has ever heard his crazy talk ("I am multiple women inside"), the only one he has said such hurtful things to. The only way for me to heal from this is to cut myself off from 40 years of my life, and not just my marriage, but my work life, because he and I went through grad school together and were hired in the same department, and spent our professional lives in the same place with the same colleagues.  And because of that, and because our university's policy forbids me to speak of my life if it reveals anything about his "gender expression," he took that from me, too. 

By the way: I'm ready to make myself available to talk to others in my area who might find themselves with a trans husband and contact the SSN.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (October 16, 2019 8:29 am)

"learned just last week that a friend, who knows the truth, had shared the truth with her husband, whom I also counted as my friend, and he refuses to believe it. (I told her I could provide her husband with photos and letters sent to me by my ex if he'd like to see them...) This means that he must believe I am lying about my ex, that I am the kind of person who would do this."

Oohc,

I'm terribly sorry about this. My heart gave a big wrenching twist when I read it.

What an arrogant ass this man must be to place himself in the position of 'lied to' over a story as incredibly painful as this one. Perhaps it struck some denial spot in him where he could not think of his male friend all gussied up in Victoria's Secret.

False friends on the backside of personal tragedy are like a kick when you're already down, but at least you know where he stands now.

It's weird how all kinds of things like this come out of the closet along with the spouse.

Best to you.

God OOHC, I so hear you on this.  But your situation does seem especially extreme!  You must have a lot of strength to be able to move on and do this very difficult thing.  Kudos to you!  You are doing it.  EVERY DAY.  

And that your ex won't come out does make a mockery of you leaving to many who just see what he allows.  I feel that way too.  I just saw my ex on social media with some of our old friends on holiday and was sent into a depressive episode - He and his new wife with two couples who we used to be with a lot socially on holiday.   I'm just replaced with another women - his new wife.  And for the social group it just continues as was...

The fact that they can go on just as they always have while we have to let go and change our whole world feels so UNJUST!  UNFAIR.  Yet there is nothing to do except walk away and get on with my life as it is.  Consequences and all.  I have little way of earning what my ex does.  I have to work to regain a viable life at age 55 instead of the shared one I built over decades.  

But the trans thing, it does annoy me.  Did you read about the Women's rugby union?  There these trans men are playing rugby and damaging women players, but cry 'gender discrimination' when challenged about their obvious advantage in strength and weight because they take hormones that make them 'female"!  UNFAIR PLAY for sure!  

OutofHisCloset wrote:

"...there is nothing to do except walk away and get on with my life as it is."

This captures the truth, one arrived at after many steps and stages after we are confronted with the actions and words of our spouses, which change everything we knew about our marriages, and threaten to--and very often do, if only for a time--undermine our sense of ourselves.  We deny, push the truth away, try to explain it by other means, seek to understand it by working through their pasts and personalities; we diagnose them, looking for help, hoping they will come to their senses again; we look for solutions from pastors and parents and marriage counselors; we attempt by our own behavior to appeal to their empathy, their sense of justice, the love we believe they must feel, having been married to us and having shared their lives with us for so long.  At all stages, their gaslighting, mimimizing, blameshifting, their projecting, invalidating, and stonewalling, every tactic at their disposal, knocks us back and off balance.

   Once we begin to accept the truth of our situation, both our spouses' sexual orientation and their actions with respect to us and our children, we grieve.  We grieve so many losses.  We feel the pain of discard and the loss of the intimacy we were always so hopeful we might reach with our spouses but now know we would never have had, and yet would have had a chance to experience, if only we had not been coupled to someone unable to work for it with us.  

   After that unraveling, we knit ourselves back together again, drawing from our creativity and our strength, the same qualities that we once so uselessly applied to our marriages.  Yet we don't get a clear path even then; like so many others in the world who are the victims of social or natural disasters, we have to deal with the injustice and the straitened circumstances in which we find ourselves.  And we go on.  We do go on. 

  And because we go on, our lives come back in focus, we remember we are vibrant people, and we begin again to experience joy in life.  To me, this is when we can see that we have begun to heal.

OOHC 
Well said, every word. 

As I reflect on moving on, its the anger that is so hard to get past.  Anger of the impact on my children, of the impact of retirement, anger that everything I provided materially for my ex, is now twice as difficult to provide for the one I now love, because of my ex's lack of courage in dealing with her denial and what the law in a no-fault state allowed her to leave the marriage with.  And as much as I try to manage that anger, it is a toxin in my current life and reveals itself in places that impact my current relationships.  Impatience with my son and that I have half the time I once had to address his learning disability and its impact on getting to college, impatience with my wife in completing our move to our new home  (I do not like tripping over moving boxes - sounds trite, but the clutter of moving and reestablishing new routines even reminds me that my ex forced me to rebuild)  Anger for the demands on my wife's patience, that in order to be an effective step-parent,  she has to patiently listen to constant (innocent) comparisons by my daughter, of our life, to my daughter's life with my ex's gay life,  as she cares for my daughter and gets my daughter to and from school.  Ah, the long shadows of both divorce and TGT.    

My current wife ( I even hate having to continually make that distinction for clarity for readers)  has said, she believes my ex truly believed she could make the marriage work when she (my ex) entered my first marriage and at some point I have to let go of this anger or we will not thrive. That belief may help with some of the anger, perhaps, and perhaps my ex did try her best, as some have said, but I expected more courage from someone who holds themselves to a high standard of fearlessness and honesty. 

So accepting the truth as your wrote OOHC...and rebuilding one's resilience and joy.... is essential to moving on. 

Ive recently re-established one of my favorite relaxation strategies - binging on a Netflix series of my choice -  this time Outlander.  (A romantic story about a woman displaced in time from postwar 1945 to 1743 Scotland when the British suppressed the Jacobite rebellion, and it highlights the contrast between 20th Century Western culture and 18th Century Britain and Scotland).   I find the themes in a way encouraging, and ironically affirming of the grief and anger we experience.  Encouraging in the sense that in 21st Century Western Culture we have material resources for physical survival beyond anything anyone could have imagined two hundred and fifty years ago.  And yet, as one observes the 'clan' culture and the British culture in the story, the importance of strong social and family connections, it emphasizes and reminds me how essential those connections are to being a healthy productive secure (physically and emotionally) human being. (More so than self-actualization which seems to be the focus of 21st Century Western Culture).    That theme is affirming in at least grasping the magnitude of the 'social disaster'  we endure in the SS experience and the magnitude of the grief we have had to process. Our families were destroyed, and our major emotional investment in life was destroyed - a 'social disaster'.   


With that said, there are more resources now, than perhaps ever in our history to move on physically, once we accept the truth, BUT, it was a 'social disaster', at the most fundamental level of human emotional need, investment, and aspiration, from which we must recover.  That is why it is so hard.  And its ok that its hard - we mustn't be impatient with ourselves about that fact, but move through this as strongly and gracefully as possible without its collateral damage (grief, anger and sadness), damaging our future.  

In my case that is managing my anger, which I will work to do, but like the past, which opened this thread, that anger rears its head in the most unproductive places and must be tamed.   

So much for my musings on a beautiful fall Saturday morning.

As always, all the best to all here, 

ADSJ

 

Last edited by a_dads_straight_journey (October 26, 2019 10:34 am)