OurPath Open Forum

This Open Forum is funded and administered by OurPath, Inc., (formerly the Straight Spouse Network). OurPath is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides support to Straight Partners and Partners of Trans People who have discovered that their partner is LGBT+. Your contribution, no matter how small, helps us provide our community with this space for discussion and connection.


BE A DONOR >>>


You are not logged in. Would you like to login or register?



May 7, 2022 11:42 am  #1


Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

Disclaimer: I no longer am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nor do I believe in any of its teachings. However, I’m hoping to be able to have a conversation about the church’s impact on mixed orientation marriages with believers as well as ex-believers like me. So while I will mention my loss of faith, I’m hoping this will not be an impediment to believers who could benefit from this discussion.

I’m not going to go into all details into how I finally figured out the big secret of my marriage – that my ex-husband is gay. I didn’t figure it out until we’d been divorced for over ten years. I went into those details in this post if you’re interested.
https://straightspouse.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?pid=33952#p33952

I got married in 1982. At that time the LDS church was still encouraging its gay members who sought help from church leadership to go ahead and date and hopefully get married, with the at least implied promise that it would “fix them”. Mormon theology is deeply tied to heterosexual marriage and reproduction, so it’s hard to imagine them changing their teachings and attitudes towards gay people. At least they’ve made some progress in that they kind of accept people are gay from birth and can’t change it. So now homosexual members are allowed to recognize who they are, but they must remain celibate for life. I don’t mean to offend believers, but that is cruel. Can you imagine being told you can never have a loving, intimate relationship?

I graduated from BYU in 1978, at which time BYU was still engaging in conversion therapy, sometimes involving electroshock therapy. My ex-husband attended BYU for one semester. Something happened to him there. He never talked about it. The only way I even knew he had attended BYU was because his mother mentioned it to me once. He stopped going to classes for some unspecified reason and failed all his classes, so he had to drop out. No one told me what had happened.

My ex-husband has other issues. He’s been diagnosed with bipolar but refuses to treat it or even admit he has it, although he has the classic symptoms. So it’s possible he experienced mania or depression, which would naturally result in having problems going to class and doing school work. He also tried to take some classes at our community college after we married, but I ended up having to do all his homework for him. He would not have passed otherwise. He is narcissistic and cannot tolerate other people – even professors – acting like they know more than he does about anything. Whenever I thought about what happened at BYU, I always assumed it was those two factors.

But one thing makes me wonder if it was something else. When I accidentally got pregnant with our first son, (surprising given our dysfunctional sex life) he was upset and had no interest in anything about the upcoming baby except for one thing – he wanted to name the baby. I liked the name he picked so had no objection, but was curious as to why he wanted that name in particular. He said that it was the name of a friend who was on the baseball team with him, and he always liked the name.

At the time, that didn’t strike me as odd. But now it does. He had no interest I the baby but was very attached to that name. I now believe that friend was more than a friend. My ex-husband had the pattern throughout our marriage of having one very special, intense friendship with one man which would last for several years (in one case after our divorce, decades) before going on to a new friend. He’d spend more time with the friend than he would with me, and would be obsessed with that friend. He’d talk about him constantly and act like the friend was the most intelligent and interesting person in the world. Anything his friend would be interested in, so would he. I now understand those friends were like faux-husbands. So I now think that this friend at BYU was a boyfriend, someone he deeply loved, like he loved his later boyfriends.

I now wonder if it was possible that my ex-husband was caught “being gay” at BYU. At that time, students were encouraged to report anyone they suspected of being gay, and for a while the university actually used spies as honey traps of a sort (without the sex). If he had been caught during that time period, he would have been given an ultimatum – participate in the conversation therapy program, or BYU would inform his parents and bishop and kick him out of school.

His family was devout Mormons and anti-gay. They later disowned a gay grandson, so I have zero doubt they would have disowned him. My ex was heavily dependent on his family, financially and emotionally, and he could not have emotionally or maybe physically survived being disowned by them. So he would have had to choose conversation therapy, which would have been yet another psychological wound.

Once he mentioned that his bishop jumped out of his chair and ran up to him and shook his hand after he “overcame” something. I always assumed it was masturbation, but I now know that LDS young people have to confess this and struggle with this so often that it’s mundane. A bishop wouldn’t have jumped out of his chair to congratulate him. I never asked what it was because I believed repented sins should be forgotten.

He did have a very brief (15 month) first marriage right out of high school. He always told me that she was very beautiful, but a whore who cheated on him. He complained that the church “pushed” them together. He also told me, years into our marriage, that he had regular sex with his first wife for a year before they married. I was shocked and asked why. The common-sense answer would be “we got carried away” or “we lost control”, but instead he said he planned it out because he "wanted to know what it felt like.” Maybe I’m reading too much into that, but now I wonder if he was pushed to date this girl and the bishop looked the other way after the sex, because they got married in the temple after a brief period of repentance. I now think he decided to have sex with her to see if he could do it.

He was deeply wounded. He had symptoms of PTSD, and was later diagnosed with that after our divorce.

I always knew there was a secret he wasn’t telling me. I actually considered for a while that he may be a secret serial killer. He was a misogynist and it wasn’t impossible for me to imagine him killing women. I know that sounds extreme, but something was very wrong with him. He was extremely emotionally abusive, and physically threatening.

What choices did he have? He had to stay deep in the closet. He rushed me into marriage (not unusual in the LDS culture, of course) and then accused ME of “tricking him” into marriage. He repeatedly accused me of “deliberately making myself ugly” to him to explain our sexual dysfunction. I was his beard, his sacrificial lamb.

I don’t know if he would have been brave enough to be openly gay in the seventies and eighties even if he had not been LDS. But being LDS assured that he would never come out of the closet. This ruined his life, and caused deep trauma in my life and the lives of his children.

I think the LDS church is partly to blame for the tragedy of his life.

As soon as I found this site, I felt certain that there had to be other LDS or exLDS women like me here. I also knew an LDS man whose wife eventually came out as lesbian, but I didn’t remain in contact with him. I’m sure the pressure on lesbians is just as intense.

It seems to me that young LDS women are perfect dupes for gay men who want a wife and family. Any sexual contact is forbidden prior to marriage, so we don’t question why they don’t seem to get carried away with kissing or necking. My ex-husband never showed any passion during our marriage, even at the very beginning. That should have been a major red flag because any newly married young man who’d been chaste should have shown some passion and lots of sexual desire. But it wasn’t a red flag to me because, at that time period, LDS leaders had made comments about how even sex within marriage should be pure. Right before I got married they had to sort of walk back a statement sent out to bishops forbidding oral sex in marriages because of the backlash. So, even as a married woman, I still had confusing ideas about sex supposed to be somewhat restrained so as not to offend God. That’s why my exhusband’s lack of interest in sex (he kept telling me to lose weight even though I was not overweight and wore a size five with a 23 inch waist) didn't alarm me from the start. No wonder he fooled me all those years. I did not realize how sexually dysfunctional my marriage was until after I had been involved in a loving, heterosexual relationship for years after my divorce.

Now that I’ve found this site, I would like to hear other stories from LDS women who were tricked into marrying secretly gay men.

Last edited by beastie (May 7, 2022 11:47 am)

 

May 7, 2022 1:02 pm  #2


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

If you do a keyword search for "Mormon" you will find the stories of several other Mormon women who married GID or closeted gay men.  (Leah's story stands out to me, but there are others as well, and several Mormon women commented on the thread about Elizabeth Smart's father coming out as gay.)

(FYI: My father's family is Mormon.  My father was lapsed during the time I was growing up, but later returned to the Church).

 

May 8, 2022 7:11 am  #3


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

OutofHisCloset wrote:

If you do a keyword search for "Mormon" you will find the stories of several other Mormon women who married GID or closeted gay men.  (Leah's story stands out to me, but there are others as well, and several Mormon women commented on the thread about Elizabeth Smart's father coming out as gay.)

(FYI: My father's family is Mormon.  My father was lapsed during the time I was growing up, but later returned to the Church).

Thank you for the good idea. I don't know why I didn't think of searching first!

     Thread Starter
 

May 14, 2022 12:32 am  #4


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

I’m not Mormon but my ex-husband grew up in a Mormon household. He would always use his religious upbringing as an excuse for everything. We moved out together very young and I think the only reason he did was to get out of his house. We were together for 30 years and still in process of divorce. He’s in denial and full of shame. Not my problem any longer!

 

May 14, 2022 7:16 pm  #5


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

broomhilda2 wrote:

I’m not Mormon but my ex-husband grew up in a Mormon household. He would always use his religious upbringing as an excuse for everything. We moved out together very young and I think the only reason he did was to get out of his house. We were together for 30 years and still in process of divorce. He’s in denial and full of shame. Not my problem any longer!

I'm so sorry you spent so long stuck in a marriage built on lies. Was he abusive to you? Did he stay active in the church?  Mine was very abusive towards me. I think he had such rage bottled up inside himself, and had to build a false narcissistic self due to hiding his real self, that abuse was inevitable. 
 

     Thread Starter
 

May 16, 2022 3:49 am  #6


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

I was raised in the church, married my missionary in the temple, the whole nine yards.  As a family we had be struggling with the faith for awhile now.  Combined issues have been contributing with the most notable seeing how the Young Women treated my daughter when she came out, and how they treated me during my medical recoveries.  However, I now see my husband used my reasons for pulling away from the church as a shield for his own lies.    

When we first married he typically would instigate things.  Until we started trying for kids.  I have medical issues that interfered with getting pregnant so it became schedule driven.  After we had our last one he never wanted to touch me again.  I would try to initiate in a number of ways but nothing.  He would either shut me down outright or have performance issues.  Because of my medical issues I blamed myself.  I thought he found me fat, ugly, and broken.  When I tried to talk to him about it he'd shut me down.  Now I feel even worse, that he was never attracted to me at all.

So for 10 years I've had a sexless marriage.  We'd go to church like we were supposed too. I stopped working to be a stay at home mom, a goal we'd discussed even before we got married.  We made a good team raising our kids. I thought we were happy.   We were comfortable and since our relationship started as friendship things were easy.  I used to say love, I don't say love anymore.  

We stopped going to church during the pandemic.  it wasn't safe for me to be there, I have damaged lungs and I barely survived the pulmonary emboli that damaged them.  Covid would likely be too much.  Again he used me as a shield as to the real why he didn't want to go.

I'm coming up on a month now from when he came out to me.  Depending on who he is talking too (and if he thinks I can hear him) he says he's been having these feelings for 10-20 years.  10 years is when he stopped anything sexual with me.  20 years was his mission.  I now very much feel that he married me because that was what was expected of him as a return missionary.  His parents approved of me.  And he wanted kids

He said he came out because he was tired of hiding it and the guilt of the lie was too much for him.  that he wants to be happy as who he is now.  That because of how we were raised in the church was a major reason he'd not said something for so long.   He is currently fighting with his father who is demanding he go to his bishop and repent.  That he honor the holy commitment he made to me.    Oh and bonus of he didn't want to be my caregiver.

His parents have reached out to me once since he told them.  After a cursory, are you okay, i was, I'll use the word encouraged, to not run away, to stay and do my job (like the good little mormon girl i was supposed to be), and most importantly don't announce anything publicly so that family and other peeps in the church didn't find out.  They weren't worried about me, they were worried I would take a torched earth approach to my life being upended and put it on blast all over social media where I am friends with all of his Aunts.  

I don't blame the church for tricking me into marriage. We could have been any faith and had this happen.  I loved him when he proposed.  I loved him when we got married.  I have loved him for the last 18 years. Up until a month ago I thought we would be together for the rest of our lives.  It hurts beyond words that he has not loved me the same way for god knows how long or if ever.  It was him that made these choices.  He made the choice to lie and mislead me, not the church.  He made the choice to seek out others, not the church.  He made the choice to make life altering decisions, not the church.  He had doubts and feelings and step after step chose to move forward with our relationship.  And he doesn't fear the church's reaction to his revelation.  His parents on the other hand are in fits about it.  


 

 

May 16, 2022 7:51 am  #7


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

I am so sorry that this happened to you. I washed 10 years of my life on a man that I found out was gay. I will be holding a good thought for you.

 

May 16, 2022 10:29 am  #8


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

beastie wrote:

I'm so sorry you spent so long stuck in a marriage built on lies. Was he abusive to you? Did he stay active in the church?  Mine was very abusive towards me. I think he had such rage bottled up inside himself, and had to build a false narcissistic self due to hiding his real self, that abuse was inevitable. 

@beastie
I'm very sorry you were stuck as well.
My ex was not active in the church after he moved out with me but it was always part of our life since his family is so involved. I've been wondering though if he's gone back. He's been spending a lot of time with his mom who is SUPER active. She gave his sister money after she divorced her 1st husband on the condition that she be re-baptized. The church might be where he ends up finding his new supply more easily. He adamantly does not want to physically give in to his urges (although he's addicted gay porn).

My ex was emotionally & mentally abusive. He's a covert narcissist. I've spent the last 8 months on self-therapy (as there isn't a lot of support for our situation) and can step back and look at our marriage with my eyes open. I have my own business I started over 10 years ago & *that* helped me grow as a person - enough to finally see he was purposely trying to hold me back and keep me down, keep me insecure and keep me dependent on him.
In my situation, I actually outed him 9 years ago. He convinced me that he was Bi and that he loved me & would do anything to save our marriage... we went to counseling for a bit & he was very open when I had questions... he blamed the church for his "confusion"... I decided that family is what you make it and we can love differently and I was leaning towards staying at that point. He suddenly wanted to buy a house and as soon as that was done he withdrew all communication, stopped love bombing me and I was back in the same, sorry situation.

I have health issues related to stress & prolonged trauma that I'm now dealing with. What actually kills me right now is that his mom doesn't know the real reason I ended the marriage. Who knows what he told her but I'd love for her to know that I'm not a terrible person and that her "perfect" son is a liar. BUT she's in her 80's and a nice woman. I don't want to hurt her just to save my bruised ego.

Feel free to message me if you need to *hugs* 
 

Last edited by broomhilda2 (May 16, 2022 10:30 am)

 

May 16, 2022 2:35 pm  #9


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

Agl03 wrote:

 He made the choice to lie and mislead me, not the church.  He made the choice to seek out others, not the church.  He made the choice to make life altering decisions, not the church.  He had doubts and feelings and step after step chose to move forward with our relationship.  And he doesn't fear the church's reaction to his revelation.  His parents on the other hand are in fits about it.   

Yes, I am learning to accept that these were all His choices and struggling with not putting these choices on me. We fell in love with them as straight men. Not the gay spouse that they really were.
 

 

May 16, 2022 2:46 pm  #10


Re: Mormonism and Closeted Husbands

Agl03 wrote:

   

 

My partner's mother raised all her children in the catholic church. When she and all the aunties learned their son and nephew was seeing a married woman (me ) with 2 children the shit hit the fan. Partner's aunties froze me out and his mother prayed for him. 
His mother died years ago but man! hearing her son likes men would have her spinning in her grave

The church has so much to answer for that it never will
 


KIA KAHA                       
 

Board footera

 

Powered by Boardhost. Create a Free Forum