i found this site today.  already i am thankful for this.  i was 2 months shy of 50 years married when my husband died.  it was after his death that i found out he was gay, having sex with men his entire adult life.  all this came to light in May of this year and i feel like i am exploding.  how did I not see this?  i question if he ever did love me.  we have three adult children and two grandchildren.  all of them adore him, at this time i hate him.  i feel like our marriage was his cover for a "normal" life.  he was well liked by all and highly respected in the community.  he doesn't deserve my silence but my children do, so at this time i suffer alone.  i have a good friend i have spoken to, he is in shock in the details i have given him.  i can't even look at his picture.  i am so angry that i can't confront him, that i have no answers to my million questions.  I will survive but the pain at this time is overwhelming.  

Hi Anon,

Know that everything you are feeling is valid.  And I can sympathize with being with your partner from a young age.  I met my husband in high school and we got married after college.  Just a few months out from him dropping the bomb he's gay.  He's been questioning for over 10 years but I have heard him tell others 20....and yeah the math sucks because he was questioning when he proposed.

He says he loves me still as a best friend but not beyond that.  

With his confession my life and future came crumbling down.  My anxiety and depression have been triggered to levels I didn't think were possible.  I feel all the things.  Anger, frustration, sadness, humiliation, hurt,  like I'm being thrown away, and then there is still pieces of the love that I thought we'd shared.  

Something he has not done to me is apologize.  Not once.  And he's been a pretty big a** at times.Because to him the hurt he is causing me and our family is outweighed by his freedom.  

We also are still living together, separated bedrooms, but I am meeting with our finance guy soon to discuss options.  My therapist told me after he confessed that separating houses needed to happen sooner vs later for my mental heath and I absolutely see that now.  But I also have to accept that we might be stuck for a bit, in which case I have to get my brain in a place where I have to watch him go out on dates and not freak out if he doesn't come home after.

Today in therapy he told me he wants to start seeing someone.  My therapist asked how that made me feel and I said it hurt, made me sad, just as I think he would should I do the same thing.  To which he said no, he'd love to see me go out with someone else and he acknowledged he is much farther in his journey and the end of our marriage relationship.  he's been preparing to do this for ages and purposely checked out of our marriage I don't even know how long ago...I suspect at at that 10 year mark. 

Remember that.  they've had who knows now long to get themselves here.  We are still in the rubble trying to just take a breath and that is okay.  

So while he's ready to go out and start dating I'm coming to terms with I'm going to be a single parent.  He is excited to go explore this new aspect of his life and I can't sleep at night thinking about having to leave a home I love, uproot the kids, and that I'm going to be doing it alone while disabled.  He's texting who knows who and I've been forcing myself to emotionally decouple from him.  He hides away in his room and I'm left to manage the house.

You don't have to keep quiet.  It's okay to tell people, especially anyone who can help you.  I have slowly let people in my circle know.  Starting with my family, closest of friends, and my bosses.  basically the people who are there to catch me when I crumble and the people I need to help me with my job.  In other cases my lifelong friends have sensed something is wrong and I don't lie when they ask.  I also acknowledge that I have a real luxury with my job that if I can't get out of bed one day I can stay there.  I have ladies that are ready to back me up in any way I need it.  

Therapy is a massive help too.  My personal counselor also runs our joint sessions  Providing us a safe, neutral place for us to discuss some of those heavy issues.  It allows allows for her to really see what I am dealing with.  On top of that I do see Psych, and was established with one of them before this all happened.

No matter what remember you are not alone.  You have done nothing wrong.  Every feeling you are feeling is valid and normal.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  It does get better but still sucks, luckily we have a great community here to help with it. 

One way to think about whether to tell your children is this: whether or not you tell your children what you have discovered and offer them the evidence, your relationship with your children will be forever altered by your discovery.  That fact is one more way in which your duplicitous husband's actions continue to wound you and continue to affect your family dynamic.  (That these cowards convince themselves that "what they don't know doesn't hurt them" makes me spitting mad.)

Please don't think that if you choose not to tell your adult children that all will continue along as it is now.  It won't, and it won't because you are aware of his secret life, and this knowledge, along with a decision not to convey it to your children, puts you in the position of withholding from them the truth, just as your late husband did from you and them.  It also erects a barrier and a distance between you and your children, because in every interaction or gathering you will aware of what they don't know, and you will be aware that your relationship with your children is no longer one of total honesty.  I have observed over the six years i've been reading and posting here that most of us are people who value directness and honesty in our personal lives.  We were open with our spouses, believed they were open with us (until we discovered they weren't), the disclosure that they were keeping secrets from us was extraordinarily painful and felt like betrayal, and that feeling of having been betrayed makes us value honesty all the more.  It seems to me your post conveys that you, too, feel this way.

 When I separated from my now-ex, I told him I was going to tell our son the reason for our divorce (after 35 years of marriage), because I wanted an honest relationship with him (our son).  My now-ex browbeat me into proffering a less than totally honest explanation--"People don't divorce after 35 years just because they are 'happier apart.'  We are divorcing because of a secret of your father's; you can ask him about it, but I already know he will say, because he told me he would, that 'some things are private.'  If you want to know what it is, I will tell you."  Our son chose not to know, and I have honored that choice.  However, over the intervening years (we're now four and a half years out from separation and almost four years from divorce), I have come more and more to regret not standing up for myself and honoring my own value of honesty by telling our son the truth, because I find that continuing to keep that secret means there is a distance between my son and me.  I have also come to believe that not telling means I am still enabling my husband's secret and secret life, continuing to carry the burden of a secret that is not mine but his to bear, and that my ex should have to confront that in his relationship with his son.  I am also quite aware that if I were to tell my son the truth now and my son were to speak to my ex about it, my ex will spin a tale of self woe and somehow excuse himself and find a way to blame me.  I realize I have no guarantee that my son wouldn't accept his father's version of events, which would devastate me in a new way.  I have often thought that if my ex were to die, I would tell our son, and it would be easier to do so then, because his father wouldn't be around to spin the story in order to make me the fall guy.  

If, on the other hand, you decide to tell your children, you have no control over the way each of them reacts to this knowledge about their father.  One of more of them may sympathize with you.  One or more of them may sympathize  but wish to retain their existing image of their father and your family, and will distance themselves.  You may find one or more of them may become angry at you for disturbing their vision of the past.  You may find out one or more of them already knows, has been carrying the secret themselves, and is relieved the secret is out.  You have no way of predicting which of these responses--or others--you will encounter.  But if you don't tell, unless you are the kind who can put things firmly out of your mind, you will find yourself endleslly circling the possibilities in your own mind.

 It seems to me that one way to go about telling them is to tell them that you have discovered a painful truth about their father, and you are telling them because truth is important, truth is important to you in your relationship to them (however the chips may fall upon its revelation), that they have a right to know the truth, and that you respect them and your relationship with them enough to tell them the truth. Tell them that the truth is important to your family relationship going forward, and that it is important for their own sakes they have an accurate picture of their own family and their own pasts even though what you have to tell them will be difficult to hear and to integrate (if you have the resources, offer them counseling).  Tell them you are telling them now because this is a secret you would prefer they hear from you, and not from someone else--because if he was "having sex with men his entire adult life" someone out there somewhere also knows the sordid truth about your husband's secret life, and your children may hear about it from someone far less sympathetic to their feelings and in a much more dismissive way.  

 Secrets and lies never make for good family dynamics.  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (July 12, 2022 8:40 am)

Absolutely seconding what Ellexoh and OOHC said: secrets and lies are toxic.  They seem convenient now, but they do metastasize.

I'd consider this approach, though: simply present your children with the evidence, but without comment of any kind.  Don't talk about yourself -- we're here to listen to those feelings, but your kids should only see what you saw, and reach their own conclusions.  If they want the discussion to go further, of course you should be honest.  But try not to start with explaining yourself or saying "this is why I'm so upset with your father."  

I want to add one more thing: when I'd confronted my husband, I asked him whether he honestly thought he was going to keep this secret forever.  He said he thought the truth would come out after he was dead.  I was absolutely stunned at his indifference to the pain he would cause us, just to save himself the embarassment of being honest. 

So I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with Grace1958 here: my definition of "love" is "when you are cut, I bleed."  Allowing you to be so utterly devastated after he's safely out of range is not "love".  It's "self-centered cowardice".  His legacy is what it is.