Rob, 
The more I think about your post the more complex our situation becomes.  Yes, I kept my vows to him but did he keep his to me?  I believe he loved me and was faithful until after the brain tumor had started to affect his mind in so many ways.  It seems to have affected his self control in other areas too.  Was he even responsible for his actions at that point?  Only God knows for sure!  I guess I don't need to worry about that but I still do.  I seem to need to know "Was he responsible for his actions?"  I don't even know if this makes sense to anyone but me.  How do I live with this uncertainty?

lily wrote:

goodness!  

I got a good look at the man I married as I went through the process of separation.  The person I believed I was married to, the kind gentle man that everybody likes, was a complete fake - a persona and not the real person at all, it was mind-boggling to see.  Once I stood back I could see him interacting with me like he was using a sock puppet while he stood to one side in the shadows, his real feelings completely hidden.  You mean I've been conducting my marriage with a sock puppet all these years, I thought as I went into deep shock and took myself off for a nap.

 

 
I don't feel that my 
Husband had bad intentions to begin with but I do cut him some slack for having a brain tumor that was the size of a golf ball.  I'm sure that it affected his thinking and intentions.  Maybe that is nieve of me but I do believe it influenced his behavior!  I still believe that he lied to me at the very start of our marriage and should have known he was hurting me!

It's a lot to process.  When I realised my ex was gay and denying it it was like a lightning strike, it lit up the landscape of my past and then it was dark again.  The thing about discovering he's gay is that it's a new piece of information that changes your past as well as the present, and inevitably you will need to sift through your memories a lot - it's like an automatic process - new info changes your past so you need to think through it all again and it will resettle in time.

I'm still going through wrinkles and it is years now for me.  The last one was just days ago when I finally recognised that the times I had left him, which I had previously assumed was to get on with my own life, and had associated feelings of guilt for doing that, was actually more to do with the emotional hurt I was in and wanting to get away from the psychological abuse I didn't even understand was happening.

Rob wrote:

Josephine,

Did they keep their vows to us?

Then you have the ones that even if they didnt physically cheat yet have kept a hidden secret and life from us such that they were never all into the marriage vows. Never fully into us.

My GX was a member of both.


This is what separates us from them. We could never do that to someone we professed to love.
I thank God everyday for getting me away from such a morally broken person..even if it is 3 decades later.

Rob,
Today is such an angry day!  I'm pretty sure that my Husband didn't actually cheat (other than dating) which I consider actual cheating,  He was more of the persuasion who kept the letter of the Law but not honoring the spirit of fidelity!  He considered any technicality as an out for him!  Because it made him smarter than the rest of us!  Our children (adults) are in various stages of hating him and think so poorly of him.  I wish I could make it better for them but I can't!  He was what he was.  A Father and Husband who ignored his family while pretending that we were all that mattered to him.  Why did others opinions matter more than his family?  I don't know what to do with this anger.  I have never been an angry person.  I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt but I feel he used that quality against me!  How do I get back to my self?  The person who was happy and self assured?  I wasn't perfect by any means but I never set out to hurt anyone.  I just wanted to love and
 be loved.

I am wondering if he speciffically targeted me as I was only 16 and a virgin when we met.  He was 21, which didn't used to bother me, but now I wonder if he wanted someone who was young and inexperienced?  Do you think he targeted Me?

Canary2 wrote:

My bf was a crumpled mess. It was a spectacular circus. Needing to see a shrink every week, and that’s when he came running back to women (me), because he was so heartbroken and couldn’t understand what had just happened. He was paying a shrink over $500/month and crying to me about how he had been used by a narcissist. How he was broken. Enlisted me and a number of closet gay men as his flying monkeys and trying to play the victim. I had no idea what was going on until much later, and once I did he had zero use for me. Once you are not a narcissistic supply to them, it’s amazing how quickly they will turn. This usually happens when you see them for who they truly are and they hate it. Of course, it never occurred to him that he just got treated exactly how he had treated his wife for years.

Canary2, 
It is kind of poetic justice!  My Husband said to me during an argument that I had "used him".  Even though I did not know he was having outside relationships at the time, I sensed that he wasn't talking to me.  Later on I found out that a person did indeed "use" him.  So glad you were able to see your bf for who he was!  I am still working on that.