I feel your pain.  But it’s still early for you.  Give it time.  No decisions need to be made immediately.  Gain your strength.  Take care of you.  There is llove at any age if you want it.  Right now focus on you.  A happy healthy you will lead you where you are meant to go.
Hugs and peace.

Cindys,
    My situation is somewhat analogous to yours.  I'm 64, a professional woman, with only one more year to work before I begin to phase out of my job (working half time).  My stbx, after an initial enthusiastic embrace of his newfound sexuality (he decided he was a transgendered woman, and therefore wanted to remake our marriage along those lines, with him acting as a lesbian woman), is back in the closet, and as far as I can see intends to stay there.  His disclosure, now three years ago, hit like a bomb and blew up my life, past, present, and future.  
     Although I initially said I wouldn't stay married to him, in my devastation and grief and disbelief and hope I fell prey to his requests for me to help and comfort him.  Trauma boding sex and my own sense of guilt re-secured me.  Only last month did I say I wanted to divorce.  We are now in the early stages of negotiating our uncoupling; luckily he is being fair and reasonable, although as half our assets are in my name, and I have my own retirement and savings that have never been part of marital property, recalcitrance on his part wouldn't gain him much.
    I look back on the last three years I spent in the agony of trying to decide whether to stay or go and wish I had carried through on my early resolve and left the marriage as soon as I could.  I don't think that "I had to go through what I did to ensure I felt that I did all I could and that this was the right thing to do."  I think my earliest impulse was the right, best, and most self-protective one. I lost three years of my life--three years of my 60s and the precious time I have left on earth--to agony when I could have been re-building my life. Yes, it felt terrible then, and I was grieving, but it's not as if I haven't been grieving these past three years while staying with him. Better to have done it while building something else that would have softened and then eventually overshadowed the grief.
    In order to leave, I had to reach the point where I could see and admit to myself that I have lost my husband.  There is a term for women like me whose husbands decide they want to live as women: trans widows.  It's as if our husbands are dead. Perhaps it would help you if you think of your husband that way; your heterosexual husband is dead.  In his place is this new being, one that can no longer be to you what (you thought) he was.  Knowing that my stbx was willing to go behind my back, expose his secret to others while keeping me in the dark, act out his sexuality with others and without me, and be willing to bind me to an inauthentic life in his closet for the rest of my life helped me to get there.  Your feeling of betrayal is real, and when you find your anger over it, that anger can help propel you out of the marriage.  It may not be courage, exactly, but it is your friend, in that it can help accomplish the same task. 
   Here's the thing: you do not have the love you want now.  As long as you stay, you will not have that love; nor will you be free either to look for it or to be in a position that it will find you.
   I don't know why it is that we professional women, competent, independent, capable, and strong in so many other areas of our lives, find ourselves seemingly paralyzed and dependent emotionally, even when we are married to men who don't deserve us, but I know in the depths of my core, and in my heart, and in the actions I am taking every day, that I have the strength and the capacity to get through this, and to come out on the other side better off, free of the weight of his disorder and free to live the life that his disorder has kept from me for a long time--if not the entire 35 years of my marriage. 
   One thing I would say is that a short term separation, getting away from him so you don't have to see him, every day, would be immensely helpful; it gives you the necessary space to allow for a change of perspective, and you don't have always in front of you the confusion being with him sows.  A therapist, too, can help you acquire the mental tools to move forward.
  
 
  
    

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (February 17, 2018 8:03 am)

This subject really helps me today. I am one year post divorce and have kids with my gay ex. I am in an amicable relationship now with him and co parenting well. Lately though ive been so lonely and find myself missing him more and more. I feel this anxiety and fear of being alone for the rest of my life once the kids are grown and have lives of their own. It terrifies me. Im not dating because im not ready. I know i have to work on myself and fill my life with something else before i start begging him to come back and experience the agony and pain of tgt all ovet again. Thank you for starting this thread.

Oh boy,
 
That is hard to hear.  I think we all fear being alone.  I feel lonely a lot too.  That someone you talked to everyday is gone, and maybe was never there.  My closet lesbian ex is not the person I married.  She is so long gone.  Nothing you can do.  3 months in here.  It hurts.  It sucks.  Find friends and family.  I am amazed at the support I have.  I am being amicable with mine, but only communicating through texts and emails.  We have 2 kids.   I am not ready to hear or see her.  She deceived and lied to me for 18 years.  I am learning it is very hard to live with a broken heart.  I think it makes us all realize just how human we are.   

Cindys,
    You will find your way forward.  When that disclosure or discovery comes, we are all in such shock and pain that it is hard to think our way forward and out, especially as we had without our realizing it been conditioned all those years of our marriage in ways that hinder us when we need to call on our strength.  But when we are able to stop and breathe, to hear from others, to ask for and be given support and validation from friends and family, or learn from others' stories, when we then look around ourselves, we realize who we are, what our values and needs are, how capable we are, and just how much time and life we have left to live without the burden of living with someone who isn't able to love us. 
   The shame is theirs: they stay in a closet because they feel ashamed of themselves for their sexuality. Too often they can't admit or realize that what they have to be ashamed of isn't their sexuality but their treatment of us.  The shame we often feel--because we were duped--was given to us by them and their own feelings of shame.  Neither the shame we feel, nor their own feelings of shame, however, are ours to bear.  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (February 18, 2018 6:24 pm)