Hi, I m a straight woman 33 yo, married with 2 kids.  I met my husband 17 years. ago and we have been married for 9 years.  So far we have a good relationship but for some reason our sex life really declined about 5 years ago.  And we ended up having sex no more than every 2 months.  In April this year I felt that I was so unsatisfied that I was considering an affair so Tried to encourage him to go in counseling.  He refused every time until in November we finally had to go on romantic week end and the morning we were suppose to leave I found gay porn on his tablet.  I instinctively decided to look in his backpack and I found condoms too.  I was shocked because we don t use them.  I still decided to go on the trip with him and that night as he was asking me why I was in this bad mood I decided to confront him.  I told him what I have found but I did not dare asking him clearly about his sexual orientation or sexual activity.  He wrote me a love letter asking me to give us a chance.  After this incident I was finally able to convince him to go in couple s therapy but I had to tell him that it was because I personally felt that I had low libido.    

This incident made me realize that a lot of things I did not paid attention to were actually red flags like :
When he was a teenager, one of his friends accused him of being gay and told everybody about it.  He told me the story and how it made him suffer as a teen, because what his friend misinterpreted was simply the fact that he was looking for support after his father passed.  Since that he mainly have close friendship with younger male and I have always asked myself why he does not seek friendship with guys from his caliber. Most of his friends were problematic younger males who dropped out of school and had no real career while he s a very ambitious and accomplished professional.  I have to say that now his crowd of friend is more diverse but most of them are no married and don t have a regular girlfriend so we could do things like double dates. I also found gay porn on his computer 6 years ago but it was just one page and I did not take it seriously at this time.  Later there was also 2 incident were I found condoms in his car.  A friend of my mother also told her that there was rumors of he being gay in one of his previous jobs.

During the counseling session I asked again for an explanation and he explained that it was simply related to the fact that he was very curious and that I could have found other types of porn on his tablet if it was another day ( I did not check the history).  For the condoms he said that he decided to buy it because it was a very special quality and he decided to buy it just for fun.  His body language was enough to tell he was lying, but he explained later that he was very embarrassed to talk about that in front of a stranger.

He explained that the most important thing is that he had no obligation to marry me when he did, and that he really loves me and want us to stay together.

The counseling is useful in term of identifying ways to improve our relationship, but I m still concerned about the possible lies.  I 'm afraid to invest all my energy in counseling, and trying to make things work then found out later that he s really gay.  I m still young and I don t want to waste 20, 30 years like some people here did.

Before we started couple s therapy I started seeing a counselor myself.  I stopped when I started the couple's therapy but this week I decided to go back in own counseling session.  One important point my counselor made me realize is that I was unhappy even before I found the porn and the condoms.

 I also decided to talk with one of my male friends about my issues but I just mentioned that I found evidence that my husband is probably cheating.  I did not mentioned my suspicions about his orientation.  My friend told me that I had to stop thinking that I was the problem and that to make marriage work there was several important factors including sexual orientation.  I did not dare asking more, but I m sure he knows something and wanted to give me a chance to talk openly about it.


My concerns now, is that I realize that it s really not easy to decide on the next steps.  I truly love my husband and I believe he loves me too.  However, if he s not straight, I won t stay in the relationship because I believe I won t experience real happiness.

I am also concerned about te counseling process because, the first goal was to improve the relationship, but as I m thinking a bout the possibility that my husband could not be straight, I m afraid to move.

I d love to hear your perspectives, also did you tried counseling and what did it change for you ?

In my case I feel like it really helped us.  We were finally able to work on a joint budget together, I was able to initiate intimacy and  we had a great date last night.  But again I m afraid it could be just temporary.