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)