Anon2222 wrote:

One thing I have grown very tired of is people telling me oh, he must have loved you at some point. Because, I cannot fathom how you can do this to a person you actually love. Unless you have lived it, you have no idea how it feels. This isn't "growing apart" or changing as you grow older. This is dealing with someone who lied to your face, from the day you met them. Except you were madly in love, lived with them, shared all your biggest fears, and your wildest dreams.,,, I know he never loved me. And it truly fucking sucks to have to live with that realization that I was married to a man for 20 years that never even loved me. I am working on accepting that this had nothing to do with me, and there is nothing I could have done differently, but it is still such a gut crushing experience overall.

Netjer wrote:

The story she tells is: He was too needy. He wanted too much. I never felt like I could do enough. Then, oh by the way, I’m gay, and I’ve known for at least 10 years—but that has nothing to do with the rest.Really?What about all the times I told you I felt unloved? The years of no intimacy? The way I felt like I was just a provider? The girls' nights and weekend plans you could always make time for—while a simple date night with me never happened? The fact that when we did have sex, you wouldn’t even look at me?And somehow none of that had anything to do with your suppressed identity?I was relieved that the therapist actually called it out.

Rob wrote:

I know will never get an apology.  That would mean she admits she did something wrong and in her mind she did  nothing wrong. In her mind she somehow convinced herself that I did something wrong and what she did was ok.It was ok to hide her same sex attraction. It was ok to abuse me emotionally and in the end almost physically.

Many quotes in this string that strongly resonate with me. I can't sleep tonight because sometimes it unexpectedly creeps in how he has warped my brain nearly my entire life and I feel like I don't function "normally" in regard to relationships. My trust level is far lower than average, I'd say, my level of caution high, and generally a carefree thought of "this relationship is right and what I expected" never coming because I always to my core felt it was him. Until he showed no consideration for the fact that he'd placed himself very clearly in the center of my life for many years. To him, it was practically laughable that he abused me (though he never acknowledged he did; he gaslighted me when confronted). 

We were young. It was before any marriage, except he became my fundamental idea of marriage from a young age. It shattered it for me still at a young age (so I wasn't interested in dating at a normal age). I've never felt any relationship really feels natural, because I loved him. I thought it would be him. It shattered my concept of my self and my life. I still feel broken in several ways 25 years later. It's better, but the hole has really never left; it's just dissipated. 

I do appreciate  Netjer's sentiment here because I generally assume/feel men/guys don't really have many emotions or concerns for a partner other than as it fills their own needs, largely because the experience with this former friend was so numbing and showing no consideration for another life. It's helpful to hear sentiments from the flip side with men who've experienced this with lesbian partners because it shows a glimmer that some men actually feel. In a way similar to my own. That may sound callous toward men, but it is somewhat my bias.

I still struggle, and have for well over a decade, with *the celebration of* people who come out. To me, it's allowing an absolution for people who've deeply abused the core of other people's lives in ways a bystander could never understand without experiencing it themselves. I feel the world would be clearly safer if people who take actions like him were in prison, but instead they're free to live their lives with no consequence. It isn't just him that concerns me, since it makes me feel my views on violence are irreconcilable with the norms of our time-- anyone who would allow him an excuse. He/they would explain his choices away as simply "fear". Fear of future violence causing him to act violently in daily behavior and deception for years on end. To me, this causes me a sense of unease that this is remotely considered permissible.

The complete upside down for a person's being and life, and somewhat isolation from everyone who hasn't really known this experience, is still challenging. Who he once was and what our relationship was mattered s fundamentally to me for so many years, yet he never cared about his best friend; and no one else knew or would recognize what he did. It would be easier I think if society acknowledged and discussed the flip side-- those who were abused.

I don't know that the hole can be filled. It can be filled in and made smaller with many other meaningful things but the memories and feelings, and the people we are because of it, don't leave.

This has been a bit of a tangent from the original topic but it's nice to read through how others feel/ experienced when sometimes I still struggle to wrap my head around myself or life in this regard.

I also like Bonnie Kaye's books.
 

Last edited by clintonia (June 26, 2025 3:55 am)

I feel the resonance too. For me the experience has been that, on the one hand, she tells me over and over how we had all these problems in our marriage from before and how I'm so at fault for everything. On the other hand there's the obvious experienced timeline where within weeks of telling me she's attracted to women she tells me she also wants a divorce, but it's not really to do with being attracted to women because she didn't even know. As though it wasn't lurking in the background all the time, a giant hole in the marriage that I thought maybe I could fill if I just tried harder. I don't think I'll ever get an apology either.