I was 19 when I met my ex-GID spouse.  I was 57 when i learned that just because he said he wasn't gay didn't mean he wasn't.

Over and over I wanted to leave him, I did a couple of times but I always felt guilty like I was not fulfilling my obligations as a spouse.  

Since I left I just want to say to people in these mixed orientation marriages - get out, get out as fast as you can, don't worry about money children or anything because it will get worse.  It will get worse the longer you stay in it.

I see them all around me now - older people than me still in their mixed marriages - twisting in the pain not understanding why they feel the way they do.

The thing that helped firm me up to separate was reaching the conclusion it was emotionally unhealthy for him as well as me.

If you cannot leave the marriage then for heavens sake fight.  Fight fight fight.  Turn the tables on them - they're angry with you?  well they better put a sock in it because you're angry with them and they better behave or you'll leave - you be top dog - give them no quarter.  you're the responsible adult in the situation, you are the one who is trustworthy to wield the power in the relationship - you will find you still have the same good and caring nature you always had.  

 

This particular question is one I could write an entire book on.  I decided on divorce before I found out my ex was gay (although I had suspicions).  I left because I just couldn't handle the lack of intimacy any longer - no matter what the cause was.  It was a long, complicated, arduous journey to my decision, and then to getting up the courage to make my decision known - to my then husband, to my children, to my extended family, to friends, and to the church.  It wasn't something I wanted to do.  But it was something that I eventually felt NEEDED to be done.  And once I came to that realization, it was just a matter of time until one day, the truth just spewed out of me, despite me being too afraid to make the decision to say the words.  Below is a list of how it went down:

- I told my husband that I wasn't happy.  He said that he was.  I began to realize that he didn't mean, "You're unhappy? Oh, how surprising - because I thought we were fine."  Instead, what he was actually saying was, "Oh, You're unhappy? Well, I'm not.  I'm fine.  I'm still fine even after you told me that you're unhappy.  I'm fine with you being unhappy."  Who can be happy knowing their spouse is unhappy?  Who can be just fine with that???

- I had repeatedly confronted my ex about the intimacy issue - telling him what I needed, asking questions about what was wrong, and telling him how important this issue was to our marriage.  And that if things didn't change, it was going to destroy the marriage.  He understood (but admits he didn't believe) how serious of an issue this was.

- I had tried over the years to solve the problem in every way I knew how - with no affect.

- NOTHING had changed.  In 15 years.  One day it dawned on me that if nothing had changed in all this time, it wasn't going to.  I was teaching him that no matter what I said, I'd stay.  My pleas for change were likely having less and less of an impact on him, not more.  As we got older, his sex drive was declining, and mine was ramping up.  We were further apart than ever in this area.  We were gaining distance, not losing it.

- I had tried to look at the intimacy issue as unimportant.  I just told myself that marriage is more than sex, and that it was selfish to break up an entire family over a lack of sex.  Logically, this worked.  But emotionally, it didn't.  My brain knew that this issue likely had nothing whatsoever to do with me.  But emotionally, my heart couldn't rectify it - I just felt rejected, ugly, unwanted and unloved.  And I couldn't make that unimportant to me.  It continued to bother me no matter how much I tried to convince myself that it shouldn't.

- Instead of looking at leaving vs. doing nothing, I began to look at staying vs. doing nothing.  I'd looked enough at leaving.  What did staying look like??  While leaving scared the crap out of me, looking forward 20 years into staying literally had me break out in a sweat.  I could NOT see us married in 20 years.  I could not keep going on this way.  And I'd be so, so angry with myself if I'd wasted another 20 years.  My mother had intimacy issues with my father, and I can remember being a young adult when she was in her 40's, having confided her anger and sadness to me over it.  Clearly she decided to stay.  And she's been unhappy all these years.  I did NOT want to follow down that path.  I simply would not choose to be unhappy that way.

- I realized that no one gives you an award for sticking out a bad marriage.  Where was the prize?  Was it in the 50th anniversary party that your children hopefully threw for you when you got there?  Was it the announcement in the newspaper from said party?  Was the few hours of celebrating worth the 50 years of unhappiness??

- I took a good look at my chances of finding love after leaving - of finding the happiness I was missing in my marriage.  And knew I wasn't assured of finding it.  And then I realized that if I stayed, I WAS assured that I would NOT have it.

- I began to see that two unhappy people cannot raise happy, healthy children.  Despite my husband's insistence that he was happy, he was not.  He said he was, but you cannot hide that from the family.

- I had always feared that leaving my spouse would put him over the edge.  He was so broken in so many ways and I felt obligated to stick by him - to not have one more bad thing happen to him.  But I saw that staying with him wasn't fixing his issues.  Iiii couldn't fix him - only HE could do that.  And he was either unable or unwilling to do so.  Staying wasn't going to fix him, or our issues.  He was not more important than me because he was more broken, or had been through more tragedies in his life.  That was unfortunate, but that didn't mean I deserved less in life than him because he'd been dealt more of a bad hand up-front.

- I began to see that I was just as important as everyone else in the mix; as my husband, and as my children.  While I always put them before myself, the truth was that I wasn't nothing.  I was a person who deserved to be happy, just like everyone else in the scenario.

- I realized that my marriage was not a good role model for what my children should expect from their own marriages someday.  Did I want them to think that a passionless marriage should be okay with them?  Did I want them to think that mediocre was acceptable?  This was their blueprint, and it was a bad one.

- I stopped seeing me exiting the marriage as being a model of quitting for my children.  Instead, I began to see it as a good example of how when things suck, you do what you can to change them.  It's not "giving up" to refuse to stay in a situation that makes you miserable.  It's showing them that a woman should not give up her happiness for everyone.  And that when one foot is nailed to the floor, you don't just accept continuing to go in circles.  Sometimes you have to make a break for the light.

In the end, it came down to 3 defining things:
1. I couldn't live with things the way they were
2. Things weren't going to change from the way they were
3. I refused to live as if that scenario was acceptable

It took many years for me to figure all of this out.  It came in bits and pieces, and I had to take time to digest it all.  And when I came to my conclusion, I knew that it wouldn't be accepted by everyone else.  But there came a point in time where that was okay - I couldn't continue to choose to be unhappy just so everyone else didn't have to have any negative affects on their lives.  In the end, it wasn't something I decided so much as something I came to realize the futility of.  I didn't know how I'd make it all work.  But the road I was traveling on was no longer an option.  I'd just have to go to a different road, and figure out the footwear needed for that road once I got there.  I was tired of feeling paralyzed.  Enough.

Kel

Last edited by Kel (August 1, 2017 11:49 am)