Carly1227 wrote: " ... I don't have siblings. My parents are deceased and I just feel I have no safety net.
Ditto. My brother, the last of my family, passed from cirrhosis (yes, alcoholic) at the beginning of lockdown last year. Him needing me delayed my confronting the truth with my husband, for which I'm grateful as I was able to figure out the truths my STBX was hiding. Have yet to travel and bury my brother. No more family has me feeling like I'm adrift in the middle of the ocean in a dingy. That's where confiding in someone you can trust is so crucial. And get yourself a therapist who can help you sort it all out and validate your feelings.
Carly1227 wrote: "And, if I'm honest, my pride - feeling of being a failure - not because of his sexual preference, but that I married him to begin with!"
What your feeling is normal. Read the First Aid thread if you haven't yet. I am humiliated that I trusted him so long. I feel like a fool that he was lying to me from the beginning. It's not TGT, the gay thing, as much as it is the lying. We invest our lives and make ourselves vulnerable so we can have an authentic, adult relationship only to find out we have been lied to, gaslit, blamed and used. Don't count this as YOUR failure and don't let anyone else pin it on you either. It's HIS failure.
We had so many wonderful memories that are now tainted. I look at them and cannot discern what was real and what was theatre. It was all real to me. Some of the lies were so consistent. Sometimes I feel like I'm waking from a coma and looking at my marriage and saying, "What the..."