Living a Lie when a spouse is gay
June 2008 - Erin Isings

It was a Wednesday night in October when Elizabeth’s* life changed forever. She remembers standing at the stove cooking dinner for her hungry sons, who were five and seven. After she had served them, her husband Jim* said, “We need to talk.”

His next sentence ended their marriage: “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m gay."

They’d had a whirlwind romance when they were in university and had connected so strongly with each other on an emotional level. It was something Elizabeth says she hadn’t experienced in her previous long-term relationship which was unhealthy and ended badly. Within three months of meeting Jim, he was talking about marriage. After a three-year engagement, they got married when Elizabeth was just 22.

After about a year of marriage, she became pregnant and then a year after Matt* was born, she was expecting again. The couple had another son, Malcolm.* It was then that Elizabeth says she realized things weren’t going well with her marriage. “That was the first hint of things starting to unravel because Jim was really struggling with how to come out, he has since told me. He was really struggling with his own acceptance and I announced I was pregnant.”

She and Jim went for counseling, but she didn’t suspect his sexual orientation. “But I knew within the first year of my marriage that something was not right. I couldn’t identify what it was. I knew there was something wrong with my marriage and I knew it wasn’t going to last.”

Women whose husbands leave them for men generally feel relief, confirmation or devastation, says Stephanie Rabenstein, a registered marriage and family therapist who works in London Health Sciences Centre’s Mental Health Care Program, and also counsels families through her private practice.

Rabenstein says the relief is when a woman comes to the realization her husband was always attracted to men and it wasn’t something about her. He’s just not attracted to women. “For other people,” explains Rabenstein, “It’s not necessarily a relief but a confirmation of what they thought.” If a woman has had hints about her husband’s sexuality, perhaps through rumours or because of previous affairs, she might think, ‘Aha, this makes sense! So I’m really sad and I’m angry, but this makes sense.’ Then there are partners who are just completely blindsided, and I think in some ways this is more devastating than if their partner left for another heterosexual relationship.”

For Elizabeth, relief was a dominant emotion during the breakup of her marriage. “It was like a ‘Eureka!’ moment, like ‘All right, now I get it.’ But there’s also hurt, which happens with any relationship breakup, and there’s a humiliation factor to it. It’s that head and heart conflict. In my head, I understand that I had nothing to feel embarrassed or humiliated about, but your heart’s not telling you that. It was like, ‘How do I face these people?’”

What made it even more difficult on her was the fact that her pain wasn’t private. “When he came out, he came out with a flourish. I’m sure for him, (it was) very liberating, but it made it really, really difficult for the first couple of years.”

Whether there was infidelity involved in the breakdown of their marriage, Elizabeth doesn’t know. Soon after Jim came out, she learned he was dating. “I don’t know if that was his first homosexual relationship, or if there was earlier infidelity.”

She and Jim shared custody of their sons, but they couldn’t agree on how to tell them about their father’s sexuality. They each received differing professional opinions about when and how to tell the children, but during one weekend visit, Jim told Malcolm and Matt, then six and eight, that he was gay.

Elizabeth felt blindsided. “It made it much more difficult for the kids and it certainly made it much more difficult for me. Because there was then some anger directed at him, and it was hard to stay focused on helping the kids understand what they had just heard because I was just so angry with him.”

Moving forward
Malcolm, who is now 17, says that it was later in elementary school when his understanding about his father’s sexuality really affected him. “When I heard ‘fag’, ‘queer’, ‘homo’, etc., all being used in a derogatory manner, that’s when it started to hit me, and for almost two years I forgot about everything I loved about my dad, and nearly the fact that I loved him, and only focused on the one thing I was always hearing: he’s gay. But after a while, it just didn’t matter anymore. I mean, the bottom line was – and is – I love him and he loves me, just like any other parent.”

Malcolm says this realization was followed by another. “That’s when I finally realized what ‘gay’ really was: love. It took me a while, and through that time I became my own person. I realized that all in all, it makes no difference. Not to me, not to my dad, and it shouldn’t for anyone else because all it is, is love.”

Matt, now 19, says that at one time he did question his own sexuality. “I always wondered if it could be hereditary and if I could possibly be gay too. Getting into high school, I almost had to prove to myself I wasn’t by making my way through a variety of girls, just almost to reassure myself.”

Although he now has a girlfriend, Matt still doesn’t broadcast his father’s sexuality. “I still worry about getting made fun of for the fact that my dad is gay, so I still don’t really talk about it. Just hearing the prejudice and homophobia when you’re surrounded by a bunch of 17- to 19-year-old males, you don’t really want to be the one in the circle to pop out and say, ‘Hey guys, can you please tone down on the fag jokes? My dad is actually gay.’”

Elizabeth is proud of her sons, who she feels have become more caring, compassionate, and open-minded by their life experience. “But it’s been a long road for them. That was tough to watch them struggle… and not be able to do much but keep the door open if they wanted to come and talk to me. But that was something they each had to individually sort out in their minds.”

She says both of her sons have “lovely girlfriends,” but always told them it wouldn’t matter to her if they were straight or gay. “As long as they’re honest to themselves and honest to the people who love them in their lives,” she says.

As for herself, Elizabeth remarried last August, and despite the issues of the past several years, she now considers her relationship with Jim to be “reasonably good.” She says most of their disagreements are similar to the day-to-day issues other divorced parents share, such as whether or not her sons should have cell phones.

“I’m long past – and have been for the last four or five years – where it’s an issue for me anymore. It took a long time to get there, and I think it did for the kids, too. And unfortunately during those years when we didn’t get along very well, and there was still a lot of hurt and anger and some animosity, I certainly said and did some things that I’m not proud of. And my kids were witness to some of that, so they bear those emotional scars a little bit too,” says Elizabeth.

When Jim remarried, she sent a card wishing him and his partner many years of happiness together. “I do wish him well, and as painful as it was for all of us, I can only imagine how absolutely difficult and horrendous it must have been for him.”

Looking back
Would it have been easier if Jim had left her for another woman? Having experienced both, Elizabeth says without doubt it’s much worse to be left for another woman. “It didn’t matter how hard I tried to make that marriage work, or how hard I tried to have a healthy intimate relationship; it was never going to be achievable because he was gay. When someone chooses to have an affair with another woman, it’s kind of that territorial, competitive nature that all human beings have that you got passed over for someone else.”

As for Matt and Malcolm, seeing their parents remarried is a positive and happy thing. “It was close to the happiest my dad could be, and that’s what you want to see, your parents happy. So to me it didn’t matter if he was standing there with a man or a woman. Both my parents are very happily remarried and to me, I see both relationships as the same,” says Matt.

Malcolm shares his brother’s happiness. “When my dad remarried, I honestly couldn’t have been happier. He was moving on, he was in love, he was happy. My new stepfather is a great guy, and he kept my brother and I involved with all of it. The ceremony was beautiful, and the fact that my dad wanted his two children to be his witnesses meant a lot to both of us,” says Malcolm. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no difference between a straight couple getting married and a gay couple getting married.

“A wedding is a wedding and a parent is a parent. I couldn’t have been happier for either of them, because I could tell that they were both finally happy.”

Lessons Learned
Elizabeth laughs about hindsight being a wonderful thing. “In retrospect… that should have been a bit of a red flag that three months into a relationship, he’s talking about marriage, but there was no strong, healthy, sexual relationship. There was a sexual relationship, but it wasn’t a strong, healthy one,” she says.

She credits counseling for her current happiness, but admits she took too long to get the help that she needed. She would advise other women going through the same thing to focus on their emotional health. “I spent so much time and energy with lawyer, but not as much time looking after my own emotional health.”

Her other advice centres around tolerance. “I think the lesson we need to take away is that we need to be tolerant of who people are and allow them to be who they are. I think Jim would have had a happier adolescent experience, and would have had a much easier road to walk in life if he had been allowed to be who he was. But that was not an option in his household, with his parents.”

For children growing up with a gay parent, Matt offers these words of wisdom: “If you love your parents you should want to see them happy. If being with someone of the same sex will make them happy, it may take you a long time to understand that but when you do, you’ll realize it’s better and it makes everyone happy in the end. You’re going to be ridiculed for your mom (or) dad’s lifestyle choice. That’s just how our society is. It’s 2008 and people are still homophobic because its ‘different.’” But he says the bottom line is, “Stay loyal to your family, and just remember, if they’re happy, you should be happy for them.”

 Malcolm has also developed a healthy perspective about his father’s sexuality. “I know who my dad is, and I know who I am. And in 10 years do I even expect to remember any of the people who ever said anything to me about it? No. Do I expect to still have a father who loves me and would be there for me no matter what? Not a doubt in my mind.”
* Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those interviewed