Married with secrets

Married With Secrets

Anger, confusion accompany revelation that a spouse is gay.

WashingtonBlade.com
By ELIZABETH WEILL-GREENBERG
Friday, July 22, 2005

WHEN I FOUND out my boyfriend of four years was gay I felt a mixture of relief, disbelief and incredible guilt. He was the first person I went to with a personal crisis. But he struggled with his anguish and guilt alone.

I learned that he had been with men during our relationship after I confessed to cheating on him. He told me he had been unfaithful too, also with men. Strangely, the significance of that didn’t sink in at first. He insisted he wasn’t gay; he was bisexual.

I believed him when he said he wanted to stay together. Until that point our relationship had felt close to perfect; breaking up was not something I ever considered. I saw our indiscretions as harmless, a need for sowing our wild oats.

So we both continued having affairs. We convinced ourselves this deceitful arrangement could work. But, of course, it couldn’t.

We finally admitted to each other that we needed to break up when I fell in love with another man. We had become best friends and roommates — not lovers.

But even after we split he still would not acknowledge being gay. There was no Jim McGreevey-style news conference and definitive declaration that he is a “gay American.” This grayness infuriated me. I wanted to understand how our relationship had deteriorated. If he was gay, then our problems made sense.

I kept expecting a meteor of revelation to hit us. He’d come out and admit our relationship had been a lie.