It All
I have always considered myself a very sexual, loving, affectionate woman. I always enjoyed intimacy, especially in the context of an intimate, loving relationship. I had always hoped to be in a marriage where my husband enjoyed making love to me. There was obviously some chemistry when I met my husband and we enjoyed what I thought was a normal, dating relationship. When we married, our sex life changed almost instantly – or should I say almost ‘ended’ instantly. It was so bizarre. My husband immediately began making excuses why he would not even sleep in the same bed or room with me. He said that it was because I snored at night.
That was his excuse – it was all my fault. I snored, so he started sleeping in the guest bedroom, and we didn’t have sex. If I would ask him to come to bed with me, make love, then he could go sleep in the guest room there was always another excuse; he had a ‘stomach ache’ or a ‘headache’ or he was ‘too tired’-- all the classic excuses. He even started blaming me more – trying to make me feel bad – saying that I had too strong of a sexual appetite that he just couldn’t satisfy. I was thinking, “A strong sexual appetite – are you kidding? I’m only asking for sex a minimum of once a month – we’re newlyweds.” It was so bizarre. I was made to feel like some sex addict while he never cared to have sex again. It made me question myself and feel guilty for asking him for intimacy.
How I Caught Him
I was nine months pregnant and two weeks before delivering our baby. My husband had me sleeping in the guest bedroom that summer, since he couldn’t sleep with me in my ‘condition.’ I was up and down to the bathroom while he needed his rest for work each day. Besides, we had slept in separate bedrooms since we married because he said I snored and he couldn’t sleep with me. Sometimes when I would wake up in the night to go to the bathroom, I would see his bedroom light on from down the hall. If I walked in and saw him at the computer, he immediately would jump and click ‘home’ to get off the webpage he was on. The next day I decided to get online on the computer and see if the ‘history’ would tell me what website he was on when I walked in late at night. In my thoughts I remember dreading finding out he was looking at pornography – naked women or men/women having sex. Boy was I in for a surprise… I would have loved to have only seen naked women on the website he was viewing – instead it was only naked men in sex acts with each other. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. Surely this was an “accident” and not something he looked at intentionally. Not my husband… the one who never kissed me or wanted sex…The one who never participated in any sports, hunting, fishing or golfing. Not him – how could this be?
As I studied the history on the computer Internet, I was so shocked to see that night after night, for hours – he was viewing totally gay pornography online. He obviously didn’t know about the “clear history” choice on the computer. I was able to see days, weeks and months back of all his viewing. I wrote down all the different website addresses – there were probably about 30 to 40 different ones. I wrote down the dates, times, and for how long he viewed each website. Some of the websites required paid subscriptions. WOW! Can you imagine, two weeks from delivering our baby and I am sitting at the computer viewing this – realizing that my husband is obviously “gay.” However, I knew that if I confronted him that night he would simply deny it and claim it was a one-time mistake. So, I decided to clear the history myself (after recording everything on paper) and pretend I knew nothing. I pretended that nothing was wrong or that I had found out anything.
Each night I would say good night to him, I’d go to the guest bedroom and he in the master bedroom with the computer – all the while knowing he’d be up viewing his gay porn. Each day after he’d go to work I’d log online, view the history from the night before, record the website addresses, times, hours he viewed, and then clear the history again. I did this everyday for two months. I knew then that I had plenty of proof that this was not an accident, and I was ready to confront him.
We had a two-month old baby. I was on maternity leave, a brand new mommy, and breast-feeding. He lost his job, and I would have to cut short my maternity leave to go back to teaching to support us. I told him that I needed to talk with him that night and that he shouldn’t waste any time trying to lie or deny anything – that what I was about to ask him about I had proof was something he’d been doing awhile and not an accident. I did that because I simply wanted to avoid the lies and denial. I wanted to cut to the chase. When I told him what I had realized that he’d been doing, and what I’d been tracking and recording for months; I simply asked him; “Why?” His first answer in response was “curiosity.” I told him that curiosity is something that someone typically satisfies within a quick time period, not months and months of re-viewing something. I told him I knew that was a lie – it wasn’t because he was “curious.” His next reply was that it was a “fantasy.” I realized that obviously he is being honest now and truthfully telling me he ‘fantasizes’ about naked men and sex acts with men…homosexuality. I asked him how long he’d been doing this and he admitted about three years. I asked him if he had already acted on his fantasy and had sex with another man and he said no.
At that point, I wasn’t sure whether he was lying or telling the truth. My husband had lied to me so many times in our short marriage that it had become very hard to believe him. I guess I’ll never know truly if he had already had sex with another man at that point in his life or not. If he hadn’t, he surely did want too and was killing himself by hiding in the closet. My husband would not come out and admit or say the words, “I’m gay,” but I knew he was deep in denial and living in the closet. At that point, he probably had not admitted to himself that he was gay.
I told him that since we had a new baby, I was a new mom, breastfeeding and needing to wean our child and go back to work early since he lost his job, that we would have to just ‘table’ this for now. Basically I was juggling all the plates that I could and wasn’t physically, emotionally or spiritually able to confront his ‘gayness’ at that moment in time. I told him we would table it and go to counseling the next summer when school was out. We agreed to continue to sleep in separate bedrooms, like we had since we married, and simply pretend – for now – that everything was ok. He loved that – pretending – he was quite good at it. He’d been pretending his entire adult life.
He wanted to stay married and continue to keep up the front at church, work, with friends, by having a wife and new baby – how could anyone suspect he was gay? He wanted us to raise our child together and just pretend to the world that we were a happy, normal couple. For me, it was very depressing and draining – living a lie – everyday knowing that my husband down the hall is gay. It was like living with your guy cousin – but worse – because I was so angry with him for being gay and being the cause of the demise of our marriage. When the summer arrived I scheduled counseling for us to meet this homosexuality issue head on. To my surprise, the counselor basically turned things around to ask me, “What would be wrong if your husband is gay?” Then my husband started private counseling with the counselor. I was left completely frustrated with zero self-esteem again feeling like I was to blame. It was so hard to try and continue on living this lie with my husband day to day.
By Christmas I decided that I wanted him to leave and wanted a divorce. I basically realized that I would rather be lonely alone then in a marriage to a gay man while allowing him to use our child and me as his props to appear heterosexual. I also thought about what it would be like when our child started kindergarten someday and mentioned “Mommy’s room,” and “Daddy’s room,” and how that would affect her. I also realized that it was horrible for her to grow up seeing a Mommy and Daddy who never touched, hugged, kissed or were in love. I didn’t want her to think that is what love is and that it was a loving, normal relationship when parents don’t share a bedroom. I decided I had to do what was best for our child and me and divorce him.
Happily Ever After – For Real!
Happily Ever After for me has been not dealing
