Wife Declares She is a Lesbian

[Spacey]

Dhartm,

What gives you the right to pass judgement on others? It's people that hate, like you, that cause many gays to hide in shame. Sometimes they hide so well that they get married just to hide their true selves from their own family (like my aunt did).

That's the point of that kind of speech, though. It's precisely to make a given demographic feel shame. It's precisely to make them want to hide. To keep them out of sight of the speaker, so that the speaker doesn't need to accept them. It's about delegitimizing people that the speaker finds to be somehow inconvenient.

This kind of thing isn't an accident, and to see it crop up in a space filled with hurting individuals in need of a safe space is really quite disappointing.


essjay, there's a lot of really good advice here for you, and I'm really glad to see you embrace it. I can only imagine the confusion, hurt, and shock that you're going through.

Whether these feelings are new for your wife, or she has been hiding and burying them for many years now, please know that your wife is also feeling confused, hurt, and probably shocked as well. We don't live in a world that looks kindly upon homosexuality, and things are even bleaker for bisexuals. If your wife is truly exploring her wider sexuality for the first time, she is going to need support and understanding.

You're not yet ready or able to supply that support, and your wife is not yet ready to ask for it. Take this time to find a new personal equilibrium, and work on yourself. Heal and stabilize, and do all of that good DB stuff. And yes, while you should definitely treat your wife's engagement with this OW the same as you would any other infidelity in your marriage (and good on you for having the wherewithal to recognize that!), be prepared to dish out some extra compassion once you are capable.

At some point all of us LBS have to sit down and take stock of our situations. Every one of us will, eventually, reach a point where we have to decide whether we love our spouses more than we love our marriages. If your wife is a lesbian who has been buried in shame and hiding from herself all these years, then I hope you have nothing but the utmost sympathy and compassion for her, and choose to love her over your marriage to her. The odds are in favour, though, of this being one facet in your wife's complex sexuality finally asserting itself, and once she has explored it and realized that relationships are relationships regardless of the sex of the people you have them with, and that women can disappoint her just as badly as men can, then she'll be in a very difficult place, I think.

That's when she'll need your support. She'll not only have the guilt and shame of the affair to contend with, but also the same imposed on her by the dhartms of the world. That's shame she probably internalized a long time ago, and it's going to rebound on your wife with a vengeance if/when her relationship with OW falls apart.

Get yourself into a place where you can be the man who doesn't disappoint her at that time.