BONNIE KAYE'S STRAIGHT TALK - MAY 2020

BONNIE KAYE'S STRAIGHT TALK

MAY 2020     Volume 20, Issue 206

Bonnie’s Mantra:

LIFE WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE THIS COMPLICATED. PERIOD.

                   COMPUTER RADIO PODCASTS - www.blogtalkradio/bonnielkaye                    Live on Sunday night 8 p.m. EST or any time after the live broadcast!

I’M BACK!! J

Just when I was sure that I was finished my final newsletters last year, life changed. I assure you there was no epiphany that drove my desire to revive this newsletter. I thought I had said everything that needed to be said on this topic—and then some!! Nearly 19 years of newsletters gave me plenty of time to say it all—and then over and over again!

Actually, I was on the trail to retirement from Straight Wives last year. It was my 35^th plus years of connecting with women from “discovery to recovery.” It wasn’t always a happy road because my heart was breaking daily from the pain that our women were going through year after year. Each week over the past 20 years, between 10 – 25 women would find me seeking sanity and hope. Well, at least I could offer them sanity. I also offered them no hope. Why no hope? Because I didn’t feel like lying about it. I wasn’t giving any straight woman a thumbs-up on having a gay husband and expecting to live a happy and fulfilling life. There are enough ignorant and misled “specialists” in the form of counselors, coaches, and therapists who can convince your husband that he has a “straight orientation” while he just has a longing for an oral or anal rise from a man because he was sexually abused when he was younger. Sorry—I’m not buying it.

But that’s me—the voice of doubt and gloom. But also—the voice of reason and future happiness. Women do not seek me out because they are happy. If they do, they haven’t read my website, newsletters, or books. They find me when they just can’t keep making excuses for the lack of love and lust in their lives. They are living at best with someone like a “brother” and at worst, an abuser. They know something is off in their marriage. But sadly, due to years of “gaylighting” by their husbands, they are reassured that the problems usually start with themselves instead of the forbidden culprit of GAY.

In 2010, I wrote this little article when I came up with the term “GAYLIGHT.”

GAYLIGHTING

In our support chats, hardly a week goes by where someone doesn’t bring up the term, “Gas Lighting.” This is a term taken from the old movie Gas Light from 1944 staring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Although I never saw the movie until a few weeks ago, I was certainly familiar with the terminology from members of our support group who used it frequently to describe their situations with their gay spouses. After watching it, I realized that this terminology certainly has a connection for many of us.

According to the Internet:

From the film's title, "Gaslighting" acquired the meaning of ruthlessly manipulating an individual, for nefarious reasons, into believing something other than the truth.
Well, that certainly sums it up for some of us, doesn’t it? I know that I was made to feel “crazy” if I suggested to my husband that maybe…just maybe…he’s….ummmmm… oh yes—“bisexual.” That was the nice way for me to frame it in my own mind back in those days. He would tell me I’m out of my mind and…oh yes…CRAZY. How could I ever think something so horrible and disgusting? Now in the beginning, I felt a big sense of relief. But as time wore on, the relief turned to doubt—and not doubt about HIM—but rather about ME! And once self-doubt starts, it’s a quick progression down that road called “I can’t trust my judgment anymore.” Like the peeling onion, your self-confidence gets peeled down one layer at a time until it shrinks to nothing.

The problem with too many gay husbands is that they have to find a way to protect the lie they are living. Those three little words—and I don’t mean “I love you” but rather “I AM GAY”--are too difficult to say to you—and often to themselves. For them, it is easier to just make you think you are CRAZY when questioning their repeated lies that start to pile up and make little if any sense. How many times have you heard, “Are you out of your mind?” “How could you think such a think?”  or “What are you—CRAZY?” With a gay husband, in almost all of our cases we’ve heard these words more than once or twice.
So now I’ve added a new word to my “Bonnie Kaye’s Pocket Dictionary of Gay Husband Lingo” which includes some of those clarifying terms that I’ve made famous like Limbo Men and Straight-Gay Men. Now I am adding the term GAYLIGHTING.

This means:  “Your husband’s attempts to make you think that you are losing your mind when in fact you are just finding out his truth.”

Trust me—you’re not crazy, you’re just being “gaylighted.”

I felt the need to post that reminder that all of us have been reminded of too many times throughout our marriages. That may sound redundant, but it does keep repeating itself.

Getting back to my story, in my year of “retirement” from our cause, I never really had a chance to retire. I still received between 10 – 15 letters each week seeking help from new women who are hit with our realities. I am happy to help all of them by sending them information and finding support for them. I sent them my old newsletters, and there were many letters of thanks and appreciation. There were also many requests to get on a newsletter list that wasn’t happening anymore.
I really thought I would run out of things to say after 18 years, and the pressure of coming up with new issues month-in and month-out was a lot. And so I decided I needed a break. And I took one.

Now, a year later, I’m rested and re-nourished. I still have some thoughts inspired by my support members and new women/men coming my way. And so you’ll be hearing from me each quarter with some more thoughts and reminders. We go through so much on our journeys from “discovery to recovery” that sometimes we lose our sense of perspective. We get so “stuck in the muck” during this period that we can’t always process the many different feelings we have. And so I’m here to guide you by confirming your doubts to be truths and reconfirming your instincts.

THE  SHAME GAME

In my early years of my newsletters, I wrote about the “Blame Game.” That included the “If Only” game where you would question yourself endlessly about if only….If only I had been more supportive, if only I weighed less, if only I initiated sex more, if only I wasn’t so prudish in bed, if only, if only…..then my husband wouldn’t be gay. Remember that old game?

Over the years I have realized there is another game we all play. It’s called “The Shame Game.” I can also subtitle it as “The Ashamed Game.” Whether you want to admit it or not, there is a feeling of shame that overtakes most of us when we learn that our husbands are gay.

It takes a while until a wife understands that she has absolutely no part in her husband’s homosexuality or more importantly, the failure of the marriage. As soon as she said, “ I do,” she was being set up for failure. Marrying a gay man is a ticket to disaster in a marriage. I don’t care how nice he is and how not-nice you are. It’s not about nice—it’s about living with a man who can’t be a husband to you in a way that you need him to be because he is gay.

I talk to over 100 gay husbands each year. Most of them say that the marriage was doomed for a long time before the news of his homosexuality came out. How many of your husbands have told me that there were other problems besides gay? Almost all of them. Here are some of the complaints I hear followed by my responses:

1.    My wife has a bad body odor. (yes, it’s called WOMAN)

2.    Her breath is always sour. (because kissing a woman is repulsive to a gay man)

3.    My wife is always suspicious that I am cheating on her. (because you are)

4.    My wife is never supportive to me.(she is, but you don’t care about her)

5.    She is always depressed. (of course—you’re a gay man acting)

6.    She never initiates sex but complains because I don’t do it all of the time. (she is complaining because you DON’T do it most of the time)

7.    She’s not adventurous in bed. (she doesn’t want your kind of “adventure” like male sex toys and gay porno.)

8.    When I married her, she was 20 pounds thinner. (you didn’t want her then either.)

9.    I need my space and she doesn’t understand that. (to go to meet men for sex)

10. She thinks I’m keeping secrets from her because she doesn’t have my passwords. (she is 100% right about that because she’d find your gay stuff.)

And the list goes on.

Sadly, none of these reasons are legitimate. But while you’re living them, you don’t realize that. This is part of a calculated daily plan on the part of your husband to get you off his back—especially when it comes to SEX. That’s the real issue. If only you weren’t so needy—then maybe the marriage could work. But you want something from him that he doesn’t want to give to you. Oh, every now and then he’ll do it to you or for you—but not with you. And that’s the difference.

Almost every man can get an erection and dump the remains somewhere—yes, even deposit it in you when they try hard enough—but they are not doing it because they really want to. They are doing it so you will believe that they are straight. They tell me they fantasize about men and look at gay porno before they do the deed so they can get aroused. Sad to say, it’s not you doing the trick for them. But once they do it a few times—BINGO—you will now be convinced that sex is not a problem—especially for them.  

In the beginning, they put some effort into it to create an illusion of straight, but it doesn’t last for long. Too many women have described their experiences in the same way I felt about mine—doing the minimum to create an illusion. I remember when I met my gay husband how frustrating sex was from the beginning. It’s true we were in our mid-20’s, but we were both experienced. It wasn’t my first marriage. I knew what satisfying love making was about. This was back in 1978, and women were just getting liberated about sex. After our first few times together that left me feeling deflated, I tried really nicely to talk about upping the game so to speak. I approached it that every woman was different and had different needs. That’s when he first jumped up and yelled at me, “No woman has ever complained about me before you!!” He claimed to be very “experienced,” but he never mentioned that experience was with men—not women.

That was how the relationship started—with me feeling like a sex ogre because I wasn’t sexually satisfied with an “act of sex.” To prove that it wasn’t me, I went shopping at the bookstore and bought some books that were popular back in those days about women wanting to be sexually satisfied. “See, it’s not only me,” I would say hoping to defend myself. So he tried a little more to be accommodating, but you can tell when someone just doesn’t want to touch you where you want to be touched. It becomes degrading. So many of our women shared that degrading feeling of sexual rejection.

Years later after he came out, he admitted that I was the first woman he had ever been with, so at least he told the truth when he said, “No woman has ever complained before.” There were no other women before to complain. He was so charming, handsome, strong, and funny, so women always gravitated to him envying me for having him. They would tell me how lucky I was to have such a great guy. If only they knew…

What creates the shame for us is the lack of advocacy on the part of our women. While gay men have a cheering squad praising their “bravery” in living their “authentic life,” no medals are pinned on the chests of their wives for enduring years of emotional and sexual abuse and neglect. No one is having parades for us with banners flying high. Instead, we get indignant stares or comments such as, “You didn’t know? I thought everybody knew!!’ or “If he’s gay, how did he have sex with you and father your children?” This is where the shame unfolds—as if we are at fault for either being stupid not to see it or inadequate to “keep him straight.”

To add to this, some of these men throw it in our faces. “If you would have had better sex with me, I wouldn’t have had to look for oral sex with a man.” Or “I didn’t cheat on you just because I let a guy give me a blow job. Or often the families of our gay husbands who “love us” so much that we believed we were their daughters now look at us with accusing eyes thinking their sons weren’t gay when they married us—where did “we” screw up? And trust me, in 95% of our lives, blood is thicker than water when the marriage ends.

Shame is an emotion that is developed over time when you are made to feel inadequate or undeserving of anything better because you are not “good enough.” I think for most of us, this is the case. As the emotional abuse kicks into our marriages and starts knocking us down, the feelings of shame increase. It shakes our internal belief systems no matter how strong you were going into the relationship. The daily “strip down/slap down” breaks us down making us question our whole belief system. As long as our gay husbands can make us feel at fault, they feel safe—and our feeling of shame just increases. We internalize our husbands’ unhappiness and our lack of ability to make them not necessarily to love us—but to want us.

One of the ways our husbands pump up the shame is by telling us “how much they love us.” Yep, they say talk is cheap, but for women who are desperately trying to hang on to any hope at all, the word ‘love” sounds really promising. Somehow, that build-up never quite meets the hurdle of physical intimacy or love making, so once again the “build-up” is a “let down.”

This is where relationship illogic steps in. First, we are being told our husbands love us. Next, we’re told that if there are problems in the marriage—they are “OUR” problems—they don’t have a problem. So they love us, and they don’t have a problem—BUT THEY DON’T WANT TO BE WITH US. It can’t equate except for us to internalize that WE ARE THE PPOBLEM. This is where the shame comes in and sinks us like quick sand. We stop asking because it just hurts too much.

After the marriage ends, you might think that recovery would include ridding ourselves of the shame—but that doesn’t quite happen. Why? Because once people start finding out WHY our marriage ended, more SHAME comes our way.

“Your husband is gay? A lot of people make that up to punish their husband.”

“You didn’t know he was gay? We knew—we thought you didn’t care since everybody knew.”

“If he is gay, why is he getting married to a woman again?”

Ugh. As if we weren’t feeling bad enough to start with, now it’s time to retreat into our own closet—the one abandoned by our husband. Yes, he’s out and about and giving a shout-out while we are retreating into our second wave of shame. We’ve learned that people don’t get it, but it still hurts. It hurts that our experience is minimized while our husbands are being hailed our heroes for their bravery of living their new authentic lives after wasting 10, 15, 25, or 30 years of our lives.

I am still waiting for our medals for bravery and courage. Actually, I’d be happy to settle for a nod of the head of acknowledgement. I don’t need a ribbon or trinket. I just want someone to say—“I get it—and you are a hero!!”

To all of my readers—I do get it. You are all my heroes.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are mothers who have to battle with challenges you face daily. Hold your children tight when you hug them. Feel their love because they genuinely love you.

BONNIE KAYE’S STRAIGHT WIVES TALK SHOW…

In January of 2020, I started back my weekly talk show. This time I was emphasizing some of the struggles women in our network are facing. I will be taking a break from the show after next week until July. You can listen to them any time you like. Here is the link to my past shows: 

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bonnielkaye

With lots of love and hope!!  

Bonnie ❤

BONNIE KAYE'S STRAIGHT TALK NEWSLETTER - AUGUST 2015

BONNIE KAYE'S STRAIGHT TALK

August 2016     Volume 17, Issue 178

STRAIGHT WIVES MATTER

          We are living in a world that revolves around "political correctness." Over the past ten years,  I have watched this develop and to some degree get it and agree with it. I agree that people need to be accepted for who they are. I agree that it is unkind to mock people because of how they look. And I agree that no one should have to live in a world feeling uncomfortable or feel "left out." So yes, political correctness has certainly made some major inroads.

I have to admit I don't understand all of these inroads. Maybe it's my age or maybe it's because it's too hard to "get it" all--and especially when it comes to sexuality. It was difficult enough for me to comprehend it when I learned that homosexual people were marrying straight people. That was a real eye opener. You see, I didn't grow up with that knowledge. I was told that if a man was gay or a woman was a lesbian, it meant that he or she wanted to be with someone of the same sex. Honest--that's what they used to teach us. This was in the day before the Kinsey ladder climbing up or down on the number chart ranging from straight to gay and everything in between. I didn't realize there was an "in between."

         

When I was in high school in the pre-enlightened 1960's, people would whisper the word "homosexual" or some horrifying derivative of the word, but I really didn't know anyone like that. There was one boy in high school--yes one--where rumors were whispered behind closed doors--but no actual confirmation. I went out of my way to be nice to this pimpled peer because I, too, was a teenager who never fit in to any crowd. I wanted to--but somehow, I didn't at that age. Therefore, I tried to find others like me for some kind of camaraderie. When we would speak, I never dared mention the rumors I heard about him for fear of making him feel worse than he already did. This was the closest I got to the gay world until 1968 in California.

At the age of 17, I moved to California to stay with my father. It was such a different way of life. Gay was very prominent back then as if it were the land of milk and honey for the new gay immigrants continuing to arrive daily on its shores. Here in California one could live an openly gay life. Actually, in California you could live whatever life you wanted because back then sex was over-the-top. There were orgies and swinging. It was quite liberating to those who needed to feel liberated. It was there that I met the first "openly" gay man in my life. At 17, I knew so little that I was so sure that gay was just a condition that came from lack of proper love. I was so sure that loving him would make him straight. And I tried the best I could for a girl of 17--but there was no change. I guess he tried to because why not? He was 24, and it seemed like something he thought might work--but he found out quickly it didn't. That's when I learned to understand that gay men were going to stay gay men. They couldn't change--and they shouldn't have to change.

 As the years went on, I thought I had that whole issue figured out--but I didn't. At the age of 25 I rekindled a romance with a man who was my high school crush. We were both adults now and thinking that maybe we could make us work. Something was off from the beginning--but I wrote it off to the Zodiac signs. He was a Cancer--I was a Libra--and the two signs weren't meshing. At least that sounded logical in the 1970's. And talk about not knowing--I will tell you this. We were parted for six years since we had last seen each other. When we reunited, he told me that he had been with four other people during those six years--two men and two women. Did it strike me strange that he had been with two men? Not at all. Don't forget--the 60's and 70's were a time of "sexual experimentation" for people. He assured me that he tried it--and didn't like it. Or he liked it, but not as much as being with a woman. And guess what? I bought it. It sounded logical to me. Why else would a man want to be with me unless he "decided" he was straight?

 We were very misled in those days by reports by "sexual experts" such as Dr. Kinsey who talked about sexual fluidity long before it was acknowledged as "accepted behavior" as it is today. Of course, he was stating that a large percentage of men had some kind of "homosexual" encounter if their lifetimes, and it was "normal." So that's what I thought. When that boyfriend said he "tried it" and "didn't like it," it made sense to me. And although I left him before our plans to move in together hastened to the date of action, I was having doubts because something was "off." I still was attributing it to the moon being in the seventh house and Jupiter aligning with Mars. Yes, it must have been that Zodiac incompatibility again. It's funny--we had sex, but I always felt he wasn't there with me--much like his moodiness and brooding.  It wasn't until ten years later and several years after the marriage to my gay husband that I learned that he, too, was gay. I was smarter by then. I knew the moment I dialed him and a man picked up the phone that that was his lover--and he admitted it.

 Oh well, enough of my history. I like to tell you my story because so many of our women kick themselves over and over for not seeing the red flags. That's because so many of us didn't know they were red flags. We just didn't know enough. We didn't have computers to check on the facts or find explanations to the behaviors that we attributed to astrology. Yes--for those of you grew up during the age of Aquarius, didn't the signs of the Zodiac explain everything?

 Anyway, getting back to my point--over the past 10 years or so, political correctness has taken over in our country. It seems that you can't say much about anyone without getting condemned. We have to accept things which in the past would not be acceptable. And I admit I am somewhat weary of having to try to be understanding of behavior that seems somewhat mixed up and jumbled, but that's me. It was difficult for me to understand straight vs. gay--and now there are so many other variations of the sexual spectrum that I never imagined. And I'm not knocking it--I'm just acknowledging it. But I do have a problem with it, and I'll explain why.

 It seems that we keep rallying to the cause of fighting for people who are coming out of some closet. The closets are different ones ranging from gay to transgender and include a whole new vocabulary of in-betweens that I won't get into. But it seems the more that these men come out and end up with barrels of praise for their bravery, the further back we, their wives, are shoved back into their closets.

 How we, the straight wives, are feeling is never the issue, is it? Is anyone out there asking us Straight Wives what it feels like to have our lives blown away and devastated? I don't think so. I do know that I get at least two or three requests from media shows each month asking me for people in my group who are finding ways of "making it work by readjusting their thinking." I tell them they have come to the wrong person and refer them to other groups who may know these women. Of course, that's after I ask them if they would be interested in doing a show on the "real lives of straight wives" focusing on the devastation of what it is like to be one. Not one production company has ever said to me, "What a great idea!" Well one did--but they were only willing to do it if the husbands were willing to go on the show--and I don't think your husbands wanted to do it. Heck, they don't even want to talk to you about it. But they'll tell the world?

 People don't take us seriously because there are no consequences. There are no advocates out there shouting for OUR rights. There is no one writing about OUR pain except an occasional Huffington Post blog or comedy cable show. We are judged by others without compassion or empathy that they are so willing to give to our husbands. People still think that either we knew and were desperate or missed all the signs meaning we were stupid. And then there are those who understand less than we did who still think that these men weren't gay when they married us, so it must have been our bad cooking that made them gay.

 We were questioning our own judgment throughout our marriage wondering what was going wrong. When we found out, then people started questioning us as if we were "blind" or "responsible." Is it any wonder that we prefer to stay silent? We are double whammied--first by our gay husbands and then by society as a whole. While people are so busy cheering on the bravery of our husbands, who is looking our way with awards for enduring the suffering all of the years if our marriages were bad or if our marriages were good, awarding us for losing what meant most to us in our lives--namely our husbands. For some women, they look at the man standing in front of them and still see these men as their HUSBANDS--not as their GAY HUSBANDS. They still can't understand how gay crept into their marriage when they weren't looking. What changed? This takes years to figure out in many cases.

         

 Why don't producers of shows want to know what it's like to survive this kind of marriage for us? Why do they only care about the 5% of marriages that try to make it work by living in an open marriage? What about the other 95% of us? Why aren't the members of the gay community taking up our cause like they want us to take up their cause? Where are their warnings to men getting married knowing that they aren't exactly straight even if they don't know they are exactly gay yet? And where is the condemnation from the gay community of men who are married and living this double life? Why are certain support chapters of gay fathers encouraging their members not to tell their wives until "after the divorce" so they won't have to end up with less financially? Where are the groups telling these men to FIX THE MISTAKE in a way that the wife comes out a winner after she has lost so much?

 No one is parading for us around the country. No one has even suggested that we have a special "Straight Wives Matter Day" for us whose lives were thrown into turmoil without a warning. We are expected to be "understanding," "accepting," and "advocates" for the gay community now that we are somehow attached to it in a different kind of way--namely through our husbands. But what gay organization has said, "We embrace the millions of straight wives who have lost their husbands and families and welcome them to our community"? I haven't heard of any yet who are looking to share our grieving. And until I start to hear it, I guess no one except us will really care if Straight Wives Matter. Sad, isn't it?  

   

MAILBAG

Each month, I receive numerous letters of appreciation from my readers. If I think your letter will help others, I always ask your permission to republish. Here are two letters from this month.

Dear Bonnie,

          I hope my email finds you well.  I always think about you.  It's been years since I met you in Houston.  It's also been a long journey for me.  I've ducked in and out of GayHusbands.com and the Straight Wives Radio Blog for years now because I still find it so helpful to my recovery.  I credit you for telling it to me 'straight' and for saving my life.  I put all of my trust in you, and you gave me the strength to be honest with myself, to trust my own intuition and to leave the relationship.  After struggling with my recovery for about two years (I finally realized there had to be more to my story then just being duped by a gay man).  For some reason, I don't know why but at the time I never fully understood what you meant about the crazy making, gaslighting and narcissism nor did         

I realize that was exactly what I was suffering from and why I was having such difficulty moving on.  I went back to your material, listened more closely to some of your guests like Mary Ann Glynn and Donna Anderson and then started Googling those terms and watching videos and so began my true healing. All of the pieces just fell into place and now I know I was severely gas-lighted by a covert narcissist.  It's actually fascinating how these people work and even more fascinating to learn about the symptoms of someone who has been abused in this way and how very little the professionals know about this type of abuse.  Needless to say, I exhibited most of the symptoms like not knowing what just happened to me, ruminating (a biggee!), feeling hopeless, suicidal, isolating, not being able to concentrate, etc.  It was heartbreaking but at the same time knowing what happened, what he deliberately did and more importantly who he really is as a person has ended most of my pain.  For the first time in years, I feel like I'm finally getting back to myself (kind of, still afraid to date) and to some of the things I love to do like sewing and writing (my therapy).  So speaking of writing...I wrote the poem below, and if you want to share it or any part of this email on your website or elsewhere, please do.  

       

From the bottom of my heart I thank you for what you've done for me and also for all of the other straight wives.  Hugs!

The Letter To Him I Never Sent 

It's been a long and lonely last three years

Still I fight back some of those old salty tears

Stupidly I thought you would be my last love 

Only later to be strangled like a too-tight glove

Was the making of that big, beautiful home 

Your secret plan to leave me all alone 

Should have known you gave me many clues

Just a sick little game to watch me lose

And all that gaslighting and crazy making

Shattered my world and left me shaking

Of all the happy times I thought we shared

Now I know you never could have cared 

Because you treated me like a big 'a hole'

That ripped right through my very soul

Every day it felt like a slap without a slap

But more than that I felt so trapped 

Always telling lies, the biggest 'I am not gay'

Like a cat on a mouse I was only your prey

You are the biggest down-low pretender

A bait and switch I'm not your defender 

Played me day and night like some old fool

But I'm here to tell you that was so not cool 

I ain't no longer your cover girl or your beard

Go on and continue living the life you feared

Don't you know you can run but cannot hide

Behind that mask your fake and phony side

Learned many years ago how to avoid your eyes

That when it ended, I never said any goodbyes

See you skipped no beat and moved right on

You think you may have found a better swan?

Another good woman you will probably destroy

Hey abuser, user we are not your lil' play toy

Clear off the table now so I can place my bet

Cause a man like you, I'm sure she's never met 

Maybe in a few years she'll reach out to me

Then I'll tell her all about 'The Bonnie' who set me free

Trisha

Dear Bonnie,

          I have been thinking a lot about the theme of "I will never be the same" and learning " to live with it." Most of the time, I think I'm actually better in spite of it all! I was so naive before this experience. I blamed myself my whole life because i refused to see other people's bad behavior and mental illness. It was too scary. And i think I believed people would change if I acted " better."  I refused to think I didn't have control. So weird. Fear drove me in my life. I made bad decisions. I stayed too long. I lived in denial and fragmented my mind to tolerate terrible situations. I didn't know I had the power to leave. I didn't know I could like and care for myself. I relied on others for that, and they were not safe. My whole life was like some sort of reward/punishment, tit for tat experiment. I was keeping score, everyone was keeping score! This is not love.

          With my gay ex, I could not understand the disconnection between us. I rationalized that I had some attachment disorder. ( I'm sure he loved that!) After I found out the truth, I felt stupid. I felt shame. It made me feel even more worthless. And my so called friends? They said" how could you.....?" I didn't realize they needed to invalidate me to protect whatever crap they had going on. This experience has sucked. But I have learned a lot about myself and other people. I have learned that caring for ourselves is seen as selfish. I have learned that most people unconsciously are manipulative and out for themselves but can couch it in caring and concern and looking " nice", but they really don't care, because they are focused on themselves. So now, I look for those few people! The truly caring ones! I actually think I found one in my therapist of all people! I am learning what caring relations looks like and that maybe I deserve it after all. I have also met some amazing women on the internet, and sadly, they are not here, but we connect in cyberspace. 

          So, do we ever get over" it"? The trauma? No. It is part of me. But it doesn't define me. I am working on bringing all the parts of me together for wholeness and maybe liking myself one day ( loving myself is a stretch lol!). If I had stayed with my gex, I could never have had space to do this. I'm pretty confident that he will leave me alone as I made sure it got back to him that I knew what he was! Maybe healing just looks like wholeness and not putting up with anymore toxic people. I don't miss that torture! 

          Many blessings to you today on our little soul journey! xoxo

A Straight Sister

Thank you, ladies, for sharing your heart-felt words.

LOVE TO YOU ALL!!! ♥ BONNIE

DISTORTED PERCEPTIONS - ARCHIVES

First, I want to thank my wonderful support group member Debbie for reminding me about this article from nearly 9 years ago. On her new blog, she posted this and after reading it, I felt it was deserving of sharing it with you on my blog. I hope you find comfort in these words.

DISTORTED PERCEPTIONS, May, 2003
I’ve written about this before, and probably not too long ago. But I could never write about this enough, so I’ll talk about it again. It’s what I call “Distorted Perceptions.” It’s an important part of understanding the whole concept your marriage and why it failed.

I think I’ve gotten most of you on board with understanding that you had no influence on your husband’s homosexuality. No matter how easy it is for us to fall into the trap of believing that we were not “good enough” or “smart enough” or “pretty enough” or “sexy enough” for our husbands, I hope after reading my constant reassurances, you finally understand that your husband’s homosexuality was there long before you were.

The next concept of why your marriage failed is a little more difficult for you to understand. You are still looking at your marriage as if it takes “two to tango” as the saying goes. I often hear women say, “He made mistakes, and I made mistakes,” or “We both had faults,” Let’s acknowledge that no one is perfect. Yes, we all have faults. But it is not your “faults” that created the problems in the marriage. On the other hand, it is very possible that the problems in the marriage intensified your faults.

Example? Okay. Let’s start with me revealing to you some of the problems I had in my marriage. Because of all of the erratic behavior and inconsistencies in my marriage, I was overly suspicious of my husband’s actions. Whenever I couldn’t account for his missing time, I believed he was out cheating on me. I made an automatic search of all of his belongs when he wasn’t looking. This included all of the pockets in his clothes, his little black phone book, and his wallet. I looked in the car at the mileage gauge, looked under the seats for clues of unfamiliar items, and went through the glove compartment for any suspicious papers, matchbook covers, or receipts left behind and haphazardly thrown in there. As soon as I would find a possible incriminating piece of evidence, I would confront my husband. He would get angry and yell at me how I was neurotic and ridiculous. He always had an explanation of whatever evidence I found, and he did his best to convince me that I was the one with a “vivid” imagination that was always in the overactive mode.

From where he was sitting, I looked like the overly nagging wife. Snooping didn’t become me. But I became obsessed. Once the trust was gone, there was no way for me to regain it, especially when his patterns of suspicion continued. As much as I tried to ignore what kept hitting me in the face, I was unable to do so. As time progressed, my obsession deepened. Every time he left the house, my imagination took over and images of young men jolted out in my mind. Every guy my husband spoke to became suspect to me. My reactions to people were totally different because of this. No doubt, there were many innocent people who became victims of my unfounded hostility, but I was unable to distinguish fact from fiction because of the ones who were my realities and nightmares.

Now, my husband blamed me for overreacting to almost everything. And maybe in many cases I did. Bottom line: This was not who I was, but who I became because HE WAS GAY AND LIVING A LIE. And that lie infiltrated the darkest part of my soul turning me into someone whom I didn’t recognize or even like.

There were days when I woke up and didn’t want to live any more. This was NOT ME. The real me had a passion for life that had been temporarily snuffed out. I didn’t know it was temporary while I lived it because my life was now on another plane—somewhere between the Twilight Zone and death. I say death because on three different occasions I attempted suicide. It seemed like an excellent alternative during those moments that seemed so inescapable and hopeless. This was NOT ME either. Prior to my marriage, I was so high on life. I was active, sociable, surrounded by high self-esteem, and very independent. I turned into someone who was depressed, scared, insecure, co-dependant, and crying constantly from being hurt.

The decisions and the moves that I made during my marriage were based on the mutated perceptions inside my marriage. Before I suspected that homosexuality was the cause of my unhappiness, I came to believe that it was me who was causing the problems in my marriage. If I told my husband that our marriage had problems, he would reply, “We don’t have problems—YOU have the problem. I am happy in the marriage. YOU are the unhappy one.” Many of you have written to me that your husbands tell you the same thing. The problem is YOU—not him, not the “marriage.” And naturally, my husband, as well as yours, never looks beyond the fact that YOU have a problem, because it’s always all about them. I guess I was falling into a darker hole each day so it was easy for me to believe that I was the one with the problems. He wasn’t falling into a dark hole. He seemed content, and why not? He had a wife and a life outside his wife.

He was living his lie. And it was a big lie. Not a little white lie. Lying about your sexuality is a really very big lie. VERY BIG. What is a little lie? A little lie is taking money and buying something and not telling your spouse. A little lie is getting a couple of drinks at the bar with some friends while you tell your wife you are working. A little lie is not revealing that you broke your diet, smoked a cigarette after you quit, or paying more for something than you’re supposed to but keeping quiet not to start a fight because you’ve unbalanced the family budget.

It’s not like I’m condoning lying, but I certainly do understand it. I’ve lied myself when the thought of revealing something is going to result in an unnecessary argument that can be avoided and has no real effect on the state of a relationship. To lie is human. To live a lie is different. It’s not something that is inconsequential. When you live a lie, there are always consequences for someone. In our cases, it ends up being our consequence.

The basis for a relationship should be one built on give and take. When a man stops having sex with his wife because it’s too much of a burden for him because he is gay, you are giving wrong information to your wife. I don’t hear too many men take responsibility for their lack of sexual activity other than made up stories about being too tired, too overworked, too depressed, too headachy, too sore from exercising, etc. When those excuses run out, then the tables turn. Then it’s—YOU. You are too heavy, YOU are too naggy, YOU are too unsympathetic,
YOU are too demanding, and of course…..YOU ARE A NYMPHOMANIAC or something just as insulting. Because YOU now think YOU are the problem in your marriage, YOU are the one who tries to change YOURSELF. So, now you are changing yourself to become the ideal wife of a man who doesn’t want to make love to you no matter how good you look, how nice you act, how talented you are, or of course—how devoted you are to your gay husband. Ouch! That hurts.


Eventually, after your husband rejects you enough times, you stop expecting sex, and you also stop asking for it. He breathes a deep sigh of relief. Whew!! “She finally gets it. Stop asking because you’re not going to get it.” Once your wife stops asking you to have sex, she has resigned herself to living an unhappy life with you. How happy to do you think she’s going to be? And when she’s not happy, that’s her fault too, right? Wrong. It’s the husband’s fault.

Some gay husbands believe that money is the key to happiness—YOUR happiness. They will try to compensate for their sexual inadequacy by buying you gifts and trinkets, as if that will do it for you. It’s the same pattern as the physically abusive husband who beats his wife, begs for forgiveness, tells her that he loves her, and goes out to buy a present to prove it. HYPOCRITS. Like a bracelet is going to make you feel better about yourself. “I don’t think you’re good enough to make love to, but I think you’re good enough for a bracelet.” Thanks pal—but no thanks.

I know they say that the failure of a marriage is the fault of both parties, and maybe that’s the case in functional marriages. But guess what? I don’t think it’s that way when you live with a gay man. You aren’t happy. He can’t be happy. He is saying that you are making him unhappy because of your own unhappiness. But if he would have been a straight husband, maybe you would be happy. Perhaps you could have met life’s challenges as a team instead of being on different teams. And not only are you both on different teams, but you’re both playing in different ballparks. If the pitcher for the New York Yankees throws the most perfect pitch in NY, the best player in Boston standing hundreds of miles away can’t hit it—NO MATTER WHAT. You are in two different cities on two different teams. Two different places in two different spaces.

The same goes for straight wives with gay husbands. If your husband is telling you that the lack of sex in your marriage is YOUR fault, and he is a gay man, no matter what you do to make yourself more physically attractive, and some of you have gone to the extremes of breast implants and liposuction, it’s not going to change anything. You are playing in the wrong ballpark. Or shall I say, you have the wrong plumbing.

If you think I’m saying to all of you that you are perfect and without fault, well, I’m not. No one is perfect; we are all human. We all make mistakes. We all have bad days. We all have human traits, and this is fine. And no husband—straight, gay or otherwise is perfect either. I don’t think any of us are seeking perfection. We are seeking husbands who are playing in the same ballpark. And although many couples who are STRAIGHT couples grow apart, they do it in a more honest way. They don’t always look to place the blame on your lap. They take some responsibility for the marriage unraveling. And you can make sense of those marriages that don’t work without feeling that you are responsible for their failure. In a marriage with a gay husband, you don’t even know what is real and not real. You are living in a labyrinth that has only twists and turns. There is no way to ever find a way to the end of the maze. The twists and turns go nowhere except in vicious circles.

And so, when you sit back and recount the years that have passed and try to figure out what went wrong in your marriage, do yourself a favor--stop thinking about it. When you live with a gay man who is parading in disguise as a straight man, nothing can change the circumstances. Or shall I say, only you are capable of changing them—by leaving the marriage and moving on to a life that makes sense. What’s really so amazing is that life can make sense once your marriage is over. No more mazes to run through, no more Twilight Zones or Outer Limits. No more trying to solve the unsolvable, no more fighting against the unchanging tide. When you live like this, you zap your mental and physical energy because spinning gold out of hay only happens in fairytales.
Posted by debbie wooding at 9:44 AM 2 comments