My quest for acceptance..

We all go through this in our own way, don't we? For me, tossing out the guilt and accepting myself was what triggered me to shove the closet door open and look out. For other people, realizing they're gay and starting out of the closet happens long before they have really accepted it and dealt with it. I'm not sure which route is easier, but I know it's a terribly personal thing that we all have to do our own way.

Guilt is something that has always been in the background for me, too. My whole family is Catholic--we made guilt into an art form, after all!

Part of dealing with it, for me, was creating a clear distinction in my mind between guilt and responsibility. Think of the difference in a legal sense. If you get behind the wheel drunk and mow down a kid on a bicycle who happens to veer unexpectedly into your lane, you are guilty of driving drunk and will be sent to jail for it. You had a choice to drink and drive, or not, and you made a choice that was irresponsible, illegal, and ultimately fatal for an innocent person. But if you are in full control, but are looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time, and don't happen to see the kid on the bicycle, you aren't guilty of any wrongdoing, even though the end result is the same for the kid.

OK, so that makes it sound like my marriage was a car accident or a train wreck or something! (Bad, bad John!) But I hope you get the correlation. When I got married, I was looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time. I knew I was gay but with my non-existent knowledge of what that meant, I thought that it was something that would disappear if I married the right person. I was wrong, and people were hurt in the process. But it's not like I messed around with guys and got married on a whim because I felt like it, knowing full well that I could mess up lives in the process. We, all of us here, didn't marry for selfish reasons, and we believed we could make it work. We may be responsible for the aftermath, and it's OK to feel bad about it, but feeling guilty is something to try and get past. You didn't go into this trying to hurt anyone--just the opposite. You were just looking in the wrong direction at the wrong time.

 

Good post. Right. It is different. There are people who are not that sexually experienced, or only have had sexual rapport with their prospective spouse, and may have a vague inkling or a very clear idea that they are interested to some degree in the same sex, who go on to marry.

Then, there are people who sow the wild oats in a big way with sexual partners of the same sex. They then stop, reassess the past, the present, and the future ... and marry a spouse of the opposite sex. This doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. I've known of a few instances like this. I don't know all the details. It's the latter that is inherently more problematic.

Many people who are gay, or even with bisexuality they later need to appease, marry someone from their neighborhood, college, or from their first employer because their intentions were good. People change ... or, better yet, people learn about themselves as time goes by. Marriage carries some degree of risk ... even for straight couples.

It would be interesting to see how many situations like this are Scenario I and how many are Scenario II.