On Marrying the Wrong Person

Thank you for sharing the article GW.

I can relate to the hazard of marrying without knowing yourself. I thought I did, but in truth, I blinded myself from seeing that I am gay. That blindness not on,y hurt me, it hurt my wife. Today, it leaves me with a sense of wondering, are there other areas of my life that I am unaware of?

On a total tangent, scrolling through the article, I felt overwhelmed by all of the male/female couples pictured in each section. It reminded me how much we are surrounded with visual messages every day that couples are man & woman. It was a relief at the end to see two men.

 

Hi,

I would have to say it is a number of things, no one thing.

For me coming out resulted in self inflicted poverty. Wife is supportive, that is not the issue. A combination of ageism, bad economy, few good jobs and taking years off to be a stay at home parent, plus a sibling who said they would help but bailed part way in put me into poverty.

That is how it happened, I am not complaining... Matter of fact "poverty" is the best damn teacher I ever had. I was faced with obstacles I did not think I could beat, I met others I NEVER would have known (recovering drug addicts, felons, undocumented immigrants) and I learned a lot about life, myself, others and society in general.

It put a lot of things into perspective. Coming out is nothing in the scheme of things. It is built up into this huge drama of "what if?", and "might be's" and self inflicted pain.

There are people out there suffering, truly suffering. They fear, death, starvation, addiction, illness, pain.

And you know what... They are just people. I have come to love people I never appreciated because society labels them worthless.

There is so much we do not know about ourselves, others, life and the cruelty of society in general.

Empathy and love are powerful.

 

I should have known that intrinsically for in my youth society held "gay" as worthless depravity and I knew it wasn't true.

In coming out question all society teaches. See the crap. Do not let the lessons of the closet go to waste.

 

I didn't marry the wrong person. It wasn't a mistake for me to marry. We had many happy years and two amazing kids who would not be here. Our shared life had meaning, love, and happiness for both of us. After more than 20 years I guess other feelings in me beginning to emerge which I could no longer ignore. I wouldn't take back marrying my wife at all; I regret not acting a little sooner to reveal my full sexuality to her.

 

I definitely wasn't "used to being happy". In fact I see so much of my parents' unhappy relationship in my own marriage that I've become more and more suspicious that my dad might have been in the closet himself. Only in his case, it was a lead-lined bunker 20 feet underground beneath the darkest, furthest regions of his closet. There are just too many parallels in our relationships for it to be a coincidence. And I was petrified that I would go through the same thing all over again if I was ever in a relationship with a guy. Thankfully, that's not the case. I guess we both managed to figure it out somehow!

 

This is an interesting article, and I can relate to a LOT of it. Like BeingEarnest, my biggest problem was not knowing myself, and therefore marrying someone of the same gender. But I can remember when I was 20, I thought that it was critical to marry before age 24 so that people don't start thinking that you're gay (how ironic!). I got married at age 23. And it was to someone who I really didn't know at all. We met, wrote letters for two years, had a couple two week chaperoned visits, and got married. We absolutely didn't know each other, but the worst part was that I didn't know myself. If only I had known that being gay wasn't a bad thing, I wouldn't have been so worried about proving that I was not. But reading the article, I can see that even if I had married someone of the right gender when I was 23, it was have been disastrous for all the reasons enumerated in the article. Of course, there wasn't anyone getting married to their same sex partner back in 1980!

 

I really like this observation!!!

I think there's a great temptation to blame the closet, homophobia, fear etc. for all the relationship problems we face 10 or 20 or 30 years later. I just don't believe that. Sure, they played into the decision to hide in the closet. But as I've observed before, people DID come out. It may not have been a safe thing to do, but people DID decide that a straight marriage and a closeted life wasn't something they could stomach, even back in the "bad old days". In fact, I know one guy in his 70's whose family threw him basically a big gay wedding shower, in 1960! and he feels a great deal of nostalgia for the lost old days.

Yeah, marrying someone of the opposite sex was definitely part of the closet mentality, and it was about as much "marrying the wrong person" as I could have gotten. But I know in my heart that all of the events that led up to falling for my wife and marrying her had as much to do with my own inability to see the "right person" as anything else, and if she'd had a Y chromosome, I would have fallen for "him" every bit as much as I did "her", and I would have been just as unhappy. At that time in my life, I felt alone, desperate, down on myself and isolated. She had friends (of a sort) and made me feel special and included in her world. If some guy had shown me the same attention, I think there's a mighty good chance I would have jumped at the chance, since I knew perfectly well that I was attracted to guys by then, even if I cringed at the word "gay" because of the connotations it carried in my mind.

At some point, we do have to take some responsibility for our choices, not only the choice to go into the closet, but who we dragged into it with us. We entered the closet as damaged people, damaged in many ways and for many reasons. And we picked partners who fit our damaged outlook and we fit theirs (how often has my wife told me "You were different from all the other guys"). I think anyone coming out and hoping one day for a relationship should consider taking a critical look at themselves and their own relationship (and communication) skills before they start looking for someone else. There are plenty of straight people in straight marriages that don't work out because of all the problems listed in the article. The growing acceptance and legality of gay relationships and marriage shouldn't mean that we get so desperate for a partner that we end up making the same mistakes they (or we) did.

 

so true! if my wife told me that she is transsexual and wanted to have the operation to be a man, I would support them in that, but we would not be any more compatible. But the issue 35 years ago was that I just wanted to marry any woman. I honestly honestly did not believe that it mattered who I married, just so long as it was a woman. If I wasn't marrying just for gender, first of all I would not have been in a rush to get married; and second, perhaps I would have been more selective. perhaps. but perhaps not. Lust is a major factor in mate selection when you're 23 years old, so my criteria, though different, might not have been better! :roflmao:

 

Ok, I know I should not be here, 'cause I'm too young and a long etc, but I can't help reading some of you complaining about the lack of understanding on a sexual level being a huge problem.

In my opinion, the fact that you understand each other very damned well on the bed/kitchen/sofa won't make the other problems automatically go away. I guess that our opinions reflect our past experiences, and you guys have had those, well, here is mine :

My last relationship was sexually speaking just perfect. He was liberal, I am liberal, we were kinky as hell, and finally I was having some decent fun with someone experienced enough, plus learning myself, plus getting accepted and validated on my sexual identity.

The problem was that the (amazing) sex blinded me for a while. And this drives me again to the need for self knowledge, and to be aware of our faults, and weaknesses, and doing some active work to deal with them. I was confronted again with some of my own personality traits that I'm not proud of, but this time I realized that maybe those traits, those unfulfilled needs, were the root cause why I got into troubles this time. Bad sex is awful, yes, but good sex can lead you to a trap.

About the article, I found very interesting the differences between the marriage of reason, the romantic age and the psycological era. When you turn the radio on, you'll hear a million songs about the romantic love : It is engraved on our brains, it's the cultural stereotypes we grew with and they'll be around forever and ever, and we are condemned to fall for it.

There is no romantic side on an interrogatory... Even if some of us do look very good while interrogating suspects, as some suspects look just sexy when they get caught lying :icon_wink

Now, seriously, I guess we need to be silly for a while, and to write bad poetry and to send flowers and be romantic, but after a while we need to sit down and ask : Ok, who is this guy/gal? what do I really think of that reaction? was he/she lying to me? was he/she lying to him/herself, trying to look good?

It's hard to give a good answer to those questions when the hormones and the memories of a thrilling night/evening are still there.

Ps: Even if I'm young, I start to feel the pressure. Sadly most of that pressure comes from myself.

 

Hi,

For me that is not true... But it is "stupid" that is a total turn off not lying. Ignorant is correctable, liar is correctable but stupid persists. I know, not nice but it is a TOTAL turn off for me. Place Mr Physically Perfect before me and he doesn't have a brain... No way, walk away.

Beauty fades anyway.

 

Everyone has his own definition of beauty. To me real beauty never fades : It's on the inside, not on the outside. It's on how you tick and what you know. /the right moment for a cliché tm/

Our society teach us that being young means being beautiful. It's up to you to decide what is beautiful and what is not. The older I get, the more attractive I find myself, the more defined are my features, the more gray hairs I grow... And I get to know myself, which helps me to deal with myself much better.

Skiff, that was a fragment of a sentence where I was joking, trying to make it lighter for a second, even if the topic is deadly serious. Honesty is paramount to me. About stupidity and intelligence, to each their own...

... Still, imagine you've been after a good lier for a while, and suddenly you just get what you wanted. A nervous glance, a brief second of doubt while chosing his words... You've got him. That doesn't mean you want to stay with him because you know he is a liar, that means... That you just got him, your theories were correct, and maybe you belong to the kind who likes those brief moments and enjoys them. You can also make a huge drama and cry because he is a liar / he lied to me. Your reaction will depend on your expectations. Keep low your expectations and you won't be dissapointed too often.

... And everyone is a lier to some degree. Tell me who is not a lier to himself or to the others to some degree. Even if they are not aware of it.

 

That is why loving witout expectations, uncondtional love is so powerful.

When love cannot be turned into a weapon to harm its holder... That is love, that is powerful.

 

A friend posted this on Facebook and I loved it. Should go back and read again. Thanks for posting!

 

Heh...mine too. Not so much the relationship I had with my ex wife, but definitely the other serious relationship I had. I'm putting his over/under at 75%.

---------- Post added 3rd Feb 2015 at 06:07 PM ----------

Heh...I hear this a lot now. I didn't date a ton, and my ex even less, before we got together. Now that she's been dating more, she's got a different perspective.

We always thought our relationship was a little different cause we were very compatible and we got along so well.

Which is all still true. Well, except for that one lil , teensy, tiny incompatibility. :lol:

 

It seems I got a chinese curse again... Oh well, I knew it :icon_bigg

 

Wait. What if your kids find that quote and know it's from you? You honestly helped produce and raise three beings bc you got married after an unrequited love? Really?? I think you might be over simplifying-- for your own sake? What a cruel thing to imply.