Hello everyone, I have been visiting the forum off and on for over a year. A bit of my story is posted elsewhere. Perhaps I posted it in the wrong section but I never got much of a response and also the turmoil in my life prevented me from visiting the website very often. However, for the past couple of weeks I have been logging in almost regularly. Maybe I am mentally preparing myself to take the plunge. My wife and I have very recently started living together once again after living apart for almost 3 years because of studying and work. We have a 5 years old son. I'm trying my best to bond with my son and build some sort of a relationship with my wife... something that might help us both when sh*t hits the fan. Just waiting for my wife to get a little financially stable. There isn't a moment when I catch myself lost in thought and it isn't about coming out and separation/divorce. Even if I am not thinking anything per se the thought is still there in my mind. I have been drawing on the collective experiences of those who have posted here on this forum and it has helped me tremendously in organizing my thoughts and starting to prepare for coming out to my wife and later to my family. Thank you all for sharing your experiences.
You suggest your waiting for the right time when your wife is financially stable. Is that a goal your setting truly for her or is it a way for you to hold off on actually doing what you feel you need to do? You have already lived apart for a substantial period of time it seems, how did that work financially? Also, you do sound removed emotionally from both herself and your son given the distance apart. Do you think she feels the same way towards yourself? If so, what is really holding you back?
Hi, Sooner is better as being apart should be part of your wife's long term life and finacial decisions.
I came out to my wife about a year and a half ago, with no plans for immediate change in our living arrangements unless she demanded it. She's been a stay-at-home mom for years (her choice, not mine), and I'm the main breadwinner, so coming out, moving out and moving on would have had a devastating impact to the family. But I felt that it needed to be on the table so she had some ability to plan for the future. As it happens, she didn't plan and didn't change a thing until I forced the issue, which happened after I met someone by chance who I ended up dating. We're separating now, and I'll probably be moving in with him by the end of the year, but money is definitely a concern. This isn't just about me--there are 3 other people in my family who will be affected by what I do. Telling her you're gay doesn't automatically mean you'll move out and life will change. If finances are rough, she should be able to recognize that she'll have to live with things as they are until they CAN change--or else be aware of the consequences if she pushes the issue. It may be strained--I've been sleeping on the sofa for 6 months and spending a couple nights a week with my boyfriend, and she hates it, but is either sensible or self-centered enough to realize that it beats selling the house at a loss and moving into some little apartment somewhere. But I'm glad I told her, because the full disclosure has been the only thing moving my life in a better direction.
I notice that you say you have "started living together again". What does that mean? Sharing a bed and having sexual relations with her, or just sharing the same living quarters? If you are contemplating separation and divorce, it does seem unwise if you are doing things which could result in a pregnancy and another child, as well as misleading her into thinking you have no such intentions as a divorce. It is, of course, possible to keep your orientation undisclosed for the time being, and move towards official, rather than de facto, separation and divorce. This would have the unfortunate side effect of requiring you to continue to stay in the closet until the divorce is finalized. If you feel you are bursting to come out to her, you should consider that that act may have some pretty major effects on the divorce and custody process with respect to your son, particularly if she has an angry and aggressive response to your announcement based upon the notion that you have deceived her from the start. Maybe you could fill in the blanks and the time-table about your self-realization of your sexuality, so people with similar experiences could chime in with their stories. Did you have same-sex feelings before you were married not that long ago? Did you consider yourself bisexual when you were married and thought you could live out the straight side of your personality with a woman, only to realize later that you were really gay? Did you intentionally deceive her because you wanted a family with children and thought it was the only way you could get one? Are there religious factors in your getting married to a woman? One way or another, all these questions are going to be raised and asked as you go through the process of straightening (no pun intended) your life out, and your "gay lifestyle" while you are going through the divorce process, may very well compromise your efforts for equal treatment by the court in conservative Florida with respect to your son, so you might want to start the wheels turning for a divorce, even if your wife is not "financially stabile" yet, and deal with that transition process as part of the divorce settlement, instead of waiting until some magic stabile day happens UNTIL you can begin to make your sexuality public knowledge.
Please, whatever you do, keep that bond with your son; he needs you. If you and your wife separate, as it seems is inevitable, don't disappear. The rewards to staying involved are many. My kids are the best part of my life. And, they are good to me but I was always good to them.
Thank you everyone for your posts. To fill in the blanks I am pasting a previous post. Please bear in mind all this was a year ago. The facts of how I grew up haven't changed but my circumstances have. I am 29 and have been married for the past 5 years. I was brought up in a conservative south Asian Moslem household. My earliest memories of attraction to the same sex date back to when I was 4 years old. Despite the conservative upbringing, I had always been fine with my sexuality except during some deeply religious phases. But even then I never denied it, just considered it "the cross I had to bear". My first experience with a guy was at 20 and I'd had a pretty good monogamous relationship with my first bf for 3 years but it didn't work out in the end and I ended up giving in to family pressure to get married at 23. Quite early for getting married even by local standards but I didn't see any reason to stall. At that point I had a pretty religious mindset and thought that that would be enough to see me through my married life till I was old and frail and it didn't matter anymore. A few months after my engagement I ended up fooling around with my ex and kept going back for more. I always justified it by telling myself that I wasn't really cheating on my fiance/wife because it wasn't someone new. I was only having sex with someone I'd always had feelings for. This went on for the first year and a half of my marriage. I managed to develop a pretty friendly relationship with my wife and somewhere along the way I fell in love with her. Sex was okay. After the first few times I didn't have any difficulty rising up to the occasion and I learned to go through the motions. Both my wife and I are easygoing people and get along really well with each other. All this while I saw my ex and we would get intimate from time to time but that was getting increasingly uncomfortable and eventually we decided to stop lest we damage our friendship. A year after being married to my wife, our son was born. when he was a year and a few months old I went to the US to study/find work and pretty much lived apart from my wife for 3 years. After resisting temptation for a few months I gave in and had random gay sex, something I did over and over again. During this time I did go back home and one such trip was for a prolonged period. That is when I realized that despite having a good relationship with my wife when we were together, I was incapable of having a long distance relationship. Having experimented with dating men and having sex over the past year I came to the conclusion that I would not be able to give up gay sex for prolonged periods of time. For the better par of the past 6 months I had been debating whether I really was bi or had only convinced myself that I enjoyed having straight sex, albeit much much less than gay sex. I had flings with a few men but I never thought I would ever leave my wife for any of them until a conversation I had with my wife a few months ago when she told me that she had been contemplating a divorce because the long distance issue was really getting to her. This wasn't the first time she had expressed she was unhappy. That killed my desire to nurture our relationship. I have been numb since then. She did clarify her viewpoint later but I couldn't unthink what I had started thinking. I asked myself whether I should come out and end my marriage or stay in the closet and keep denying myself and pretending for the sake of my wife and son and any other children we might have, not to mention keep cheating on my wife. I have decided that I am in fact gay and I can no longer fool myself to the contrary. But the question is whether coming out is worth all the heartache I will cause my wife and myself. After unsuccessfully trying for two months I finally came out to two of my closest friends. They were both very supportive but the conversation quickly turned to what I was going to do about my wife and son. They both advised that given my wife's religious and conservative south asian background getting a divorce on the basis of coming out wouldn't be the best course of action. My (step) mother in Law is a very vindictive woman and I wouldn't put it past her to try and get me in trouble with the authorities as homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment in my country and worse, she would probably fling my sexuality in my son's face every time she was mad at my wife or my son. My son will undoubtedly live with my wife as joint custody is well neigh impossible given the physical distance between my home country and the US. A few days ago I came back to my home country to renew my visa. Once I do my wife and son can apply for their visas and finally start living with me. My friends strongly advised against having her traipse across two continents for nothing especially since her support system is back home and that's where she should be when we do get a divorce. Since coming out right now isn't the best option, especially while I am here, I have been trying to talk to her about how I am unhappy and that our marriage isn't working for me but whenever I bring it up she always says that we can work on it and once we don't have the distance between us things will get better. It breaks my heart to hear her say this. It breaks my heart to see her laugh when I am thinking of causing her so much pain. I do believe things might get better for a time, as she says, and I will get into a rut again but I don't want that. I really don't want to come out when I am 50 and I regret not coming out 21 years ago and wasting all those years of my and my wife's lives. I also think it will get harder for my son to deal with it the older he gets. Right now he barely has a relationship with me. I am in a real fix because I can't just push for a divorce on this trip because I don't exactly have a concrete reason to, short of coming out. I feel disgusted at myself for beating around the bush and hearing my wife say that we can mend our relationship and giving her a false sense of security because I choose to stay quiet. The relationship can be mended but that will not change the fact that I want to live my life with a man and that no matter how deeply I care for my wife I'm not sexually attracted to her. I am trying my best to lay the ground work for a divorce but I feel like the surest and quickest way to end it is to come out to her. But this also is the ugliest and I think the most painful way and I will also be forced out of the closet to all my family as well, dashing any hope of support form my family because they adore my wife. Having spent the last few days observing our son and my wife, I don't want to even suggest taking away our son away from her. Hopefully she wil find comfort in him when we are no longer married and she won't have to go though a divorce without someone to love who loves her back unconditionally. All I can think about is to make this as easy for her as I can. But truthfully I'm not even sure if I have to heart/courage/balls to go through with this.
Hi everyone. Thank you for patiently reading the last post. Fast forward to the present: My wife moved to the US half a year ago. She and I have been living together and trying to get along after the long hiatus. its like getting to know each other right after getting married. All the rough edges without any of the excitement. We manage to get along most of the time. However, now there is barely any intimacy which has been a bone of contention because she wants it and i don't. Living apart "worked" financially while she was in our home country because she lived with family as I was studying initially and couldn't support her. Now that she is in the US she can't legally work because of her visa status. the reason why i want to wait for her to get financially stable is because hopefully in the next few months she might get a job with visa sponsorship of her own. that way a legal separation or divorce will not force her to go back to our home country as she will be able to support herself (with alimony and child support from me). Over the past 6 months I have developed a very strong bond with my son and love him to bits. a fact that is not lost on my wife and further strengthens the case for joint custody. She thinks I am a good father. coming out is also an option now where it wasn't before because over the past 6 months I have gotten to know my wife better and realize that she isn't as homophobic as I thought she was. I don't think she would keep our son from me just because I am gay. I know I am jumping from idea to idea but please don't get me wrong. I am not indifferent towards my wife. I love her. Its just that I am not in love with her. I am not emotionally removed from either my wife or son. I care for them deeply. Perhaps I have let myself go a little numb where my wife is concerned to spare myself some of the hurt that stems from the guilt over how my actions will probably turn her world up-side-down. I also understand that her life decisions are her own to make which is a point in favor of coming out sooner. But if I come out now while she doesn't have a job or friends i don't think there would be much holding her back from getting on the next plane bound home with my son in tow. I did keep my sexual orientation undisclosed because its not only a huge social taboo where I grew up but also punishable by law or getting lynched. Plus i had convinced myself that I was bisexual because I thought breasts (on women) looked okay I had previously talked to an immigration lawyer about seeking asylum on the basis of sexual orientation. I am not going down that route but the lawyer in no way suggested a divorce and joint custody might be a problem for me if I tried coming out later. Perhaps its something I should look into again.
Thank you for this detailed expansion of "your story". You knew you were essentially gay from an early age, and pretty clearly acknowledged this by your relationship with your boyfriend before you married your wife, and your continuation of sexual activities with men after you were married and separated from your wife. That is pretty much hard core gay. If you explain all this to her, something probably is going to hit the fan, and it may be you. You really don't belong with her, you belong with another man. This is inevitably going to mean that you are unlikely to have access to your son unless your wife stays here and is exceptionally considerate of your orientation and wants your son to know you, otherwise she has pretty good grounds for treating you badly in court with all the gay sex going on outside the marriage, which would probably not be treated happily by the conservative courts in Florida. I doubt that you would do any better in the courts in your previous home country given what you have said about the attitude towards homosexuality. Right now your wife is vulnerable and dependent on you while she is here and unable to work, as you have explained. This might be the best time to come out to her and explain WHY things have been happening as they have between the two of you. I can't imagine that she will be very happy to hear any of this, but she will either take off for the home country and support of her family, or decide to stay here with your son and work out an amicable divorce arrangement with you. If she decides to leave, there is not a whole lot you can do about it and that probably means the end of your friendly contact with your son, here or there. Your only hope would seem to be to come clean with her, admit your sexuality, promise your continued financial support of her until she reaches independence and/or a new marriage, your unconditional financial support for your son throughout his childhood if she stays here and works this out with you, and clearly express your love of your son and desire to be a part of his life HERE, with both of them remaining in this country. In other words, come clean, give her a logical explanation of the fault being yours not hers, throw yourself on her mercy with a carrot being the help to get her established here and able to support herself, and hope for the best outcome for you, given the less than honorable stuff you have done for the last few years. Then see what happens. Maybe it will work out OK for you, maybe it will not, but it may be your best shot at getting as much of what you want as possible given the past and present circumstances of your actions. Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the best possible outcome. Being gay is not easy, particularly in a country hostile to gays; a lot of screwed up marriages result. I hope you can unscrew yours up, so that all of you can enjoy the rest of your lives with someone who can make you happy.
I just read this thread again after over a year. Thank you for you replies! Over the past year I had been reading the posts on EC sporadically but more frequently over the past month and I have realized I am ready to actually come out or get the ball rolling at any rate. I had been thinking of writing something to at least try to organize thoughts because I think there is a lot that I'm not allowing myself to think about/acknowledge and subconsciously blocking myself from thinking. Maybe that is why I have at times avoided getting on EC. A lot has changed over the past year. For starters my career is on track and my wife is working as well so there is more money coming in. My wife has, over the past year, realized that wild horses couldn't drag her back to our home country so I am less fearful of her packing her bags and leaving with our son. She has gotten used to the freedom and independence here. Since she actually has a job I am not very concerned with how she will cover the expenses of living here. Of course I will augment her income but I can't run two household on my own. So now the only thing that is left is encouraging her to go see a therapist and to think about how I can start the conversation and what to expect. I want her to see a therapist beforehand because she has been battling depression to the extent of suicidal ideation for a very long time and has codependence issues. Right now she is doing better as far as depression goes but the slightest thing pushes her off the edge and brings on anxiety attacks. Thank you for reading. Yossarian thanks for your reply. I never replied back but I agree with what you wrote.
