Straight Talk Blog

By Kristin Kalbli

I’ve never been too fussed about Valentine’s Day. When I was married to a closeted gay man, he wrote me the obligatory card, and maybe we did the occasional obligatory dinner, and maybe I got him a little something too. I don’t really remember. What I do remember, is that none of those Valentine’s Day celebrations turned romantic or sexual, never lead to the good stuff. 

By the time I was divorced and single, I didn’t put too much stock in Valentine’s Day. It typically passed by without me taking much notice. I watched other singletons and divorcées around me lament with hang dog expressions and couldn’t really relate. Thing one, it was a commercial holiday, and I wasn’t much for feeling any kind of way because Hallmark told me it was the day to feel that way. And thing two, I was busy living my single life, free of a bad marriage and a husband who was only going to give me a Hallmark card that was going to end up in the recycling bin a few days later. So, forgive me if my general position on the old V-Day is a robust and hearty “meh.”

It wasn’t that I was cynical. It’s just that I was preoccupied, and Valentine’s Day had never really delivered anything particularly notable in my life. 

This year, I’m having a little re-think.  

Yes, Valentine’s Day is a cheesy commercial holiday. Yes, the chocolates are typically terrible. Yes, it’s impossible to get a dinner reservation late in the game. Yes, it’s hard to watch couples enjoying themselves (or faking enjoying themselves if they were anything like my ex-husband and I). Yes, I will likely be binging comedy specials on Netflix that evening before heading to bed to – ahem – take care of myself. So far as all that remains true, I offer that taking Valentine’s Day too seriously doesn’t really help those of us in the single category.

And yet, it is a day to commemorate love. And what better, more noble thing can we do as human beings, than love? And who among us doesn’t want and even need love? Especially for those of us that have discovered that the love we thought we had was not real. 

Why wouldn’t we long for authentic, intimate, heart connecting love? Loving, and longing for love when it isn’t available, is an innately human thing to do. I have found that it is quite literally painful to not have an outlet for all that love inside of me. We do not long for love to receive it nearly so much as to give it, because as humans, that is what we are here for. And that, my friends, is a reason to celebrate a day just for love.

So, if you are one of those fortunate enough to have someone to exchange love with this Valentine’s Day, or any day of the year, I will raise my martini glass in your honor when the day arrives. And when you get a moment to think of those of us singletons, blow a little of your magic love dust on the rest of us. We’ll still be eating the terrible chocolates.

By Anonymous Husband

I sit here thinking, “is my life over? Why did this have to happen?” I met this person and I thought I was her everything. I fought and she fought so hard to work through the bad times to make it work and stay together. It wasn’t always easy but we did it.  

Now, thirteen years later, I sit here with a problem that can’t be worked through. It doesn’t matter how hard I try or what I do. This situation will not change. There are no more promises “I will change the way I act.”  No more promises “I will work harder.” No more promises “I will do better.”  No more promises that “we can work through it.” I have met the end of the road and it is so hard. I couldn’t have ever imagined this day would come, not like this at least.

It is crazy to spend the first part of your life trying to find the one that completes you in every way. I felt like I was one of the lucky ones to have found that. I found this woman that was everything I wasn’t. She was strong when I was not. She was there when I needed it the most. She was stable when I wasn’t. She loved me when I probably didn’t deserve it.  

I love her for who she was and who she is today. It just hurts because you never want to hear you are not the one and never were. It hurts when you feel that person is the one for you. It hurts when you love someone and they have felt like they had to live a lie for everyone else. It hurts that this life you have built was a lie. It hurts that I cannot do anything to change it. It hurts that I cannot imagine a life without her in the way I want her. It hurts that I feel alone. It hurts that she hurts. It hurts that I feel lost and confused. It hurts that I imagined us growing old together. It hurts that I feel like I was never wanted. It hurts that I feel I will never find a love like this again. It hurts that every good intimate time we had was only one sided. It hurts to worry about her. It hurts that my heart is broken. It hurts because I feel like a fool. It hurts that I have lied to myself for so many years. It hurts that I feel I can never move on. It hurts that I was truly never the one. 

But what probably hurts the most is that I just wasn’t the one for her, ever. I was never the one. I was never the one. I was never the one.  Man it hurts that I was never the one.

By Anonymous

As a psychology major, I learned about the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — but I thought they only affected those experiencing a death or terminal illness. Was I wrong!

Three days before Christmas in 2008 I discovered my husband was gay and had been picking up men online. When I saw the emails between him and other men arranging to meet for sex, I was stunned. This couldn’t be true. Not my husband — the minister’s son, the man I married for life thirty-seven years before.

I immediately descended into denial until I became curious to know more. Soon the evidence was bigger than my ability to deny it. I felt as if I had a hole in my chest where my heart should have been.

Then logic took over. I became a detective and gathered evidence while he was at work. Anger set in and every shred of information I found fueled the inferno inside me. Initially, I could keep the hurt and sadness away by keeping busy. But when my head hit the pillow, my brain let all the feelings rush back in, and they were overwhelming.

Over the next few months, I went through the motions of daily life, pretending to my husband that all was well when I was seeing a counselor and consulting an attorney to help me prepare to ask for a divorce. His behavior was escalating, and I feared if I didn’t get out, I would be sucked into the abyss with him.

Once I confronted my husband, he initially admitted parts of the truth. But later he tried to gaslight me and deny what I knew was true. He moved in with a friend because it was “too hard to be with me.” Later I learned the friend was one of his online hook-ups.

My feelings didn’t matter. I married with an expectation of joint honesty, respect, and trust; in actuality I’d spent over half my life on a one-sided relationship. I’d encouraged his career, giving up any opportunity for a career for myself. When I learned the truth, I felt stupid and gullible.

I never tried to bargain with him. The situation had deteriorated too far to be salvaged. He tried to bargain to have the best of both worlds. By this time, I had shared my situation with my sister and a few close friends, had been seeing a counselor for a few months and retained an attorney. I felt confident enough to refuse his offer of staying married but living apart.

I never sank into the pit of full-blown depression, but I was at a point somewhere between there and sadness. I felt unloved and manipulated. I’d been his “beard,” making him socially acceptable while he led his secret life. Humiliation didn’t begin to describe how it felt to explain the situation to my counselor, my doctor and especially to my family. Our children were grown, and this was supposed to be time for us again. Now there was only me — feeling furious, worthless, and empty. At a point in my life where I’d finally begun to feel good about myself, the rug slipped out from under me, and my universe splintered into pieces. My self-esteem was at an all-time low. I couldn’t focus or concentrate. My favorite pastimes became chores. And because he had found someone else to share his future with, I felt discarded — like a toy once desired then casually tossed aside.

My counselor recommended a local divorce recovery program, and it reintroduced me to the stages of grief. Life as I’d known it had died along with my dreams for the future. The facilitators helped me work through them to emerge as a whole person.

I also had a good glimpse into life’s rearview mirror and realized I’d ignored myself to the point of disappearing.

Through that program, my closest friends, and organizations like OurPath, I learned I wasn’t the shrew my husband declared me to be. I was a loving and giving person. I also discovered I had a backbone. I began to feel empowered and to believe in myself again. After completing the program, I reached a sense of acceptance.

I couldn’t accept my husband’s behavior, but I could accept that our marriage was over, and I had a future as a single person.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” In hindsight, fear was what most consumed my thoughts. How would I manage financially, physically, and emotionally if I divorced my husband? How could I manage as a middle-aged divorcee when every moment was filled with overwhelming dread of the great unknown? Day by day I learned how.

I’ve been divorced now for twelve years. I learned how to go from married to single, from together to alone. I made new friends who understood the pain of betrayal and accepted me wherever I was in the grief process.

I’m a great believer in the power of words, so I will end with these. With time, wounds will heal, but there will be a scar. That scar means you survived.

By Kelly Wilkins

“At least your partner left you for someone of the same gender. That’s got to be better, right?”

“I needed to have gay sex to confirm my sexuality.”

“I knew you wouldn’t let me explore this side of my sexuality.”

“It wasn’t cheating because I was with a partner of the same gender.”

These are all common responses to finding out that your partner was unfaithful to you as part of an LGBT+ relationship outside of your relationship with them. And they can be demoralizing at best, and destructive at worst. It’s not always easy to have a measured, or even calm reply when confronted with one of these gems. 

So let’s get something clear right now. Cheating is cheating is cheating. If you engage in a romantic or sexual relationship outside of your committed relationship without the knowledge and consent of your partner, you’re cheating. The reasons may vary, but for the remainder of this blog post, this is the operating argument.

Cheating has many negative effects on a relationship. Some of the reported negative effects reported for the uninvolved partner are:

Anxiety

Low self-esteem

Self-blame

Stress and depression

Rage and anger

And that’s just for starters. When your partner is cheating on you in a same-gender relationship and you had previously been assured by them that they are straight, it can compound the effects of the negatives on your psyche. It’s hard to know where to turn for support as well. There is still a stigma attached to a partner’s infidelity, which can compound your feelings of low self-esteem and self-blame. 

There are long term negative effects to grapple with as well. Once trust has been broken, it can be impossible to repair in some cases. There will be grieving, and just like the initial pain of discovering infidelity, that can take the form of anger. Your partner may be defensive and unwilling to accept responsibility for their actions, or they may attempt to justify it. Especially in the cases of closeted LGBT+ partners who have engaged in same-gender relationships to test the waters of sex with same-gender partners. You aren’t being homophobic, close-minded or prudish to be hurt and angry when your partner has broken the agreement of fidelity you had with them, and cheating is cheating is cheating. You have a right to your feelings, as well as your grief.

So what do you do when you find out that your partner was unfaithful to you? Despite how cathartic it may be to take the remedies talked about in popular songs, it’s far better for your own mental health to seek out people who will support you while you process and heal from the intense blow that a partner’s infidelity will have. Many therapy practices have programs devoted to recovering from infidelity, either as one-on-one counseling or as part of couples counseling. It’s also important to make sure that you receive any and all medical tests and care you may need after finding out that your partner was unfaithful. At the end of the day, only you can decide if you want to continue as part of a Mixed Orientation Relationship and move past the infidelity, or if you will go your separate ways. Regardless of the path you choose, OurPath is dedicated to helping you get through this difficult time every step of the way.

By Ellen Koretz

Ah, pronouns, those vexatious little words.  English lacks a widely-accepted gender-neutral singular pronoun, although it sure could use one.  

My former spouse – now, there’s a nice, gender-neutral word – has come out as transgender.  I refer to this person as “he” prior to transition, and “she” after. This reflects my perception, and seems to annoy everyone. This person is so different pre-and-post transition that I truly see two different people, one of whom is gone. He is so gone that his name, like Voldemort’s, must not be spoken. It is “dead.” Someone recently challenged my reference to my ex as “she,” asking if that wasn’t “a win” for my ex. My gut feeling was that no, it wasn’t, but I had to stop and think about why. 

The choice of pronouns is meant to indicate how one perceives the other person, hence the sensitivity. What we call someone tells them who we think they are. But we are all familiar with people who have changed what they wish to be called, for all sorts of reasons. Norma Jeane Mortenson, Ralph Lifshitz, and Saloth Sar became, respectively, Marilyn Monroe, Ralph Lauren, and Pol Pot. We accept that. Anyway, it’s pointless to disagree. Their perception of themselves is a matter of belief, which doesn’t respond to argument. If my neighbor sincerely believes he is the Emperor Napoleon, am I going to get anywhere by saying, “C’mon, you’re Joe from down the street!” 

If you have raised a teenager, you know that to maintain your sanity, you pick your battles. If you have a husband who came out as transgender in middle age, you are most likely dealing with a teenager. So, sure, I refer to this person in the present as “she.” This person has a Y chromosome, left the factory with the standard equipment, and maintains an implacable sense of entitlement, but I will not convince her she is a man, and no good will come of trying.

This doesn’t mean that I unquestioningly accept her as a woman, or as a man. It means something more radical. It means that I don’t care what gender she is. It no longer has any impact on me one way or another.

And that is a “win” for me. As long as the conversation is about whether or not I accept her as a woman, she controls the script. I don’t want to talk about what gender she is. I want to talk about the lies she told, the secrets she kept, and the way she cynically used me until she found another partner. I definitely want to talk about the way she rejected our troubled teenaged son and her responsibilities toward him, and the disrespect with which she treated me for the many years she held me as an unwitting hostage in her closet. If I insisted on calling her “he,” I could just be dismissed as a transphobe. Then we could keep it superficial, and on her terms. If I were a transphobe, I would dislike all trans people. But I don’t. Trans people don’t all do bad things, but this one did.

Maybe we will eventually wordsmith our way out of this. It’s hard to predict how language will evolve. “Ms.” is now in general use, but when was the last time you heard someone say “sock it to me?” I hope we find such words, and soon. It would save everyone a lot of trouble and we could move on to talk about more important things.

By Kristin Kalbli

At OurPath, we know that when June rolls around each year, many straight spouses struggle. It’s not news that June is internationally celebrated as LGBT+ Pride month. What began as a righteous and necessary protest march for rights and equality several decades ago, has shifted into a enthusiastic celebration of LGBT+ sexualities and identities. Rainbows are seemingly everywhere. In stores, on clothing, on drink cans, candy wrapping, buses, crosswalks, etc. Sometimes, for straight spouses it can feel like there is no escaping the rainbows.

We have spoken and written plenty about how OurPath has a long history of supporting LGBT+ rights and equality. It’s on the first page of our website. We are not shy about saying it. We understand that with rights and acceptance comes (hopefully) fewer and fewer closets, and that means fewer and fewer closeted marriages, the kinds of mixed orientation marriages many straight spouses were in for years, even decades, without knowledge or consent.

So, we don’t need to talk about how we support LGBT+ rights this June. That goes without saying, it’s in the organization’s DNA. Instead, we need to talk about straight spouses, and the support straight spouses need during Pride month.

Straight spouses need support while watching their former partners move on to live completely different, reportedly authentic lives without them — new lives that make them question the authenticity of their marriages, new lives that make them question if they were living a lie, new lives that make them question if they were ever truly loved by their closeted spouses. It can be hard to see pictures of your ex-wife at a pride parade, smiling at the camera with your children and her new partner – especially when you know her claim that her new life is her authentic life means that her old life with you was, by default, inauthentic.

Straight spouses need support while grieving the loss of their families, family homes, family traditions, family histories and time with children. Disclosure and discovery bring with them the knowledge that those family histories are not what straight spouses thought or believed. They herald a new normal, often of shared custody, divided households, and new traditions that can be difficult to envision. In can be hard to see a steady stream of Pride posts and not feel that these celebrations come at a cost, that cost being your family as you knew it.

Straight spouses need support while trying to make sense of the lies, deflection, gaslighting, infidelity and other behaviors that are often (though not always) part of protecting closeted identities. It can be hard to smile at a rainbow flag when you are still reeling from finding Grindr on your husband’s phone. It can be hard to cheer on the LGBT+ community at the precise moment you learn that you are in a mixed orientation marriage, whether that’s by disclosure or discovery.

Straight spouses need support as they question their reality, their own judgment and their own history. When straight spouses discover the life they were living was not true, they often lose their trust in themselves and others. They can begin to second guess and doubt themselves, and it can take a long time to build that trust back. It’s hard to celebrate that “love is love” at a time when you aren’t sure you’re ever going to be able to love again.

These feelings are messy, complicated, and hard. That does not mean they are bigoted or hateful. After all, closets are messy, complicated, and hard. Mixed Orientation Marriages are messy, complicated, and hard. Straight spouses have a right to feel and process all the emotions (from grief to anger and beyond) that accompany messy, complicated and hard disclosures or discoveries, and they have a right to support, to tell their stories, and to heal in their own time. And they have a right to struggle with Pride month. They have a right to feel messy, complicated and “some kind of way,” during June.

It’s ok to feel all those feelings. It’s ok to see the celebrations and rainbows and parades and feel sad, or confused, or even angry. It’s ok to feel like collateral damage in someone else’s war with themselves. It’s ok to feel like you were run over as your spouse busted out of the closet door with a new boyfriend.

It’s even ok to really, really dislike rainbows for awhile.

By Kristin Kalbli

The character Ted Lasso is, in my opinion, a delightful pop sage of our times, and one of his most impactful platitudes is undoubtedly, “be curious, not judgmental.” Observing that he had been misjudged his whole life, he noticed that if his detractors and bullies had merely been curious about him, they would have asked him questions — questions that would have led to mutual understanding, and maybe even compassion.

This June — this Pride Month — when the attention is so enthusiastically focused on the LGBT community, I want to make a tiny plea regarding the wives of husbands who come out as transgender: spare just a moment to be curious about their experiences, their stories, and their knowledge, instead of judgmental.

Because their stories need to be heard, and because the judgement they are facing out there in the world, even in the rawest moments of the shock of initial disclosure, when they aren’t even sure what is happening with their spouses, or what the situation requires, is staggering. The judgement casually tossed their way before they’ve had a chance to register what this will mean for their spouses, their families and themselves; before they can even ask themselves to what degree they can be supportive, stay in the marriage, or need to leave it; before they’ve even had a chance to sit down and ask themselves if they can possibly conceive of themselves as a lesbian, is unjustified, misguided and frankly, callous.

This is a heated moment in the discourse around transgender identities, and if anyone is caught right in the middle, it is straight wives whose husbands come out as trans women, and their children.

As a Support Contact for OurPath and the host of the OurVoices Podcast, I hear their stories every day, and I promise you, they are struggling with an emotional and phycological leviathan almost no one can fathom unless you’ve lived it.

So, let’s be curious and start by asking who are these women whose spouses are coming out as trans? First thing to note: these women are from every possible political and religious bent, from conservative Christians to liberal atheists. One woman told me, “My kids have been at Pride parades since they were in utero.” That still didn’t prepare her for her spouse coming out as a trans woman. That’s something all these women have in common: nothing prepared them for this.

Next, let’s ask, are they always women whose husbands come out as trans women?

The answer is no, OurPath supports a teeny, tiny handful of men (as in you can count them on less than one hand) whose wives have come out as trans men.

Are they always straight people?

Also no. We have supported a teeny, tiny handful of lesbian, bisexual and queer women whose spouses come out as trans, because yes, this happens to them too, and they need support as well — support that is not always available in traditional LGBT spaces (per their report).

(From here I’ll proceed by referring to straight wives because they are the fastest growing population of people we support).

Do these marriages always end? Some do, some don’t. Some women find they can weather their spouse’s transition, incorporate a spouse’s trans identity into their lives, even celebrate it, and genuinely feel their spouse’s transition was a growth opportunity for the entire family. Other women do not, and this is not some kind of failure on their part. Sometimes the psychological turmoil of the spouse’s transition is so intense as to be unendurable, and for the welfare of the wife and children, the marriage must end. (We must be clear that transition is self-evidently emotionally and psychologically turbulent, and it is willfully blind to ignore that the entire family is profoundly impacted, at times in ways so severe they rise to the level of abject harm).

So, let’s be curious about what kind of judgement these wives face, regardless of marriage outcomes: whether they stay in their marriages or leave, it is highly likely they will be judged by someone for making the “wrong” choice. Whether they re-conceive their own sexual orientations and identities or choose not to (as is their right), they may be judged for making the “wrong” choice. They may be judged as not being supportive enough of their spouses, they may be judged for no longer finding a transitioning spouse sexually or romantically attractive, they may be judged as being transphobic or bigoted, depending on how they handle the world rocking news that their husbands, whom they thought they knew, have felt they were women their entire lives.

But if you could read the posts from these women, as I do almost every single day, and you could feel their palpable shock, profound disorientation and lostness as I do, I hope you would feel curious, not judgmental.

If you could read, as I do, their pleas for help in their distress, their desperate seeking of advice, their frantic need for someone to reassure them they will be ok, their kids will be ok, that they will survive the psychological tornado they have just been swept up in, I hope you will be open about her pain in those moments, not judgmental.

When you hear their compassionate intentions to “do the right thing,” to be supportive of their spouses even while their minds are in utter chaos, they haven’t slept in weeks, they just called a doctor for a prescription for anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications, I hope you will ask questions.

When these women’s hearts are heavy at the incremental fading away of their husbands — a complicated, drawn out grief, like a slow bloodletting that unfolds over the weeks, months, years of transition, and never resolves because there is no closure, I hope your first instinct will be empathy.

When you hear the early pleas to hear “success stories” of couples who stayed together, because she is hanging on for dear life hoping to keep their families together, and on the back end hear the amount of self-deprioritizing it is taking her to do that, I hope you will not condemn her. (Counting “success stories” as only those where couples stay together through transition overlooks that any outcome enabling a wife to live according to her own authentic sexuality and vision for her life is a success, whether divorce is involved or not.

If you could listen to their fear as their families’ futures are instantly plunged into an abyss of unknowns, I hope you would not be inclined to judge them.

Instead, be curious when a woman says to you:

“I need help. I have been my spouse’s biggest supporter. I taught her how to wear makeup and shared my clothes with her. I took over parenting so she could focus on her transition with voice lessons, hair removal, and surgeries, etc. I’m effectively a single parent. I’m tired. I have nothing left over for myself.”

“Our 6-year-old daughter is nervous around my spouse when they are dressing as a woman. I try to talk my spouse up to our daughter, but it doesn’t help. What should I do?”

“If he was always a she, was there ever really an us?”

Be curious when a woman tells you:

She’s had to remove all the family photos that depict her spouse as a man; she’s not allowed to talk about memories from the time before transition; she feels like her own memories are forbidden, and even having them is transgressive.

Her spouse’s wig looks unnervingly like her own hair, her bras and dresses are mysteriously missing or misshapen, or there’s a bag of women’s clothing from Goodwill sitting on the kitchen table that she has mixed feelings about.

Her spouse’s transition seems to be happening so fast her head is spinning. Disclosure was only five weeks ago, and now her spouse is on HRT and has appointments for hair removal and facial feminization surgery. She can’t get her bearings.

She feels like the husband she knew has died (but at the same time, has clearly has not died), and that she does not recognize the person who has taken his place. And she misses him so profoundly she aches from it.

She would prefer not to share the honorific “mom” or Mother’s Day, and she’s being told this makes her selfish. She feels she can’t object when a day dedicated to commemorating the sacrifice of her body through nine months of pregnancy and the intensity of childbirth might not be reserved for her.

She is mourning the loss of little things, like her husband’s beard, which she used to love to touch, and which was one of the things she adored most about his face.

She has been asked to live with her spouse as a lesbian and is told she can just decide to change her sexual orientation, like turning the TV on or off.

She tells you sex with her spouse has become a minefield; she is tiptoeing in the bedroom lest she trigger her spouse’s dysphoria, she is asked to take on a masculine role during sex (which she may or may not be comfortable with), or she witnesses new sexual behaviors in her spouse that are anathema to her own arousal and pleasure.

When she whispers all of this to you because she doesn’t know who is going to call her transphobic, or a bigot, simply for responding (inevitably imperfectly) to an incomprehensible family transition not of her own making and which she did not see coming.

I have listened to the stories of these women for five years now. My husband was only gay and emotionally and psychologically recovering from being his closet door, and clawing my way back to a stable sense of reality still took years.

Imagine, just imagine, the upside-down world these women are living in (because most of us have no idea), and be curious, not judgmental.

And then, maybe, find compassion.