more REAL stuff from Bonnie Kaye

Inserted from Bonnie Kaye's Lessons I Have Learned
Lesson#3

Although it takes two to make a marriage, when you’re married to a gay man, it only takes one to make it fall apart—namely him. Any other natural failures of straight marriages are not applicable here because your life is a distortion when your husband is gay. Whatever he objects to is through the eyes of a gay man. When he is angry with you, it is because he is frustrated being in a marriage with a straight woman and will look to find fault with YOU rather than face up to his responsibility of being honest. This is not to say you are perfect, but it wouldn’t matter if you were. He would still find fault with you because you are a woman. And a lot of you are almost perfect. That’s because the unhappier he is, the more you try to make him happy, internalizing and personalizing that his unhappiness is your fault. Untrue. He can’t be totally happy or fulfilled living with a woman no matter who the woman is. Accept it. It’s his failure, not yours. And this is not to say that he is a failure as a person. He is just a failure as a husband to a straight woman.


 Debbie's thoughts: So true and no amount of counseling can help or have any real or lasting effect on these marriages because when the husband is hiding his homosexuality from his wife and the counselor, the real issue is never addressed. So true also that they would rather let you and everyone else think that you are the one with the problems. They make you feel like you're going crazy because nothing is real and you rack your brain all the time trying to figure out why your marriage is so hard and makes no sense, then they call you crazy at any display of emotion as a result of the Twilight Zone-like life you live with him. Just a glimpe of the unreal reality of living with a closeted gay man.