Editor’s note: Lovefraud received the following story from a reader whom we’ll call “Marilyn20.”
It’s coming up a year ago since the world as I knew it changed.
I had been with my husband for 14 years and married for just under 6. As far as I was aware, he suffered from depression. He didn’t think he needed help, but eventually he went on medication.
He wasn’t easy to live with, but what kind of person would I be if I didn’t support my husband who was depressed?
He had his own business hut told me he hated what he was doing. I helped him find alternative types of income, but spent more time running it than he did.
For 3 years he only earnt enough money to cover his luxuries. The mortgage, food, power, phone and a $50 pocket money was paid out of my income. We were spending more than we earnt.
This time last year his behaviour had deteriorated towards me. I walked on eggshells. We had hardly been intimate over the previous year. It was making me miserable.
He had gone off his meds. I gave him an ultimatum — he needed to seek help and go back on his meds, or we were breaking up.
Later that week he started crying one evening. He said life was stressful for him. I asked if there was something he needed to tell me but couldn’t. He said no.
The next day it all came out. He had cheated on me. He was in love. The person was a transvestite. He didn’t mean for it to happen — it just happened. It snowballed.
His story didn’t make sense. What I ended up finding out was he had joined various dating sites 4 years earlier. One where he called himself translover73. He had a second life. He still does not admit he is bisexual.
He used me for his lifestyle. I was the good wholesome girl to make his life look perfect… there is so much more but I am sure you get the idea.
Emotional incest and enmeshment in narcissistic families
Hi Marilyn,
Needless to say, you have my sympathy for discovering you’ve been deceived for so many years, which must be very painful.
Coincidentally, someone here (Sunnygal perhaps?) recently posted a reference to an article in the British Daily Mail from a doctor’s wife named Alana Kirk who discovered to her shock that her husband was gay. Apparently this was prompted by news about some British TV presenter named Phillip Schofield who recently “came out” as gay. I don’t know what Schofield’s wife thought about this, or whether she knew already, but in Mrs. Kirk’s case it was devastating to feel she’d been “betrayed” all these years. Here’s the article in question, which you may find helpful:
What it feels like when your husband tells you he’s actually gay
However, I will add one thing. I hope your husband is not “actually” personality disordered in addition. Or a “sociopath,” or whatever other labels often get stuck on these troublesome people.
There are so many issues people can have that end up causing pain to others around them, quite apart from those that fall into the category of “cluster B personality disorders.” There are other conditions too that make certain people behave abusively in various ways–some treatable, some not–so for some there ought to be a category called “Abusive Personality Disorder, ‘NOS’ (Not Otherwise Specified.” However, I haen’t heard that your husband, “difficult” as he might be, falls into that category–unless you have evidence to the contrary, that is.
What I’m reading here is that if your husband ended up deceiving you, he was also deceiving himself, all along–about his bisexuality, or whatever odd form of sexuality attracts him to crossdressers and transwomen. (I’ve sometimes wondered why some men go for that–it seems to be an obsession with some–but I’m betting that “bisexuality” covers it perfectly.)
And if you found him “hard to live with,” I imagine that might be because he also found it “hard to live with himself.” It’s got to be awful to live with someone we hate. But if what someone hates is a part of themselves that they’ve never accepted, yet can’t get away from, what must that feel like?
Of course, he could have been prone to depression on top of everything else–or maybe bipolar. Things like that for a bad mix, a kind of “devil’s brew”: problems with sexual orientation (or with gender identity for that matter) exacerbated by everything from emotional instability to conflicts with society. Think Tchaikovsky, or Alan Turing (though he got shafted by the “society” he served), or the high incidence of suicide among transsexuals.
Just the same, this was all your husband’s problem, and “not your job” to fix it–which you never could anyway. Certainly not while he was in denial about his own sexuality. Naturally as you said, ”what kind of person would you be if you didn’t support your husband while he was depressed?” However, you can only go so far with “support,” and you deserve the same advice anyone would give to someone struggling with a psychopath, a narcissist, or whatever:
I hope things are working out for you since this life-shattering revelation. Good luck for the future!
Dear Marilyn,
Just like Straight people, LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) also can have personality disorders.
Think you were used by this man as his “beard,” (a normal woman to hide behind to appear normal in society).
Highly recommend a book about this subject, The Sky Turned Green & The Grass Turned Blue: Diane’s Story (My Personal Journey as the Significant Other town MTF Transsexual). by Diana Kelly.
Also, there is a very compassionate and emotionally safe website called
https://www.TGGuide.com
that is worth checking out.
Yours truly,
Monica