Bonnie Kaye's Straight Talk (23 page)

Since then I bought you book “Straight Wives, Shattered Lives” and it truly changed my life. The testimonials followed by your thoughtful and insightful observations and affirmations expressed all my feelings. Even my most personal and private emotions and fears were addressed - where I felt alienated I now felt a part of a group. Misery does indeed love company!

I must admit that I get frustrated or maybe just plain jealous when I read about women that meet a straight man and fall in love and therefore move on. I wish that could be my story but raising two young children alone is all consuming and leaves no room for taking on searching for a man. I also have to admit that I made terrible choices when my husband left me and flung myself into the arms of creepy straight men, as we women who only know gay men don’t know how to navigate with straight men.

I learned the hard way that attention and flirtation from a straight man may fill the void that rejection from a gay husband created. But you can get used up and spit out very easily while lacking the confidence and experience to see that they only want sex and manipulate women to get it. Therefore once again, I found myself feeling rejected and lonely. Although I am relieved to hear that there are women who had gay husbands that find new healthy love with a straight man I want to share my message to the rest that haven’t that they must be careful not to sell themselves short.

If any woman who has just found out that her husband is gay reads this I want to encourage them to avoid sexual experiences until they are not fragile. I believe women like us are desperate to prove that we can be attractive and sexual. We lack confidence as we have been so broken by the terrible realization that we were lied to and have wasted time on fake love/sex.

But being used doesn’t help a woman to heal - it only creates more pain. And most importantly - integrity is the one thing woman like us share in that WE while were believing in the marriage, our gay husbands were cheating and lying to us. Therefore we should never lower ourselves to their level where we trade integrity for cheap useless sexual encounters.

Thanks for your support,

Trish

Trish’s letter definitely saddened me because it brought back so many of those painful memories about the horrible feelings that I suffered with for so many years following the end of my marriage. So let me give you my take on this.

After a marriage breaks up and the woman knows or suspects that her husband is gay, there are two roads that are the most traveled. The first road is celibacy; the second road is promiscuity. There doesn’t seem to be much in between for most women. We either find ourselves unable and unwilling to trust our own instincts again and hibernate, or have the need to make ourselves feel “desirable” which drives us over the borderline. I’ve seen it go both ways and there’s no way to predict this ahead of time. Trust me—I make no judgments at all either way.

I went the way of the first road—celibacy. I was walking down that road for 11-- yes eleven--years following the breakup of my marriage. And guess what? I was perfectly fine with it. Well let me backtrack—I did have one sexual encounter after six of those years, and it was a disaster. That sent me back into my world of safety for another five years.

After the breakup of my marriage, my sexual esteem was at an all time low. Ironically, I had been very sexually active prior to that marriage. I was married to a straight man at least once or twice before! And I had a string of men over the years because I was always a romantic in love with love. How could one man have affected me so badly to send me into sexual hibernation? Believing that I was a sexual failure did just that. I knew that I didn’t make my husband gay, but just living with him and feeling the sexual rejection and humiliation were enough to make me feel that no other man would want me ever again. And he kept telling me that throughout our years together. “No other man will ever love you as much as I do.”

It’s funny how that word “love” just became another four letter word to me. In time, I found it just as offensive as other four letter curse words. Over the period of our marriage, it had the same impact—it would make me ill just to hear it. How could someone “love” me and constantly berate me and talk to me with contempt? How could someone make me feel so inadequate as a wife, mother, and lover? How could someone who “loves” me weaken me into a heap of jelly with no spine left to barely stand up for fear of being knocked down verbally? There’s was never physical violence, but we all know only too well how those “invisible bruises” last much longer than the black and blue ones. And they are inflicted more often and push—or shall I say penetrate--your most vulnerable emotional buttons.

When my marriage ended, I was nowhere ready to be with a man. My ex kept reminding me how my weight would turn off any man like it had done for him. After all, hadn’t our sex life been reduced to nothingness because I had gained weight and was no longer worthy of being a sex partner? So now that my gay husband was out of the picture, why would a straight man want me?

The FEAR OF SEXUAL FAILURE was an overwhelming emotion that stayed in my head in those early days, months, and years. And so I learned how to suppress my hormones. I focused on rebuilding me, my life with the children, and getting an education. I became a super achiever and started to rebuild my badly beaten down selfesteem. Back then, I believed that this was enough to make me feel good about life. I had family and friends and I was a single mother. I was happy. I kept very busy going to school so I could have a future for my kids. Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, life goes on, brah.

I am not going to lie to you—for many years I felt no sense of loneliness, but rather a sense of freedom and independence. I had never really been manless, because I always equated manless = unworthiness. And believe me, I wasn’t justifying my life—I was truly happy. I learned to LOVE MYSELF again and TRUST myself again. Those emotions take a long time to rediscover.

Let me not leave out learning to trust my judgment again was a key factor in allow myself to trust a man again. Some of you have been married 10, 20, 30, and even 40 years to a man who has hidden his true identity. Knowing this destroys our own sense of being able to make decisions, especially about men. We keep asking ourselves how we could have been so blind…stupid…misled. We start to wonder what else happened in our lives that was illusion, delusion, and smoked mirrors.

I think that almost all women who are in recovery start to suffer from what I call “gaynoia,” or the fear that every man we meet is gay. I hear it constantly. When you discover that you have a gay man, every man after that is suspect for a long time. Sometimes years. After all, our husbands didn’t “appear” gay and they were. So what do we know about gay? As we say in our support group, “All men are gay until proven straight!” When we start to recover our sense of judgment again, we realize that there are many men out there who are straight and possible soul mates. But that takes time too.

For me, it took eleven years before I was ready to find love again. My body and mind started to want it. And once I was ready, I fell in love again. On that road of getting my soul mate to fall in love with me (which took a year-and-a-half of relentless pursuing), I dated and dated and dated and dated. I had lost a lot of weight, started looking good, and built up the confidence in myself that I lacked throughout most of my adult life due to my weight problem. In that year-and-ahalf, I made up for 11 years of void. I met guys, went out with them, made out with some of them, made love with a few of them, fell for some of them, rejected some of them who cared about me and was rejected by a few whom I wanted. Yep, the rejection hurt, but I just kept moving along to the next guy. It was a learning experience. Some of those experiences were a little scary, but they served as excellent material for my book “ManReaders: A Woman’s Guide to Dysfunctional Men” which was published in 2005.

On the other hand, there are women who are jumping into the beds of men the week that their marriages split up. I see this happen often. “My husband rejected me—but some ‘normal’ man out there is going to want me.” There is no doubt that some normal man is going to want you because you are a woman. Straight men want women, ESPECIALLY FOR SEX. Men are sexual beings. It’s not that easy to find women who are willing, ready, and able to have encounters. So when your radar goes up, they come running.

At first, this is a morale booster. After feeling deflated for so long, it feels wonderful to be “inflated,” even if it’s for a quick sex fix. I am woman, hear my roar! And it does feel good to feel wanted, desired, and sexy. After being pushed away for so long, it’s nice to have someone pull you in. The big bonus here is that you get to have sex with a STRAIGHT MAN—and for many wives of gay men, you can finally understand for the first time how wonderful making love can be.

The problem is, as Trish so beautifully put it, when the night becomes day, we are often left with the feeling of being “used,” and that feeling negates the feeling of the moment when we felt desirable. That’s why I always tell women to give themselves a chance to heal before seeking out worldly pleasures. If you jump into a relationship before you have healed, you are likely to make the same mistake with a different player. This does not mean you will necessarily meet another gay man, but it does mean you will likely meet an unworthy man who will rob you of your self-worth in a different way than your gay husband.

Here is why. After the breakup of the marriage with our gay husbands, most of us suffer in one way or another from LOW SELFESTEEM (LSE). Straight men who are predators have are drawn to women with LSE like sharks are to blood. They sniff and smell. They are pros. They recognize us before we recognize ourselves. And they know how to charm us which doesn’t take much because we’re so desperate for approval and love. The problem is that you haven’t spent enough time learning to love yourself, and until you do, you can never find a happy, healthy, and emotionally nurturing relationship. That’s just the way it is.

I am not here to discourage any woman who wants to take the plunge into bed with a man—rather, I here to warn you about some of the problems in the aftermath. There is no right thing or wrong thing to do during your recovery. You have to take back your life and take whatever steps are necessary to do this. You can make mistakes along the way, and that is human. There is never shame in making a mistake—the shame is not fixing it. Hopefully in time, you will meet your soul mate IF YOU WANT TO MEET HIM. You always read happily after stories in these newsletters, so never give up hope. And if you make the decision to live your life without a man because you are truly happy, that’s fine too. You never have to apologize or explain to anyone.

If you are willing to share an “aftermath” story like Trish that will give women insight as to what to expect, please let me know so I can share it with our other sisters in pain. After being isolated for so many years, we need to now share our lessons so no woman feels alone again.

Trish, I thank you so much for sharing your emotionally moving story. I know that your words will touch our readers.

JUNE 2007

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I consider myself to be one of the most understanding, openminded women when it comes to gay husbands. I consistently state that I understand why gay men marry. I contend that the overwhelming majority of them love their wives when they marry them and hope against hope that their love will negate or erase those sexual feelings for men. I even believe that there are some gay husbands who don’t realize they are gay when they marry because their sexuality has not been clearly defined at a young age. And I even understand those gay men who do know they’re gay but marry anyway really intending to be good husbands, vowing that they will never cheat on their wives even though they can’t keep that promise later on.

I get lots of flack from some women in pain who are sure that their husbands married them to “cover” their identity while having no intentions of being faithful. I truly don’t believe that is the case in almost all of these marriages starting out. I have worked with nearly 1,000 men through the years in helping them in their pursuit of honesty. I am committed to doing this because I know how deep the fear of loss is to a gay man who wants to do the right thing. I know how some of them linger far too long—long after they know and understand that they are not straight—in marriages for fear of losing the known rather than facing the unknown. So many of them are afraid of a world that they have been taught is decadent, unstable, and morally wrong.

Now you know, once again, where I stand on this issue, even if you don’t agree with me. You know I am not in the least homophobic, even if I am sometimes gay husband-phobic. And I admit that I sometimes am. Here’s why.

I don’t understand how a man can marry a woman proclaiming love, and then after he leaves, becomes your enemy. I see this happening time after time after time. It’s not bad enough that your marriage is ending and that you have lost years of your life, but now you have a new enemy—your ex-husband. I hear horror stories—and I mean horror with a capital H. So let’s push the fast backwards button and revisit this.

A gay man marries a woman whom he promises to love and cherish til’ death do they part. A woman puts all her hopes, dreams, and aspirations into the marriage, working her butt off to please the man she loves. In time, she realizes that there can never be enough done to please him, but she still doesn’t understand why. She feels like the failure because the husband can’t be honest or truthful with her. But that doesn’t stop her from trying harder and harder. Nothing works. No amount of tears, therapy, plastic surgery, or weight loss/gain seems to make a difference. Her husband doesn’t desire her and finds 100 reasons why she is at fault for the problems in their marriage—especially the sexual ones.

One day, he decides that he can now accept his homosexuality and tells her the truth. Or sometimes, he is caught by his wife who has now become a better detective than Columbo. The marriage ends because it needs to end, and they both move on separately in life.