Coming Out Late in Life and Divorces
Breaking the Silence: Redefining Marriage Hurts Women Like Me - and Our Children.
This is a tragic situation that happens far too often. One partner in the marriage is in the closet, and they don't come to terms with their sexual identity until the marriage has existed for a while. Families are broken because of this. Throughout this entire article I kept thinking one thing: If people were made to feel more comfortable with sexual orientation, if people were welcomed with open arms when they discovered who they are instead of being told to hide and that it's just a phase, maybe people would feel more comfortable opening up and coming to terms with who they are sooner so situations like this wouldn't happen.
Although the wife believed her husband found a "new" identity, the truth is he was coming to terms with an identity he tried to suppress for a while. It wasn't something he decided to do because it was fun or convenient. It was something he came to terms with and couldn't lie about anymore. If he had had the ability to be open about it earlier in life, perhaps their marriage would have never existed in the first place, and the wife would not be in this terrible situation.
There was a point in time where I completely denied who I was. For a long time I told myself it was a phase. Then I told myself I could just ignore it. I was willing to force myself into a marriage with a member of the opposite sex, to someone I had no sexual attraction toward, because I was afraid and I didn't want to disappoint anyone. When I came to terms with who I was there was already a dramatic shift in the social beliefs in America, so there were far more people willing to welcome me with open arms. To an older generation, coming out is MUCH more difficult. There are fewer older people open to differing sexual orientations and a greater risk of losing everyone close to you. Is it any wonder things like this progress so far until the closeted partner can't go on living a lie? Eventually you just can't do it anymore, and sadly there will be people caught in the fire the longer the lie is allowed to fester.
For a good portion of this essay I felt really bad about the woman whose husband left her. He was honestly really shitty about it. He filed for primary custody of the children, he put his entire family in the limelight, and he was unwilling to compromise. There's no denying that the husband's general attitude was that of selfishness and arrogance. As the article went on though, the wife kept talking about how much she lost because of her husband and demanded that he should have given up everything -- his happiness, his identity, his sanity -- for the sake of a broken marriage. While I agree that marriage is an important vow to not take lightly or throw away casually, their particular marriage was dead. No amount of counseling could have changed the husband. At best their marriage would have been amicable but loveless, tied together for the sake of the children and so the wife wouldn't feel bad. At worst, it could have turned outright ugly. The husband could hold resentment for not being able to be honest with himself after years of hiding, and he could have taken it out on the wife and his children for being forced to continue on with a farce. The husband was a real jerk about it all and he shouldn't have been given as much as he was. Choices have consequences, and if he were a nicer person he would have seen how much he was hurting the people he claimed to love by grabbing for power. The wife should have seen how much better her life would have been without him, she could have found someone who is actually attracted to her and shares her values.
It's clear that, if the husband is leading such a sexualized lifestyle (as described in the article), that his young children should not be around that. To live in what is essentially a gay commune where sexual conduct, prostitutes, and other such stuff is flashed in the kids' faces could be detrimental to the young children's psyches, as anything of that nature can be scarring to children regardless of sexual orientation of the parents. The courts should be privy to this and the case should be reexamined. It's also important to note that this is one experience from one woman. Not all people who come out of the closet late in life act this way, and if they do, they don't have children around.
The wife worries about her children not developing "proper" identities or sexuality because of her children not having access to both parents who can teach the kids properly. The children will learn and mold their own identities, as they would in any home, whether it's a single parent home, same sex parent home, foster home, etc. The kids may not turn out exactly how she wants, but they need to find their own way.
If we were all more open about sexuality and let our children know it's ok to be who they are, whether they are straight, bi, gay, transgender, or what have you, maybe shitty situations like this would be less prevalent. If people didn't have to hide to make other people happy or to be accepted into their various cliques, maybe we'd have fewer weeping ex-spouses and broken families. People need a safe environment in which to express their sexual and personal identites, to experiment and explore themselves. This is one shitty situation, and it should not be the deciding factor in the gay marriage debate. We need to be more open and less restrictive to our growing generations so the mistakes of the past are not repeated.