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The New Mixed Marriage: When One Partner is
Gay
When we think of a “mixed marriage,” we
typically imagine two individuals of different
races or religions. But the mixed-orientation
marriage—with one straight spouse and one
who’s gay or lesbian—is just as real,
though far more likely to operate underground. This
long-shrouded partnership burst into public view in
August 2004, when New Jersey Governor James
McGreevey went on national TV to come out as a "gay
American," while his wife, Dina, stood stock-still
by his side, her mouth arranged in a frozen smile.
More recently, bestselling author Terry McMillan
(How Stella Got Her Groove Back) publicly denounced
her husband, Jonathan Plummer, for carrying on
clandestine affairs with male lovers. Suddenly,
America was buzzing about the "horror" and
"tragedy" of straight and gay individuals united by
marriage.
Let me be clear at the outset: I’m not
against mixed-orientation marriages per se. They
can, and do, work well for some couples. What I
don’t support are mixed-marriages that are
steeped in secrecy, which is how these
relationships too commonly operate.
Living a Lie
During my first appointment with Eric, he told
me that he’d had some homosexual experiences
and wasn’t sure whether he was gay, bisexual,
or a sex addict. The manager of a major export
company, 48-year-old Eric had been married to his
wife, Ann, for 25 years, and the couple had a
teenage son and daughter. But even before he’d
gotten married, Eric admitted, he’d had
frequent and elaborate sexual fantasies about
men.
When he was 21 years old, a college therapist
told him what he badly wanted to hear: that his
urges were simply sexual perversions that would
pass. The therapist further advised him not to act
on these "perversions," but to go forth and lead a
healthy heterosexual life. Deeply relieved, Eric
decided to marry Ann, whom he’d dated during
his senior year of college, and to keep his
homoerotism to himself.
At first, Eric felt he pulled it off pretty
well. He loved his wife and enjoyed sex with her,
though he often used images of men to stay aroused
and reach orgasm. For a number of years, he
didn’t act on his homosexual urges, so he
didn’t feel bad about them. Occasionally,
he’d masturbate to porn, but he was careful to
throw the magazines out afterward. Overall,
Eric’s lack of romantic feelings for other men
convinced him that his urges were "simply" sexual,
not part of full-fledged gay identity. He told
himself he was "heterosexual with a bit of
kink."
Then, several years into the marriage, the
couple bought a home computer, and Eric’s
delusions quickly began to unravel. Secretly, he
began surfing gay-porn sites and entering chat
rooms. Before long, he found himself meeting men
for anonymous sexual encounters. "But all this
time, I loved Ann and believed in monogamy, so I
felt horribly guilty for cheating," he told me.
One night, as he surfed the web, he stumbled
upon an internet club expressly for married gay men
who wanted monogamy with another man without
leaving their wives. He immediately joined the
group, and soon afterward met Harris, who lived in
a nearby city and was also married. They
“clicked” online, met soon afterward, and
agreed that they’d found the perfect
arrangement. They told their wives they’d met
at a business conference and discovered that they
both enjoyed fly fishing, which gave them the
excuse to spend whole weekends alone together, for
enthusiastic sex and—for Eric, at
least—deepening intimacy.
But their idyll was short-lived, for Harris soon
announced that he wanted to have sex with other
men. Eric was devastated. He plunged into a
depression so black that Ann couldn’t help but
notice. Finally, sleepless and distraught, he
called me.
After listening to his story, I pulled no
punches. "You’re not living with integrity," I
told him.
He exploded. "This from a gay therapist? For a
response like that, I could have called Dr.
Laura!"
I assured him that I didn’t necessarily
disapprove of his having an intimate relationship
with a man, even though he was married. "The issue
is that you’re keeping secrets, deceiving your
wife, and aren’t being congruent with
yourself." I said. "If you both had an open
relationship, with informed consent on her side,
that would be different."
"You have no idea what my life is like!" Eric
shouted. "You’ve never had a wife and kids you
loved, and because of it, faced giving up someone
you’re mad about." He started crying. "Maybe
you’re not the right therapist for me," he
said between sobs. "I need someone to support me
and help me make this work."
"Make what work?" I inquired.
"Having a relationship with both my wife and my
boyfriend. I don’t want to lose either of
them."
I gently told Eric that if he wanted someone to
approve his living a lie with his wife and himself,
he was correct—I wasn’t the right
therapist for him. "Until you get honest with
yourself and your wife," I said, "I can’t
support your belief that having sex with someone
outside of marriage is okay." Even more important,
I told him, "Until you act from a place of
integrity, I don’t think you’ll feel any
happier or more whole than you are right now."
If Eric wasn’t prepared to tell his wife, I
said, there was another viable option—to stay
married and make a commitment to never again act on
his homosexual urges. I made very clear that my
perspective on this was different from
practitioners of Reparative Therapy (RT), who tell
gay people that sexual reorientation is possible
and, indeed, highly advisable.
I believe that’s nonsense. However, I do
believe that people who self-identify as
homosexual, but don’t wish to come out as gay,
can choose to create a heterosexual lifestyle.
But Eric wasn’t open to this option,
either. At the end of the session he left quickly,
mumbling over his shoulder that he’d call if
he wanted to reschedule. I figured there was a good
chance I’d never hear from him again. But a
month later, he called, sounding desperate. His
depression and anxiety had worsened. "I gotta tell
her," he said.
Coming Out
When a gay person comes out to his or her
straight spouse, the couple is likely to embark on
a roller-coaster ride of emotional stages that
often encompass humiliation, revenge, renewed hope,
rage, and, finally, resolution. While each couple
is unique, these stages can serve as a rough road
map for therapists trying to help mixed-orientation
couples make sense of their feelings, communicate
honestly, and, ultimately, make informed, healthy
decisions about their future.
When Eric told Ann that he was homosexual, she
was stunned and horrified. "Did you marry me just
to have kids?" she railed. "Were you just using me
all along?" When he then admitted that he’d
been having an affair with Harris, her hurt and
horror turned to cold fury. Blaming him for ruining
her life, she ordered him out of the house and
threatened to tell their two teenage children and
their families of origin. She also planned to see a
divorce lawyer to get full custody of the kids.
"You do realize," she hissed, "that no judge would
let a homosexual even have visitation rights!"
Beneath Ann’s rage was a deep sense of
humiliation. "What kind of a person was she to
choose a homosexual husband?" she wondered. Eric,
in turn, felt humiliated by Ann’s accusatory
response, which only reinforced a lifetime of shame
about his essential "wrongness." I explained to
Eric that Ann was trying to shame him because of
the humiliation she felt, but that he needed to
take her threats of reprisal seriously. At my
suggestion, he asked her to join him for a therapy
session, and she reluctantly agreed.
Before they came in, Ann sent me a long e-mail
detailing everything she knew about Eric’s
dysfunctional childhood, neurotic personality
traits, inadequate fathering, problematic work and
sleep habits, and more. This wasn’t unusual.
Typically, when spouses learn that their partner is
gay; their first response is to focus on their
partner’s failings.
As the joint session got underway, Ann was quick
to let me know that she didn’t trust me. "Why
would a gay therapist be interested in helping us
decide whether to stay together?" she demanded. She
wasn’t sure she wanted to stay with Eric, she
said, but she wanted to keep the possibility open.
Her concerns made sense to me, and I explained my
perspective on mixed-orientation marriages. "If you
both want it to work, then so do I," I assured
her.
For most of that first session, I listened to,
and validated, Ann’s flood of thoughts and
feelings. Both Ann and Eric wept, insisting that
they wanted to stay together but weren’t sure
it was possible.
I then appealed to Ann’s sense of
integrity. If she wanted to remain married, it
needed be a conscious choice free of shame and
darkness. But Ann was unwilling to look at her
contribution to the issues in the marriage. Spouses
in all marriages—gay or straight—choose
partners, in part, to meet certain unconscious
needs. I tried to explain to Ann that straight
individuals rarely marry gay people accidentally.
Either they have sexual issues themselves or they
need emotional distance from their partners. Ann
didn’t want to hear any of this. Instead, she
projected all of their problems as a couple onto
Eric.
I spent our next several meetings trying to
facilitate clear, open communication between them.
What did each of them want? Ann made it clear that
she couldn’t tolerate Eric’s having a
relationship with both her and Harris. "You’ll
have to choose," she told him. But soon afterward,
Harris made the choice for Eric by breaking off
with him. Eric was crushed, although his
boyfriend’s decision also clarified for Eric
what he wanted—or at least what he thought he
wanted. Now that he’d lost Harris, he
couldn’t face the possibility of losing Ann,
too. He apologized for hurting her, and told her he
wanted to stay married. "I love you, and I promise
to stay faithful," he said.
The Honeymoon
This new pledge of fidelity initiated the next
stage of the coming-out process for Eric and Ann as
a couple: a kind of honeymoon period of renewed
hope and mutual appreciation. Because Eric truly
loved Ann, and because he’d empathized with
her pain, she began to feel she’d been
reunited with the man she married. Eric, for his
part, was profoundly grateful that Ann was willing
to take him back. "She’s a saint!" he told me,
his voice edged with awe.
Shortly after they reunited, Ann stopped coming
to see me. She also refused to see another
therapist or attend a support group for straight
partners married to gay partners. But Eric
continued on in therapy. Before long, he
acknowledged that he’d begun to feel restless
and dissatisfied. He loved Ann and his kids; there
was no question about that. But with no homosexual
outlet, his life felt flat and empty.
Eric’s growing dissatisfaction initiated
the next stage of the couple’s process, when
they become aware of the limits of the possible.
While still hurt, Ann was genuinely happy to have
Eric back. But, the absence of a man’s
emotional and sexual companionship weighed
increasingly heavily on him. Increasingly
depressed, he found himself surfing internet porn
sites once again, and drifting into chat rooms.
Before long, he was telephoning men and meeting
them for sex—and, he hoped, for love.
Late one night, Ann caught Eric making
arrangements on line to hook up with a new man.
After an explosive fight, they returned to my
office together. "I love you," he told her in that
session, "but I have to be who I am. I want to stay
married to you and have affairs with men." I still
remember my sense of foreboding when Ann, looking
strained and pale, agreed to his terms. This type
of arrangement can sometimes work out, but only
when the straight spouse is willing to take a long,
close look at herself. So far, I hadn’t seen
any willingness on Ann’s part to do that. I
strongly recommended she get some individual
therapy, but she assured me, "I can handle this on
my own."
Eric continued to meet men, but now told Ann the
truth about his plans. Between dates, he’d
often sit in their driveway for hours talking on
his cell phone with guys he’d met online. From
Eric’s vantage point, Ann seemed to be
adjusting pretty well to their "new marriage." Then
one night Eric returned home from a date to
discover that Ann had told their son and daughter
that their father was gay. He was stunned and
furious. "How dare you tell them without my
permission," he raged, "and without letting me be
part of the process!
"What was I supposed to do?" Ann countered
bitterly. "You’re out all hours meeting guys,
and I’m left here worrying sick you’ll be
killed!"
Back into therapy they came.
Ann stubbornly held to her position that
she’d told the kids only because she was
worried out of her mind, not because she was
furious at Eric. Firmly, I told them that I
believed that neither one of them was behaving
either with respect to themselves or their
relationship. As far as I could tell, I said, Ann
wanted a full-time, monogamous
husband—sexually and emotionally. Eric wanted
a boyfriend as well as a wife who was reasonably
happy with the arrangement. Their aims were
incompatible.
For the next few sessions, I worked on
encouraging both of them to examine and identify
their authentic relationship needs. Within a few
weeks, Eric decided to come out as a gay
man—in his words, to live "as the person
I’ve been all along." Ann, for her part,
realized that it was impossible to make the
marriage work. They decided to divorce.
Getting Real
When I work with people in mixed-orientation
marriages like Eric and Ann’s, my goal is
neither to help them to stay married or to get
divorced. Instead, it’s to help partners come
back into integrity with themselves and each other.
It’s truly up to the couple, not to me, to
discover what’s right for them.
That said, I tend to start from a place of hope
for the relationship. Unless one partner definitely
wants out of the marriage, I start by asking a
couple how their marriage can continue. I work with
each partner on what he or she really wants.
I realize that many therapists disapprove of a
gay husband and straight wife staying together
under any circumstances.
Many believe that such an "arrangement" is a
clear sign of an intimacy disorder. Some might urge
the couple to consider divorce to allow both
parties to move on with their lives. Other
clinicians might advise the gay husband to remain
the sexually faithful partner he promised to be on
his wedding day. I once held this belief
myself—that anything less than monogamy
betrayed the relationship. Now I’m open to the
various arrangements that couples adopt.
The principal reason I’ve changed my mind
it that I’ve now sat with many couples
who’ve struggled long and hard over a divorce
or separation when, in the end, that wasn’t at
all what they wanted. So I’ve come to accept
that there are a number of instances in which
responsible nonmonogamy between partners is a
viable option. One such instance is when the couple
is older, has invested emotionally, financially,
and psychologically in each other, and want to be
together in their later years. Another is when the
couple has become best friends, and the marriage is
sacred to them. A third is when the man is
emotionally heterosexual and physically
homosexual.
The idea here isn’t to change the
orientation of the gay spouse. That’s
impossible. Rather, it’s to accept the couple
as they are and honor what they want.
In doing this kind of work, taking a thorough
history on both partners is essential. While Ann
refused to participate, I was able to do some
effective family-of-origin work with Eric. He grew
up in a family that demanded obedience, and
therefore Eric learned early on to get his needs
met underground. I helped him see that his
depression stemmed, in part, from his inability to
openly make decisions for himself and allow himself
to experience the consequences of those decisions.
Gradually, I helped him feel safe enough to do
this.
Ann still hasn’t gotten help. She remains
angry at Eric for "ruining her life." This outcome
isn’t the norm: many gay and straight spouses
who divorce ultimately become friends. While Eric
wants friendship, particularly for his
children’s sake, Ann has made it clear
she’s not interested. Meanwhile, Eric has done
his best to talk with his teenage kids about who he
is, why he’s made the decisions he has, and
how much he loves them. At this point, they’re
more aligned with their mother.
In the meantime, Eric has met a man with whom he
wants to spend the rest of his life. He continues
to regularly visit his children, but doesn’t
talk about his gay life or bring his partner
around, at their request. I hope that, eventually,
the children will develop a separate relationship
with Eric and accept his life as a gay man with a
new partner, just as they would if their parents
had divorced and Eric had married another
woman.
It’s often hard for me to sit with
mixed-orientation couples, since I get in touch
with my anger at living in a society that shames
gays and lesbians into role-playing
heterosexuality. If gays were treated with respect
and empathy to begin with, much personal suffering
and chaos could be spared.
As comedian Jason Stuart says, "I wish you
straight people would let us gay people get
married. If you did, we’d stop marrying
you!"
©2009, Joe Kort
Related: Issues,
Books
Psychotherapist
Joe Kort, MA, MSW, has been in practice since 1985.
He specializes in Gay Affirmative Psychotherapy as
well as IMAGO Relationship Therapy, which is a
specific program involving communication exercises
designed for couples to enhance their relationship
and for singles to learn relationship skills. He
also specializes in sexual addiction, childhood
sexual, physical and emotional abuse, depression
and anxiety. He offers workshops for couples and
singles. He runs a gay men's group therapy and a
men's sexuality group therapy for straight, bi and
gay men who are struggling with specific sexual
issues. His therapy services are for gays and
lesbians as well as heterosexuals. His articles and
columns have appeared in The Detroit Free
Press, Between the Lines Newspaper for
Gays and Lesbians, The Detroit News, The
Oakland Press, The Royal Oak Mirror, and
other publications. Besides providing therapy for
individuals and couples, he conducts a number of
groups and workshops for gay men. Now an adjunct
professor teaching Gay and Lesbian Studies at Wayne
State University's School of Social Work, he is
doing more writing and workshops on a national
level. He is the author of 10
Smart Things Gay Men can do to Improve Their
Lives and
10
Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Find Real
Love.
www.joekort.com
or E-Mail
*
Gaydar
(gay'.dahr, n.): (1) The
ability that lets gays and lesbians identify one
other. (2) This column--where non-gay readers can
improve their gaydar, learning more about gay men's
psychology and social lives. Also, (3) a regular
feature where gay readers can discover the many
questions and hassles their straight
counterparts--and themselves--must face!
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