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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm on the other side of this man whose wife has come out. It hurts.    And for some reason, people think I'm not supposed to hurt.  They think I should be happy because  "it's not me",  and "at least she didn't cheat". All those times she didn't want to sleep with me or complained about what I was doing, weren't really about me.  That's great, right? It doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel great to know that the life you built with someone was a total lie. It doesn't feel great to know that the person you love, never loved you in the way you thougt they did.  But I'm selfish for thinking this way.   I wonder if she just used me to have kids. I'm supposed to be happy she's brave enough to live her truth and find her happiness. Maybe someday I will get there, but right now I resent her a lot and find it hard to be around her except when I have to be because of our kids. Thankfully the kids are young enough that none of this seems to be affecting them.  So great for your friends, OP I hope your friend's husbands are doing better than I am.[/quote]

Do you think she really knew the whole time? And when she started to know, did she fully know right away?
As the wife in this, I can assure you that if she was lying to you, she was also lying to herself, and probably had to over and over again. 
I definitely had to gaslight myself, many times over, while I processed.

Understandable that you don’t feel good about this, of course. You are using a lot of your energy to resent her that you could use elsewhere to try to understand the circumstances that led to what happened and maybe find peace. In other ways, try to hate her less, and instead hate the things that got in the way of her finding this out before getting married.

I’m guessing that like myself, she entered the marriage in good faith and just didn’t know. She also likely did love you on some level and just didn’t know that it was supposed to feel different for her.

Lack of sexual experience, low self confidence, and having seen my parents and family react very negatively to other family members who came out, all got in the way of me figuring things out prior to marriage. [/quote]

Lots of people have those issues or worse and still manage to come out before marrying someone under false pretenses and messing up that person's life. The "things that got in the way", for people who came of age in the 2000s and later, outside of specific religious cultures which push adolescent marriage and where coming out truly does mean and end to life as you know it, include a level of self-deception and lack of self-awareness which are thankfully rare. (And that's the best-case scenario where they truly didn't realize it.) That doesn't mean you're supposed to punish yourself for the rest of your life for it or stay in that marriage, but if you don't realize that your actions caused someone to suffer in significant ways and that their anger is justified, that's really not great. They were lied to and betrayed by their spouse, who in a set of circumstances where most people don't lie to themselves and get involved in these kinds of marriages, made a series of choices to do that. T[/quote]

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