Dear Roe,
My fiance and I are to get married next year and I thought we knew everything about each other. But recently, during a drunken conversation about college flings, he blurted out something that shocked me: he had a brief fling with a gay friend during a post-breakup ordeal. I consider myself a very liberal and open-minded person, and I truly believe love is love, regardless of gender. However, I can’t shake this feeling that I’ve lost attraction to him. I’m into manly men, and this revelation has just completely grossed me out. It’s made me uncomfortable and confused. I feel almost betrayed, even though it happened years before we met and of course there’s nothing wrong with a guy experimenting. But I can’t help feel that it’s redefined him and I don’t think I fancy him any more. I do love him, and calling off the wedding would be an inconvenience. Do you think therapy would help me?
I admit I’m torn here, because on the one hand I think it is very possible and would be beneficial for you to work through your response to this so you can evolve and save a relationship that I presume has been serious and loving for several years. On the other hand, for your fiance’s sake, I would vastly prefer that they not marry someone who judges their past, whose attraction to them is apparently so flippant, and whose main reason for not wanting to cancel the wedding is due to the “inconvenience”. Frankly, they deserve better, and it’s up to you whether you want to rise to the occasion.
This is an opportunity for you to do some self-examination and explore your belief systems, because despite you saying that you’re liberal and open-minded, your very visceral reaction to your fiance having had a fling with a man is showing you that actually, you do have some very limiting, judgmental and homophobic beliefs around gender and sexuality.
I ended my situationship six months ago but I’m still not over him. How do I move on?
Where can my wife and I access porn that is both legal and erotic?
I think I’m in love with my ‘situationship’ but he doesn’t feel the same
‘My brother-in-law wants to move in with us but I don’t think my marriage will survive it’
My language is strong here because your language is strong – you say even the idea of your partner being with a man has “grossed you out”; that you no longer consider him “manly”; and that this knowledge has now “redefined” him in your mind. This is an extreme reaction, and you need to own that and be honest in the underlying attitudes behind that, because it’s easy to support ideals in the abstract.
It feels good to pronounce yourself an open-minded person. But if your actual, real-life response to someone having a same-sex interaction is one of disgust, revulsion, judgment and redefinition, then obviously there is a chasm between the values you espouse publicly and the ones you live privately, and you need to decide which direction you actually want to lean into.
The tragedy here is that it’s likely precisely because you have professed to be so liberal and open-minded that your fiance believed he could trust you with this information about himself. Because you have presented yourself as someone who respects everyone’s expression of gender and sexuality, he felt safe opening up about himself and – as we all do when we open up to the ones we love – was hoping that his honesty and vulnerability would be met with love, respect, acceptance and safety.
You’re at a fork in the road where you get to choose: do you unpack those damaging messages about gender and sexuality and do the work to live up to your ideals, or do you let them steer the rest of your life?
He offered you an opportunity for your love and intimacy to become deeper, more expansive and more knowing as he offered you a previously unseen part of him and to hold it dear. He offered you the chance to be his safe place in a world filled with judgment, and instead you’ve responded with what was likely his greatest fear: judgment, shaming, and the threat of abandonment.
I don’t think this is who you want to be. I know you know where these attitudes have come from. We live in a still sadly homophobic patriarchy where “manliness” is a very limited category, defined by heterosexuality and rigid gender roles. So much of the cultural messaging we received around masculinity tells us that intimacy between men is somehow emasculating, and homophobic attitudes perpetuate the incorrect and deeply damaging idea that same-sex interactions are unnatural, disgusting and shameful. Despite your intentions, you have absorbed and are now perpetuating these attitudes. Now you’re at a fork in the road where you get to choose: do you unpack those messages and do the work to live up to your ideals, or do you let them steer the rest of your life?
Sure, therapy could help, as could a lot of self-reflection, examination and education. Your assertion that you’re open-minded and liberal has let you off the hook for doing the actual work of really exploring your beliefs and addressing them, and it’s time to do that work now. It’s time for a reckoning. What does “manly” actually mean to you? Why does this moment in his past feel like a betrayal, when it has nothing to do with you? What ideas have you inherited about gender and sexuality that might be asking for an overhaul? What’s the gap in your supporting people’s expression of love, sexuality and gender in theory, but not in practice, and what work needs to be done there?
These are questions you should definitely explore and address. But I will also say, your fiance is not your personal social experiment or a tool for your self-improvement. He is a person who deserves love and respect and to be with someone who embraces and adores him, and only you know whether you are willing and able to be that person. Right now, I have my doubts.
Take this time, go to therapy and do the work so you can meet yourself more honestly, so you can ask deeper questions about love, gender, sexuality, identity and attraction, and live in the world in a more open way
You say you love him, but focus on the fact that calling off the wedding would “be an inconvenience”. If you are framing losing this man as an issue of logistics and not of emotion, it seems like you’re already pretty checked out of this relationship. And he doesn’t deserve to have someone half-heartedly go through the motions of committing to a life together just because you don’t want to deal with calls to a florist.
Indeed, your reluctance to call off the wedding is related to your vision of yourself as an open-minded person: you are more preoccupied with how you and your life are perceived by other people rather than living your life truthfully and doing the sometimes uncomfortable, messy work that comes with that.
So yes, do some therapy and do the work. But not so you can avoid the inconvenience of calling off a wedding – which is why you’re going to embrace your fears and pause the wedding for now. Call your vendors and your guests and tell them that you’re changing your date and will update them, but for now you need more time – because you do. You need time to do this work and make these decisions honestly, not out of pressure or fear.
[ We are married, in our 60s and my husband wants to wear women’s clothesOpens in new window ]
Take this time, go to therapy and do the work so you can meet yourself more honestly, so you can ask deeper questions about love, gender, sexuality, identity and attraction, and live in the world in a more open way. Do the work so you can decide – truly and honestly – whether you can love this man the way he deserves to be loved. If you do, let your relationship be one of evolution, curiosity, and unconditional love. If you don’t, let the ending be one of integrity and self-awareness, not avoidance.
I wish both of you the futures and loves you deserve.
