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My husband told me he had something he wanted to tell me after dinner.
"Why can't you just tell me now?" I asked.
"Because I just want to wait," he said.
I had a bad feeling.
"So what is it?" I asked the minute the table was cleared.
"Here's the thing," he said, and then he let a few beats pass without talking. I could tell he was nervous. "I need for you to know that I have never been exclusively heterosexual." He paused. "I need to be able to explore that part of me more."
"What do you mean?" I asked. I was filled with anxiety. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
It was 1990, and my husband and I were in our mid-30s. We had been together for almost 14 years. I thought we had a great marriage. We talked and laughed and traveled, and shared a love of music and books and food and nature. He was a great dad to our daughters, who were 2 and 5 at the time. He satisfied me intellectually, emotionally, and physically. I never had a reason to question his sexuality.
"I'm sorry I never had the courage to tell you this before," he said.
He told me he felt he had no choice but to keep his desires hidden, growing up in the machismo world of Miami's Little Havana in the 60s. He thought he was gay until he was 23 — until he met me. He had never had unsafe sex, he assured me, but he also had not been faithful.
I was surprised I wasn't mad at him. I know my rage would have been infernal had he told me had slept with other women. But this felt different. This felt like a dark secret he had carried with shame for over 20 years. I just felt sad for him — and for me.
At first, we weren't sure we would have to split up. We still loved each other and enjoyed spending time together, including in bed. I joined a support group for straight people married to gay or bisexual spouses. It turned out I was not alone.
I sought out academic journals and read everything I could related to bisexual people and marriage. I wanted to know our prognosis. Not good. Studies showed that the couples who tended to make it were those who knew the full picture when they first got together. We weren't in that category.
I wondered what an open marriage would feel like. I viewed myself as an open-minded person, but I had a hunch my husband's nonmonogamy would be too painful for me. Could I handle him going on vacation without me? Not coming home at night? I was doubtful. We decided to play it by ear. We'd see how things progressed and then reassess.
But really, nothing progressed. We worked, we took care of the kids, and we continued to live as we had before, he told me, as though nothing had changed. But everything had changed.
Almost exactly one year later, it became clear that clinging to the status quo would not work. I knew I had two choices, and both were excruciating: stay with my husband knowing I would always have to share him, or end my marriage and be alone. If I left, my new world might be bleak and lonely, but at least it would hold the possibility of some future joy. At 35, I was still young. I wanted to find a relationship where I would feel like enough. I didn't want to compete with someone else. I wanted to be the only one.
We both came to this realization simultaneously. We sat together on the couch one dismal night. We didn't even have to say anything. I realized I could not flourish in this union, and he realized he could not live his life fully with me by his side. We held each other and cried.
I remember the last week we lived together before he moved out. There should be a name for this strange period. A Divorceymoon, maybe. A time when instead of starting to build your life together, you must begin to take it apart. Separating the books, photos, and posters was the easy part. Far harder was cutting up the fabric of our shared life. Soon, I would stop seeing him when he came home from work. Soon, I would wake up alone in the morning. Soon, the marriage would be over.
The first few weeks of starting a life apart were more painful than I expected. The house was so quiet when the kids were with him, and I was always happy when they came back. I felt like I had not understood true loneliness until then. To have a full family one day, and the next day, to be alone.
The separation continued at a gradual pace. We still spent time together as a family, going out to eat or to the playground with the kids. We went camping on the Cape. Once, we even traveled to Spain together. And then, a few months later, he met someone. Soon we were spending less time with each other, and I missed him terribly. But then, a few months after that, I met someone too. We had now become two separate families.
Years passed, and relationships came and went for both of us. We rarely met each other's love interests. They rarely joined us at our shared meals. They didn't feel like part of the joint family we still had together.
But then my ex met his big love. And two years later, so did I.
I guess it shouldn't have surprised me that I liked my ex's new boyfriend and that he liked mine — and that the two boyfriends liked each other. We all seemed to have the same sense of humor and spent a lot of time laughing, and often had dinner at each other's houses. Usually, I'm not a big fan of socializing with other couples. It often feels unbalanced because I rarely like both spouses. But this didn't feel like that. This felt like family.
It's now been more than 20 years that the four of us have been hanging out together, sometimes every week; sometimes more. Recently our gatherings have gotten much larger. I've picked up a stepdaughter along the way, so now we are often joined by our three daughters, three of their spouses, and three little grandkids. Last year I had to buy a bigger table and four sets of benches.
These days, the grandkids hold center stage at the table. Once the food is cleared, we'll play a round of Junior Mad Libs which will make everyone shriek with laughter. Then later, my husband and my ex will pull out their guitars and everyone will join in for a raucous round of Wheels on the Bus. Though there's not a specific name for what we are to each other, the way there are for relationships like "daughter-in-law" or "uncle," the term "family" still fits — perhaps even better than it did before.
