My always polite and very-high-functioning drunk husband was fucking around for the first fifteen years of our marriage. The other women were “unhappily married co-workers” who needed discretion. At the time, I thought our sex life was actually fairly normal.
Things came to a head when I learned about a two-year affair he’d been having. I kicked him out. He quit drinking and, because our kids were young, I took him back. He has maintained his sobriety for thirty years. But he became a turtle: he hid in a shell, abandoned his friends, refused to voice opinions or make decisions. He wouldn’t even choose a restaurant or TV show. Our sex life came to a halt after the discovery of the affair and since I took him back he’s avoided intimacy—physical or emotional—with me or anyone else. Our marriage became completely transactional: I was management, he was labor. We’ve been in a basically sexless marriage for the last 25 years.
Why didn’t I leave? That’s a complicated story, but it has much to do with our two adult children, both of whom have serious medical conditions that required us to create a big nest egg. The husband has been to thousands of AA meetings over the years and seen a dozen therapists, alone and together. The only thing that has changed—and this is a recent change— s that he’s finally willing to talk, but only about himself. But there are no childhood traumas or traumas of any kind that he can recount. Why did sobriety turn him into a monk? He either doesn’t know or won’t say. I’m curious what your take is.
Vibes Only Marriage
Your husband was a high-functioning, philandering drunk for the first fifteen years—careful to cheat only with unhappily married women who would (in theory) keep his secret—and he’s been an emotionally-inert monk for the last thirty. So, you limped along, doing what needed doing, for forty-five years, most of them sexless.
To make your marriage bearable, VOM, you came up with an explanation: your husband was who he was—and your marriage became what it is (management, labor)—because your husband had experienced some significant trauma in childhood. But when your husband finally opened up to you about his past—after all these years and all of those AA meetings and all them therapists—there wasn’t some flashy traumatic event in his past that made him and everything else make sense. No rapey priests, no abusive parents, no alien abductions.
No significant trauma… unless you count the trauma he inflicted on you and himself and your kids with his drinking, VOM, which doesn’t seem insignificant to me.
Maybe after the chaos and guilt and broken promises of his drinking years, he didn’t know how—or didn’t have the will—to be a human being, much less be a husband. So, your husband buried himself in silence and simplicity and left you to carry the emotional load of making all the decisions. And it worked, right? To a certain extent? You got the kids raised and built that nest egg together. He stayed sober and steady. And here you are.
So now what?
It’s too late to remake your marriage—that ship sailed long ago—and at forty-five years, VOM, it may be too late to end your marriage. So, you can either make peace with what this relationship has been (and the long-simmering, slow-build trauma it has inflicted on you) and live the rest of your life with the man you’ve built a life alongside but not with. Or you can give yourself permission to want more. Even if that “more” is just a you let him go without leaving—a solo chapter where you allow yourself to choose what to watch on TV without allowing your husband’s apathy register with you.
And if listening to him talk about himself isn’t giving you the answer and/or closure you hoped it would, VOM, you don’t have to listen to him talk about himself. He’s got therapists for that.
When my cousin was about three years old—my cousin was assigned female at birth—they told everyone they were a boy. My family laughed this off and told them they were not a boy. My cousin stayed consistent on their boyhood until they were about seven. They wore boys’ clothes and did not like being called a girl. We’re from a Catholic family in Montana, but ultimately mostly liberal. My family, especially my grandparents, have struggled with supporting our gay relatives, but have always tried. I am ten years older than this cousin, so I was thirteen when this began to play out.
My cousin, who had been a pretty loud little kid, became a reserved bigger kid. There were other things going on with their parents, but I’ve always worried that they became so introverted because they’re trans and have been forced to live as a cis woman for the lack of support. I’ve thought a lot over the years about whether or not I should try to talk to them about their identity, but we’ve ultimately never been that close. I just read Dylan Mulvaney’s memoir and thought about how painful it was for her to have told her mom that she was a girl when she was four, but not get to live as a woman for another twenty years. I don’t want this to happen to my cousin, who will turn 21 this year. I think about a possible future where they come out and feel that they were never supported. Do I wait until, or if, that ever happens? Or do I try sooner? I’m working on being supportive generally, and reaching out to build our relationship outside of family dinners over the holidays.
Conflicted Over Unstated Support Involving Nibling
For the record: Some assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB) kids who insist they’re boys and dress like boys grow up to be trans men. But some don’t. Some grow up to be cis women—often lesbians—who just happened to be tomboys when they were kids. And #NotAllTrans men were tomboys… and #NotAllCisWomen were girly girls… and gender identity and gender expression are two different things… and this shit is complicated… and I need a drink.
There are two competing and contradictory risks here: the risk of doing nothing, which could leave your cousin feeling unsupported if they are trans and closeted and struggling, and the risk of jumping in, which involves making assumptions that could offend your cousin and/or open old wounds if they’re not trans). If your cousin is still figuring things out—or if they’ve already figured things but aren’t ready to share the news (they’re trans) or if there isn’t any news to share (because they’re cis)—asking the dread direct question (which I often endorse) is highly likely to backfire in a case like this.
Relatives who’d made homophobic jokes around me didn’t start saying supportive things when they began to suspect I was gay. They just got quiet. If they had asked me if I was gay before I was ready to come out, I would’ve panicked and denied it and probably remained closeted for a lot longer. What I needed—what they could’ve done when they began to suspect I was gay—was say something positive about gay people to other relatives when I was around.
Signaling to your cousin that you’re in their corner—assuming they’re in a corner—is the best way forward and it won’t be hard to do. Trans and queer issues are very much in the news, thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks. If you think it can wait, you can express your disapproval of those attacks to the whole family at your next family dinner; if you don’t think it can wait—if you think your cousin might be in crisis—you can express your disapproval on the family group chat.
P.S. You could also tell your cousin you’re gonna be passing through their college town on a road trip—they don’t need to know that they’re the reason you’re going on this road trip—and take them out to dinner. If they want to open up, they will. If they don’t, they won’t.
Read the rest of this week’s column here! And this week on the Lovecast: Yikes! Hear the unpleasant tale of the woman who shut her boyfriend’s son’s dogs in a room for so long, that they did what dogs do when shut in a room all day. Oh, and as she was cleaning the mess, she saw that the 20-year-old son had a sex toy. Goodness.
On the Magnum, should you be stockpiling poppers? Dan brings on our favorite poppers expert, Adam Zmith, author of Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures. He explains why gay men use them, a bit of their history, and what to do now that they’re in the crosshairs of JFK Jr’s FDA. LISTEN HERE!
