My always polite and very high-functioning drunk husband was fucking around for the first 15 years we were together. The other women were “unhappily married co-workers” who needed discretion. He quit drinking and I took him back.
He has maintained his sobriety for 30 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. He avoided any 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 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 — is 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 15 years — careful to cheat only with other unhappily married people who would keep his secret — and he’s been an emotionally-inert monk for the last 30. So, you limped along, doing what needed doing, for 45 years, most of them sexless.
To make your marriage bearable, VOM, you came up with an explanation that made it possible for you to stay: your husband was who he was — and your marriage became what it is — because your husband experienced a significant trauma. 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 — and it turns out there’s no flashy traumatic event that makes everything make sense. No rapey priests, no abusive parents, no anal probes on alien spaceships.
Unless you count the trauma he inflicted on you and himself and your kids and countless others 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 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, and, at 45 years, it may be too late to end your marriage. So, you can either make peace with what this relationship has been and live the rest of your life with the man you’ve built a life beside but not with. Or you can give yourself permission to want more — even if that “more” is just a solo chapter where you can choose what to watch on TV without allowing your husband’s apathy to register with you.
When my cousin was about 3 years old — my cousin was assigned female at birth — they told everyone they were a boy. My family laughed this off. My cousin stayed consistent on their boyhood until they were about 7. My family, especially my grandparents, have struggled with supporting our gay relatives, but have always tried.
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 4, but not get to live as a woman for another 20 years.
I’m aware my guilt over how our family has treated my cousin is not a good enough reason to do anything, but I think about a possible future where they come out and feel they were never supported. Do I wait until, or if, that ever happens? Or do I try sooner?
— Conflicted Over Unstated Support Involving Nibling
When I was a kid, relatives who cracked 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 about being 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 was someone to say something positive about gay people to each other when I was around.
Trans and queer issues are very much in the news, thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks. COUSIN, you can express your disapproval of those attacks to the whole family at your next family dinner or on the family group chat.
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