Up-date. This coming Friday, tomorrow, will be the second anniversary of my wife's coming out to herself and myself as a lesbian. I continue alone in therapy. I try to fill my life with other interests, activities. But there's still a great big hole where a sex-life isn't. I repeat daily a mantra: 'peace and plenitude'.

As someone has said, these words are just labels. But what lies behind them? My wife said, 'I'm bi-sexual...no, I'm a lesbian'. And the fact is that she now has no desire, for me, or for another woman. That's where we're at. So she's at peace, and I am not. One early thought that helped me was: 'she's still the woman you've always loved, but she's trusted you enough to share with you her deepest darkest secret'.

Our experience of Imago therapy has been inconclusive. It's a help for 'normal, straight couples', but seems (to me) to have little to say for MOMs like ours, or about how to handle TGT. But there's one exercise that I am finding a help: 'Visualization of love. One minute, three times a day. Close your eyes, take several deep breaths, and visualize your partner. Refine the image until you see your partner as a whole, spiritual being who has been wounded in ways you now know about. Hold this image in your mind and imagine that your love is healing your partner's wounds. Now visualize the energy of love that you are sending to your partner coming back to you and healing your wounds.'

My wife has said that she wished we could go back to pre-coming-out. But we can’t and the truth IS better than untruth.

A part-answer is to try to live fully in the present, and really focus and savour all the good little things. I cherish friends and friendship more, the few who know, the many more who don’t.

My therapist (I continue in therapy alone) tries to help me to accept that any changes will be slow and take a long time. I need to talk more with him about ‘future thoughts’. He tells me that we none of us know what the future holds (true!), that the chances of us dying together are slim... But doesn’t this open the door to simply terrible thoughts of suicide or wishing that our partner would have an accident? Simple ways that ‘fate’ could take the pain of choices and living out of our hands? ... Is he trying to give me some more hope? Is it important to have hope? I’ve been feeling that my only hope is to give up any hopes of change in my wife and in our relationship and work on change in me, moving from resignation to real acceptance.

But still dream and long for a passionate loving relationship. .. With a partner who desires me...