On the private Facebook group, Str8sbook, we were asked, all straight spouses, what The Gay Thing has taught us, what we have learned through this experience. Here are my musings:

• To look beneath the surface. What looks like a perfect couple/family/marriage may hide great pain and suffering. So a great sense of care and compassion for all this hidden burden of pain. It is the invisibility of TGT that is an important part of its poison.

• I am forced to work on myself and my past: the only area that I have some real handle on. So some healing of ancient (childhood) wounds.

• A sense of mystery, of having to accept things that I just don’t understand. To trust that there is still some loving reason and purpose, even if I don’t now see any glimmer of it.

• A simply massive increase in my knowledge and understanding of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, even as I lose the modest sex-life that I used to have!

• I am now a LBGT ally, but not an unconditional or uncritical one. I expect and demand some reciprocal compassion and understanding from them.

• The limitations of God and prayer. Some things do not, cannot change. However much you try. However much you pray. However much you want them to. TGT is one of those things. At least in 99.99% of the time.

• The pain is endless and excruciating. But life goes on. Is it any ever easier? Perhaps, a little. But we straights (we humans?) are stronger than we ever dreamed.

• Very few friends understand, can understand. Our pain is an embarrassment to them, they don’t know what to say.

• The very foundation of our lives, of our being, is shaken. Our judgement, some of the basic, most important, most thought-through choices of our lives now look like a mistake. ‘Does that mean that my whole life is founded on a mistake or a misunderstanding? Or can it still in some way be redeemed?’

• Does our MOM, our Mixed Orientation Marriage, give something to others, despite us? What does it give to both of us? Are we really better together than apart? Yes, at least for now.