Free Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women by Laura Andre Page A

years of age. She listened with rapt attention, jotted down some notes, and when I was through telling her everything, she leaned forward and said to me, with the faintest almost-wink of a smile, as if we shared a delicious and enchanting little secret:
    “Startling, isn’t it?”
    Indeed.
    From there, we dove into my past and inspected my present (I couldn’t do future just yet). For a while I was fixated on figuring out if I had always been gay but just never acted on it, if this dalliance was an isolated incident, or if I had undergone some sort of a mid-life shift. Eventually I realized I could make a case for any of those explanations, but ultimately it didn’t matter if it had taken the train or a town car. It’s arrived, and what am I going to do about it?
    Motivated by the guilt brought on by secret-keeping, my husband wondering why I was so moody, and my lover’s growing discomfort with my being married and closeted, What am I going to do about it? rapidly became How do I tell my husband?
    And so one night after the kids were sound asleep, I turned off the TV, turned to face him, and told him exactly what my anguish and distance had been about. I told him I was really confused because I still loved him, but not in that way , and had no idea what this meant for me or for us. He wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t shocked. He was understanding and kind and supportive, and instead of heading straight to blame and resentment, we talked about how to move forward from here. Was the marriage over? Or was it just redefined? If so, as what? Did we want an open marriage, or a polyamorous arrangement, or a don’t ask/don’t tell policy? Did my questioning mean we needed to file for divorce immediately? Did “sexual fluidity” mean that I had cruised over to the other side and might just as easily cruise back someday? He made it clear that he didn’t want me to deny or stifle my true self, but that he was just as committed to the non-breakup of our family as I was, and asked if it was possible for these things to exist in harmony, and if so, how? He started therapy. He found a straight-spouse support group, went every week, and created his own network of men in the same situation. We had not been physically intimate for a long time anyway; we agreed to stay that way indefinitely. We had been married nearly seventeen years by then—neither of us wanted to do anything impulsive, and both of us wanted to exhaust every possibility before calling it quits, if that was what needed to happen (which we weren’t even sure was the answer).
    Meanwhile, I started comparing—not so much her to him, but my life the way it was presently versus what it would be like with her. I started examining that relationship with a critical eye, and found myself thinking: Do I really want to leave this for that? Was I willing to trade no sex and stability for great sex and instability? She was fun, but not terribly reliable. She was successful and wealthy, but not happy. She was physically attractive, but not spiritually sound. There was a demanding, controlling quality to her that made me feel resentful and rebellious. I didn’t like her all-or-nothing attitude about our relationship and she didn’t like my not coming out more fully, not leaving my marriage faster, or my need for time and space. She was jealous of my business, my dogs, my children, and my husband. She refused to come to my home because of those things; and I was tired of traveling the hour-plus to hers. Eventually we went from feeling like we had our own secret club to feeling like we were speaking different languages.
    The stress and pain of living in secrecy and uncertainty was taking its toll on her and me, our trust, our sanity. When one person is waiting alone on the sidelines tapping her watch and the other has a life so full she feels like she’s going to burst, emotions go horribly awry. Over the course of the year we went from the bliss of new love to the tedium of a