Mixed Orientation Marriages (MOM)

There's been a lot of buzz about this topic lately.

I suppose I could list all of the links to the different posts and discussions about it, not sure if I can even keep up and frankly, I don't know what that would accomplish. I tried abstaining from making an opinion about these stories because first I wanted to process what it all meant and if I honestly had a say on the topic at this point in my life.

Turns out maybe I do!!

I think I'm going to summarize my feelings in a couple of sentences (Okay, they ended up being paragraphs--I tried my best). First off, I'm glad that a lot of guys felt comfortable enough to let their future wives know that they were gay. If I had a time machine that is the ONE THING in life I would go back and do-over---keeping something like this to myself and not telling my now ex-wife was huge mistake--granted she said once that had I come out to her when we were dating she wouldn't have married me and that's fair. I admire the women who in-spite of knowing about their guys they still want to marry them--is it faith? is it being naive? is it being a realist? I don't know if they're aware what they're giving up...I suppose only they can answer for themselves and it still is much better to know that one is entering into a Mixed-Orientation Marriage consciously rather than only one party being semi-aware what it all means...

Hell, even being semi-aware, I spent 15 years in one!!


But once the awareness of one spouse being gay is out, there's always the proverbial  rainbow elephant in the room that everyone knows is there as much as they would like to ignore it. Some people have described this as coming out only to drag one's spouse (and potentially other family) into a closet of their own. There's feelings of self-worth, inadequacy, lack of trust, confusion that weigh horribly on two people who are merely trying to have a relationship without knowing why are the square pegs are not fitting in the round holes.

For any of these Mixed Orientation Marriages that claim to be doing alright (maybe 3-4) who knows maybe there's lot of them who are not as vocal and open-- there are at least 20 marriages that I'm personally aware that are either breaking up or didn't make it--and the list grows, the numbers on the Utah gay father's group expands more and more each time and 99% of them came from these kinds of marriages--bottom line, even for someone with poor math skills like me, the odds don't look so good, I hope there's a lesson to be learned from this. Some of these marriages have ended up amicably and some not-so amicably at a great price and suffering from all parties involved (spouses, children, etc).

Of course, I can stand here and write about this now. What do they say, hindsight is always 20/20?

Still knowing what I know now and knowing how I felt and thought back when I was venturing into marriage, reading about club unicorn of these modern days, it would have probably made my decision much more clear that if these guys could do it, heck, I can do it too!!--which could very well be the underlying message coming from these guys and at least it seems to be the meta-message heard by plenty of people out there; sure they say it is THEIR life, THEIR choices and THEIR marriages, but where I think they do a disservice is when they stop short of acknowledging that they're aware of the odds and risks and that all other forms of relationships--not just theirs--is as valid without having to comply with any society or traditions--for those that do, more power to them and God bless them!

Let's face it, relationships are hard even if the person you love has the right body parts--but that may be a posting of its own someday, I think I've said too much already...