Website owner:  James Miller

How well do we ever really get to know a person?

   How well does one really get to know another person?  Even 
   after living with a mate for years how well do we really know 
   them?  How sure are we of them?  The program "20/20" last night 
   featured a piece about support groups for straight people who 
   have suddenly discovered, to their great shock and horror, that 
   their mates were gay.  Typically they were middle-aged people 
   who had been married to their spouses for many years, often had 
   several children with them, had had good marriages, and loved 
   their mates dearly.  Then suddenly the mate "finds himself", 
   discovers his "true feelings", falls in  love with a person of 
   his own sex, or some such thing, and reveals his deep, dark 
   secret to his mate.  The people in the support group likened 
   the trauma and hurt to the death of a loved one or a divorce 
   from someone you have lived with for a long time.  They said 
   they often felt a stigma, felt they couldn't talk about the 
   problem to others.  They blamed themselves, wondered what was 
   deficient in themselves, what they had done wrong, to drive 
   their mate to a person of his own sex.  The most frequent 
   question from others was, "But how could you have lived with 
   that person all those years and never even suspected he was 
   gay?  They were attached to their mate by love and all the 
   bonds of years of memories but there was no way to hold them.  
   Some accepted the idea of continuing in a platonic friendship 
   with their mate while he lived with his gay lover.

   Jan 1994