We were married for 15 years ...then he told me he was gay

When Phillip Schofield came out last year, it was hard not to feel for his wife. Here, one couple describe what it’s REALLY like when a husband leaves his marriage for another man

AFTER her 15- year marriage dramatically fell apart, Carolyn Hobdey remembers the ensuing terrible weeks of soul- searching and hunting for clues that will be familiar to many ex-wives.

Was there something she’d missed? Did everyone know about their problems but her? Her grief, anger and pain were all-consuming. ‘I felt as if I was dying from the inside out,’ she recalls. ‘It was the loss of everything. Had David ever loved me? Had it all been a facade?

‘Our wedding. Each anniversary. The heartfelt cards, the letters — I pored over them and looked for clues — were there signs I should have seen? It all rattled around in my head, robbing me of sleep and stealing my sanity. It made the whole of our marriage feel like a lie. I felt like an idiot, I was embarrassed.’

Such sentiments are entirely underby standable for any woman uncovering a long-buried deceit. But it wasn’t an affair David had been concealing: ironically, it was Carolyn who’d strayed, succumbing to a brief, desperate affair with a work colleague after her marriage had slumped into a sexless ‘arrangement’ that had sapped her self esteem.

David’s big confession was that he was

No longer can some wait on the sidelines, hoping for incremental change. In times like this, silence is complicity.

US VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS

gay, and he’d been suppressing it his entire life.

The Hobdeys’ story echoes that of Tv presenter Phillip schofield, 58, who came out as gay last year, having been married to wife stephanie — with whom he has two daughters — since 1993.

schofield also revealed he knew he was gay when he married, but gave one absolute assurance: ‘We will always be a family. That is the one definite, constant, absolute positive thing.’

stephanie, too, went on to confirm that she loved Phillip ‘as much as ever’ and would ‘ still be there, holding his hand in future’, a feeling which resonates with Carolyn, 47, and David today.

In fact, four years after their divorce, Carolyn is contemplating the improbable. ‘Do you know what?’ she says, only half joking. ‘ Perhaps we need to just get married again. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we ended up spending our old age together,’

AS SHE voices the impromptu thought, David laughs in agreement. ‘I feel very much the same,’ he says, revealing that his partner Andy, 54 — with whom he’s been in a relationship for seven years — is ‘ quite envious’ of the warm friendship he sustains with his former wife.

so how has it come to this? How have the Hobdeys attained such a happy equilibrium that they now regard each other as the best of friends, and she has even kept his name?

‘The fact is,’ says David, 58, chief executive of a charity that cares for vulnerable adults, ‘my life is richer for having been married to Carolyn.

‘There were turbulent moments in our relationship but they passed. I’ll never regret having married her and although I’ve started a new phase of my life, I still love Carolyn and I always will.’

of course it hasn’t always been like this. After David’s revelation about his sexuality, Carolyn felt a series of conflicting emotions: first sympathy for him, then hurt and rage.

‘I felt sad for him not feeling able to be honest about who he was,’ she says. ‘I empathised with the burden he must have carried and how wearing it must have been to keep it contained for so long. But then came the pain, which crashed over me in a wave, and anger.

‘David had watched me unravel from the guilt I’d felt about my affair. He’d watched me crucify myself with the blame. He could have said, “Look, I’m gay, and it could be the main reason our marriage isn’t working.” But he didn’t.

‘I felt denied a life I could have otherwise had. I might have tried earlier to have a child with someone who wanted to have a sex life with me. I felt such a sense of injustice.’

flash back to their first meeting in 1998 at a business course: Carolyn, then just 24, was vivacious, bright and physically striking, tall and slender with a river of auburn brown hair. David, then 35 was ‘gentle, kind, considerate and impeccably well-mannered’, his outward seriousness leavened by a mischievous sense of humour.

David insists the attraction, for him, was physical ‘but there were so many other factors: she was full of energy, so articulate and intelligent.’

David, then MD of a medical services business, a high-flyer on a six-figure salary, invited Carolyn, then an HR executive, to lunch.

Their friendship flourished and a few months on they were sleeping together. ‘The sex was good, and plentiful,’ recalls Carolyn. ‘I thought David was the sun, moon and stars. We were smitten and nine months on we were engaged.’

on their wedding day in June 2000, at Hazlewood Castle, a stunning venue in Yorkshire, Carolyn looked radiant in pale gold, beaming with happiness, her handsome bridegroom in traditional morning suit smiling at her side.

When asked if he felt the whole event was a charade, that he knew, as a secretly gay man the marriage was doomed, David is aghast.

‘ oh no!’ he says, ‘ I had no misgivings whatsoever. falling in love with Carolyn wasn’t a lie.

‘But I was concealing part of myself from her — the part that had

I felt denied a life I could otherwise have had. I might have tried earlier for a child with someone who wanted sex — Carolyn

feelings for men, and pushing those thoughts away from myself as well.’

‘Those thoughts’, he says, had been haunting him from his early teens, when, aged 14, he remembers first being attracted to boys. ‘But I can’t say I wasn’t attracted to girls, too. There were so many complicating factors. I grew up in the 1960s — homosexuality was only decriminalised in England in 1967 — and I was brought up to believe same- sex relationships were wrong.’

Raised on a council estate in Hemel Hempstead, Herts, David was bullied mercilessly, between the ages of eight and 15, by his homophobic stepfather: ‘He called me a nancy boy and a sissy because I was reserved, quiet and studious.’

‘I wasn’t flamboyant or effeminate in any way and I can’t remember repressing feelings of homosexuality,’ David continues, ‘But it was something I was aware of; an attraction to men.

‘If I’d told my mum I felt attracted to boys as a child I think she’d have