Should I follow my heart and risk losing everything?

fresh lease of life: new job, new friends, new home, new love. And your health scare intensified an understandably urgent wish to seize the time.

Second is your conviction that you are gay, long suspected but now encouraged by a new friend supportive of your leaving the closet — at whatever cost.

You give no indication of whether this is a platonic relationship or whether you’ve had any sort of sexual engagement. I’m suspecting not.

Both those elements represent the ‘unknown’ — the latter because you have no idea what your life would be like as an openly gay man, nor can you predict how you will feel about the ageing process when you are 60.

All things change and we change with them; such ancient wisdom tells us not to believe the present is a permanent state.

It would cause great distress to your family if you simply walked out of their lives.

A wife loved for 30 years does not deserve that treatment, nor does a cherished family.

The opposites to weigh are the ‘known’ versus the ‘unknown’. You could destroy the whole life you know — and find yourself unhappy in the end. That is to say, more unhappy than if you had stayed.

I don’t think anybody could possibly advise you, because we all have a different attitude to risk; some (like me) prefer the known, others run away to the new — and damn the consequences. Either way, the Greeks were surely right that life is suffering.

I feel desperately sorry for your turmoil and believe you would benefit from counselling. You can find help at counselling directory. org.uk/sexuality.html#sexualityandmentalhealth.

And is there anybody within your church you can talk to about losing faith? Have you confided that part of your angst to your wife? Does she have any inkling that you are unhappy?

You have to start the conversation — and if she rejects your hesitant confidences it might help make up your mind. In my opinion, sympathy, not sex, is essential to happiness.

Naturally cautious, I just beg you not to slam any door behind you until you can see a clearer path ahead.