My jailbird lover’s totally betrayed me
DEAR BEL,
WE ARE a gay couple — together for 21 years — and my partner unexpectedly went to prison in August. It was a great shock, but he has just been released.
We don’t actually live together but I have been staying in his home since August as we share a beautiful cat.
While in prison he asked me to do various tasks (eBay, bank, etc.) for him using his computer. But a couple of weeks ago, before he came out of prison, I discovered he has a ‘friend’ who he has been speaking to about things in our private life. It turns out this has been going on for four years, as I discovered when I spoke to my partner about it.
He has shared our most private details, which are our own business and not anyone else’s. This socalled ‘friend’ has tried to turn him against me (but didn’t succeed), saying nasty, dreadful things about me and my home, which are totally untrue.
I have never met him nor do I wish to. As well as
that, I discovered my partner starting working as an escort in September of last year — charging for sex.
I am absolutely devastated to say the least. He has been bragging to his ‘friend’ about how many clients he has had. In a million years I would not have dreamt that he would do such a thing.
It makes me feel sick to think he has slept with many other men in the bed that is ours.
He is totally in the dark that I know about all this. I don’t want to lose him. Should I tell him that I know or not?
BRIAN
YOU give no indication of your ages. But my instinct is telling me you are the elder, and as hopelessly addicted to your partner now as you were when you first met. I could have written ‘in love’, but often these days the emotion that’s been called ‘love’ for centuries seems to me more like a terrible addiction for which there is no help. I think that when women write to me about their appalling husbands then end their emails with the information that they ‘still love’ the man who is their destruction.
And I think it now, reading your email. It makes no difference whether you are gay or straight, you are locked into a helpless dependency on a partner who will (on the basis of this evidence) surely continue to lie and cheat, yet whom you do not want to ‘lose’. oh, if only you could ‘lose’ your complicit victimhood.
Yes, an unwillingness to leave a long relationship can be due to fear of the unknown and of loneliness; starting again when you are older can seem truly terrifying. That I really do understand. Yet is it really more scary than staying with somebody you do not actually know and who treats you with neither love nor respect. Then seeing out the remainder of your days feeling humiliated and unloved?
When I write things like that, some readers sound off at me for being ‘harsh’ (see today’s ‘And Finally’, right) in stating what is an obvious truth.
But I’m sorry — I agree with Shakespeare’s Hamlet when he tells his weak mother: ‘I must be cruel only to be kind.’
I think you should tell this man that you know all about his sideline as an escort, and that you find it both hurtful and disgusting that he had sex with strangers in the bed where you have lain in blissful ignorance that your long-term partner has turned out to be such a lying sleazebag.
Tell him that his betrayal of intimate confidences to that ‘friend’ was bad enough, but now he has betrayed you in every possible way — and enough is enough. Then ask him what he wishes to do, given that you can never see him in the same way again.
You could suggest you both seek couple counselling at Relate, but I doubt very much he would agree.
If he says he wants your relationship to continue, then say you must lay down rules — and be clear and firm about what you expect of him.
Honesty and fidelity would be a good start. If he says he doesn’t care what you think, then I suggest you will know yourself whether sharing custody of a lovely cat is worth making the rest of your life bitterly unhappy.