My husband and I have talked most days now for months; in this last month I have really begun to be able to actually hear what he’s saying and understand how he feels about my coming out and how that had caused him to re-evaluate our mutual history together. In our relationship before I came out I was (I now know) emotionally unavailable – a metaphor I’ve come up with is that before this coming out that I was playing on a keyboard with only half the black keys and none of the white keys, now I feel as though I have an entire keyboard of emotions.

I have learnt how lonely my husband has felt, and whilst he has always felt physically supported, that he felt emotionally unsupported. There are other things that he’s shared about how he has felt about my coming out and it history that I now understand.

One thing I have not been able to understand is why he has said that he felt betrayed …. until this weekend. I could not get my head around it. There was some resistance within me towards this, but I just knew that I had to keep trying to understand what he meant. What I’d previously thought he was saying was that the support and friendships that is found when trying to come to terms with myself themselves constituted the betrayal he felt. He’d used the phrase “chatting with men online”, which I felt was a gross simplification and rather missed the point. Indeed, thinking that he resented those relationships and that I might have shared “the intimate secrets of our relationship” with strangers left me confused and a little angry: I needed the support and insight of these people in understanding myself and how I felt and how I could come to terms with what I was and what that actually entailed. I was afraid that in order to be reconciled with my husband, that he would expected me to break off this important source of support and understanding. That was something I do not want to do: I need that sense of identification with others like me.

Besides, these “men online” were friends, not relationship candidates. Indeed, many of them don’t even identify as “men” – a number of them are transgender, having an interest in castration only as a part of their medical transition. My relationship with these various friends is completely non-sexual, even though we are often talking about the fate of our sexual organs. This might often get emotional as we shared our thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears with each other, but this wasn’t “sexting” or having any kind of an affair: how could it be betrayal?

Perhaps it was simply the willingness to keep trying to understand that enabled the penny to drop. I am grateful that my husband was patient and we talked about this a lot on and off over the last couple of months, but especially the last few weeks. The problem wasn’t that I had found friendship, support, and identification, it wasn’t that I’d been connecting emotionally and had intimate discussions with these people. It was that is had these emotional, intimate discussions before I’d ever had an intimate, emotional discussion with my husband. Until recently we had never had a truly intimate and honest conversation: I was incapable of it.

It didn’t help that I was thinking of betrayal in terms of Marcus Brutus or Judas Iscariot.

As I reached understanding I got very emotional. He wasn’t jealous, I had misunderstood how he felt. He really was glad that I had found identification and support and didn’t want me to lose that – it was all about strangers breaking my emotional cherry. He had tried for so long to connect with me and I had never been able to give him what he needed so deeply and deserved, but I had given it to others first.

Once I reached that understanding, my husband and I emotionally connected in a way we have only rarely managed in the past: both physically and emotionally. I think my husband might be a demisexual, which would explain a lot of about my part in how our relationship hasn’t worked and my lack of compensation about the man I have spent the larger part of my life with. Gaining that insight enables us to actually be an us.

There is one more thing to add here about betrayal: in n order to hide from my Dysphoria, indeed to hide from any uncomfortable feelings, I would transfer those feelings onto my husband. He was the one with the problem, his reactions were abnormal. This is gaslighting and is another example of betrayal in a relationship. The cure for a gaslightinger? Complete honesty with themselves. I hope this coming out had cured me.