Married, yet alone
When your partner is in the closet.
On her wedding day, Yolanda knew she wasn’t in love, but she wasn’t too worried. There was still time for that. Plus, she was in love with the idea of being married, and so was her groom.
It was a quick decision and a short engagement. John (not his real name) proposed eight weeks after their first date, and they were married 10 months after that.
“Looking back, I knew I wasn’t in love with him, but I was desperate to get married and he looked like a very positive person,” she recalls. “We were both so in love with the idea of marriage, the romance of the marriage, the security, the fact that you’ve arrived.”
“In our circles, marriage was the ultimate, especially for a woman.”
John looked like a good prospect.
“He had a good income. He looked like a very solid believer. And I was naïve enough to think that two Christians who are willing to make it work will make it work, because, you know, divorce isn’t an option.”
The wedding itself was wonderful. After all, Yolanda was 21 years old and already “a spinster” in the eyes of her conservative family and church congregation. Yolanda’s family didn’t believe in post-secondary education for girls and John was a sincere Christian with a good job so what more could she ask for?
Forty years later, she knows what she really wanted was a husband who was straight.
Two years ago, when she was 61, Yolanda’s husband told her he was divorcing her. In addition to the grief of losing the ideal Christian marriage she had been raised to expect, what Yolanda also felt was relief.
Pressure to wed
In 1985, it wasn’t just Yolanda and John who were happy to be getting married. Both sets of parents were also enthusiastic about the young couple.
“My parents were lovely, but they were very old-fashioned,” Yolanda recalls. “They did not believe in careers for women, unless you were going to be a teacher or a nurse, so post-secondary education was just not an option for me.” Yolanda’s grandmother gave each of her granddaughters a sewing machine as a wedding present, but in Yolanda’s case, her grandmother had already given up, giving her the machine on her 21st birthday.
John’s parents – especially his father – were also keen for a quick trip to the altar. “I think he knew, or at least he suspected” his son was gay, Yolanda says now. Her father-in-law was rigid, a rule-follower in his career and in his personal and religious life, and, in the days before gay marriage was even legal in Canada, having a gay son was unthinkable.
Signs of trouble
As a young bride, Yolanda knew very little about sex, but early in her marriage, she suspected something was amiss.
“I could tell he just wasn’t interested in sex, but what did I know?” Books she had read suggested that young men should be eager for sex, but “sometimes books exaggerate.” Yolanda was left feeling that there was something wrong with her, that she was not desirable. John’s lack of interest in her meant that “[she] was not having [her] needs met.”
Around 1988, when John was out of the country on business, a letter from their youth pastor arrived. Yolanda opened it, not even considering it might not have been meant for both of them. In it, their pastor asked how John was coping with his homosexuality, and whether he was avoiding porn and illicit liaisons while travelling on business. The youth pastor was also gay, and the two men were trying to hold each other accountable.
“My entire world shifted, it just rocked me,” Yolanda recalls. “That’s when I really had to rely on God. But God was still there for me, in my relationships with my children, in my life at church.”
The youth pastor went on to give Yolanda a book, explaining that homosexuality was the result of an overbearing parent, but that it could be cured. Focus on the Family, the Christian organization founded by James Dobson in 1977, taught then that gay people could be cured, Yolanda says. “I believed that if I was enough of a woman, he could be cured.” Once again, it was up to Yolanda to make herself more appealing. She committed to being a faithful and supportive wife and prayed her husband would be healed.
Two more children were born and the couple continued to put a brave face on a tough marriage. John was a leader in their church, and the family appeared on Sunday mornings perfectly dressed and coifed. “I was the obedient wife” going through the motions, believing that a miracle could still happen.
But John was struggling too. A decade into their marriage he had a breakdown and ended up hospitalized. He came out to several people in their church at that time, and they too believed he could be cured. “We were all supporting him because Focus on the Family says you can be cured. We thought he could be cured.”
He’s not the only one
On Christmas Eve 2013, when the family was having dinner, Yolanda and John’s youngest son, home from university, announced he was gay.
“My immediate reaction was ‘we love you no matter what’ but I just about died. I thought it was the absolute worst thing that could ever happen,” Yolanda recalls. “I buried my head in the sand for a year, ignoring it, hoping it would go away. But when our son started dating, I knew I was going to have to tell people.”
Her sister sent her some books, including Torn by Justin Lee, and Yolanda began considering a different way of understanding human sexuality and a different Christian response. She could see her son was a faithful Christ-follower, and now the literature was saying this was not something caused by parents and not something that could be cured.
“That’s when it finally hit me, that John’s homosexuality was also not my fault. But it’s also something that is never going to change. That was the tipping point. Relief on one hand, but that I also really wanted this marriage to end.”
The couple stayed together almost 10 more years, partly for financial reasons, but also because of shame, and because of their shared belief that Christians simply do not divorce.
Then, in 2022, John broke down again. Without discussion or consideration of Yolanda’s opinion, John announced he was coming out publicly, was quitting his job, had bought a condo, was moving to another province and wanted a divorce.
Loneliness and grief
The end of her marriage, and the lie that it represented, brought Yolanda a complicated mix of relief and grief. Over the years, she had always acted like the loving wife, and her church friends had been happy to support the charade.
“My friends had some idea that I was unhappy, but they didn’t know the cause. Once, when I tried to talk to my closest friend, she just changed the subject. She didn’t want to know that I was unhappy in my marriage.” But that was what everyone did and believed. “You just stick it out.”
After nearly four decades of marriage, Yolanda felt alone, carrying her husband’s secret and dutifully protecting his image.
“It’s lonely, because you can’t open up to people when so much of your life is a lie,” she says. “But I didn’t think it was my story to share, and I would have been outing him if I talked about it. So, I had to stay in the closet too, to protect him.”
For the last 10 of those years, Yolanda was publicly affirming of her son and his marriage, but that also drove a wedge between her and friends who continue to hold a traditional interpretation of scripture and definition of marriage.
Helping others
After their son’s marriage but before John came out, Yolanda thought her spiritual journey from ultra-conservative theology to a posture of affirmation could help others.
“I heard a distinct message from God, that telling my story would help people,” Yolanda says. She thought it would be as a wayfinder – someone who had been raised – and who had lived within – a traditional Christian understanding of marriage but who had come to see a different path forward. “I thought my friends would want to know how I had come to change my mind,” Yolanda says ruefully. Instead, those friends have drifted away and seemed to be even more entrenched in their traditional biblical interpretation.
Now that her life has undergone even more upheaval, but she is finally free of deception, she hopes the message from God comes true. As many churches, including the Christian Reformed Church, debate the Christian response to human sexuality, Yolanda has a message for pastors, parents, and pew-sitters: “let people be who they are.” And for people who are thinking about their sexual orientation and gender identity: “question things. Make sure what people are teaching you aligns with the overarching theme of the Bible, with God’s love.”
Otherwise, the devastation that is wreaked on the lives of those who are forced to fake it – and on those around them – is too great a toll.
Yolanda also has a message for people like her, who might find themselves in a mixed orientation marriage.
“Get help. Find a counsellor or find someone you can trust, but don’t keep it inside.”
