My Life as a Beard

“I didn’t fucking use you!” my soon-to-be-ex-husband screamed over the phone to me.

I’d hit a nerve. Which is I suppose what happens when you confront your husband of eighteen years and partner of twenty about the fact that it was exactly what he’d been doing for all those years.

I was his wife, but mostly I was his stage manager and ambulatory homophobia meat-sheild, protecting him from the hate thrown his way constantly, from his hateful, bigoted parents and brother, his even worse other relations, his co-workers, and our small town Central KY community, the same one that tried to beat Shaun King to death a few years after I’d graduated from high school and had started dating my ex-husband.

I was nineteen when we got married, and thirty-seven when we divorced. With retrospect comes clarity, and I can look back now and see that things were already set up to fail before we’d even started. Most of the time now I’m pretty sure it was my own dogged insistence on holding things together and his fear of coming out in the face of his family’s scorn and hatred. Even before we’d gotten engaged, we were living in a sexless relationship, and the subtle and not-so-subtle comments about how difficult I was to tolerate, let alone love had started. I was also a US size 14 when we were dating, and the comments on my fatness were cruel seasoning in my life with him. When a combination of family history, PCOS, depression and untreated hypothyroidism kicked in during my 20s and 30s and my weight went up, up, up, he would use it as a way to distance himself from me further. No one wants to fuck a fat woman, he’d say.

We’d fight about it, my tears and explaining what his rejection of me sexually was doing to me leading him to get upset, and then expect me to comfort him and reassure him. After all, isn’t that what he kept me for?

During one of our fights, he told me if I weren’t reading so many romance novels, I wouldn’t want sex all the time and he wouldn’t have to be the bad guy in turning me down. So I stopped reading romance novels. I didn’t watch television or movies with explicit sex scenes, because what was the point? No matter my desire for him, he would just turn me down and tell me it was my fault. Why subject myself to that? It hurt too much. Way, way, way too much.

In the meantime, I took any show of consideration, of affection as declarations that he really did love me. It didn’t matter that the psychological and emotional abuse made me suicidal several times, or that he would then cry and rage about it, expecting me to pick up both our pieces and put them back together.

He told me no one else would ever love me. I believed him. He told me that he really DID want to have sex with me sometimes, it’s just, with our debt and him working such long hours, he didn’t have the energy.

He lied about the gay porn in his browser history, claiming that he’d been looking for straight porn. That it belonged to some other person. Back then, so early on in the marriage, I MADE myself believe him, because the alternative was to face something neither of us could admit to. In later years, I just stopped looking at his computer at all, because that hurt too much, too. He said he loved me. Why couldn’t I just take him at his word? Why did I have to make things difficult?

Eventually, the power balance in our marriage changed a bit. I moved up in my career, he fell back in his with job losses. I took over paying the bulk of our household expenses, but we still had debt and money problems. All of those were my fault, too, he said. I kept trying harder to make things better, to make things right. To have the marriage that everyone believed we had from the way things looked on the outside. I worked hard at THAT, too, even going so far as buying my own anniversary gifts, which he would then use against me.

Then his father died. He turned 40. Life was moving forward, and here we were, locked in his closet with me doing my best to call it love and mostly succeeding. I knew his father’s death would free us as a family, from his father’s overbearing, obnoxious presence, his bellowing and hatred and casually tossed racial and homophobic slurs. I just didn’t know HOW.

When the end came, it was brutal. He sat me down one weekend night and explained to me that he no longer loved me, and that it was all my fault. That he’d fallen out of love and wanted a divorce. I knew things were bad between us, but I was still taken off guard. He expected that in telling me on a Friday, we’d file for the divorce on Monday. Because I’d always given him what he wanted, within my power to do so. In this, I was powerless to give him what he wanted. Powerless to stop the shattering of my heart, my marriage, the life I’d devoted my entire adult existence to. I needed time, and he wasn’t inclined to give it.

I tried to fight, to repair the marriage, the relationship. I didn’t realize that the only one IN a relationship was me, and that I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t “fix” him, and he blamed me for that, too. I was supposed to have made him straight in all this time, so that he could live the life that would protect him from the hate and scorn. He’d neglected to tell me that part. It was the longest job interview in the world, and I’d failed, he said.

It took another two months for him to make me out him one sunny afternoon. He wouldn’t say it himself. And then, I failed him in that, too. My reaction was a quiet “Oh. Things make so much more sense now,” not the yelling of slurs and hatred he wanted — needed — to make his narrative fit reality. Just one more of my failures in a marriage full of them.

It wasn’t until later that the anger and betrayal hit me, and my anger wasn’t about his sexual orientation, it was about his lying and using me, making me his unwitting beard that all his lovers (including a former friend of mine from high school) knew about. And lovers there were. Lovers aplenty. I would find out about all of it later on, from concerned mutual friends who implored me to go to a doctor and get tested for STDs. They knew too, and never said. I still bristle when people ask me “How could you not know?” Just a tip? Don’t ask that. Ever. You’re putting the responsibility for disclosure on the wrong damn person and it’s a shitty thing to do.

The next eight months of the divorce process were a litany of constant tiny cruelties by him and his family, who had never really liked me and made no bones about it once it was clear that my ex-husband had no further use for me. I stopped existing to them well before I cut them out of my life. I got through it with the love of friends and family, a LOT of therapy, adjustments to my anxiety and depression meds, and the same sheer determination I’d had in keeping the marriage together in the first place.

Since then, I’ve lost both my parents, nearly died of sepsis, tried to undo the toxic relationship training I’d received, loved, lost, and finally decided to love myself more and settle into a life where the only person I answer to for my happiness is myself. I still fight for equality and I’m a vocal ally for the LGBTIA+ community, as well as being there for the straight spouses like me that I meet. There are more of us than you think.

Because there’s a use for me out there. But this time, I decide what it’s going to be.