My fiancé had a fling with a man but I want to make it work

* My fiancé had a one-night fling with a man just before we got engaged, which he recently told me about (we’ve been engaged for six weeks, together for three years).

He has explained that it was something he needed to try before he proposed, and it proved to him that he’s definitely not gay. I was horrified but I want to make it work. Am I being an idiot to trust him again?

>>You are not an idiot. You are a woman whose beliefs have been shaken to the core. The cognitive dissonance between your faith in your fiancé and his same-sex infidelity is forcing you to find a rational solution to an incomprehensible problem.

I admire your refusal to jump to conclusions, but I also know that when someone is so heavily invested in a relationship they can’t contemplate letting go, denial enables them to ignore the most egregious of insults. You may accept his protestations about his sexuality, but how do you explain his betrayal?

Cheating is cheating, whether the person involved is gay, straight, bisexual or transgendered, and I doubt your fiancé would be very understanding if you suddenly announced that you “need to try” having sex with someone else before you marry him.

Research from the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that 20.8% of men have had a same-sex sexual experience, yet only 5% to 7% of men are openly homosexual, so your fiancé may not be gay. But, let’s face it, if he was incontrovertibly heterosexual he wouldn’t have felt the need to have sex with another man.

Some people theorise that same-sex infidelity is less threatening because it is not comparative in the way that heterosexual infidelity often is. Theory and reality are, of course, two entirely different things.

In a study by Confer and Cloud (2011), 60% of men and 26% of women said they would stay with a partner who had a same-sex affair, but those statistics were generated by asking people to “imagine” how they would react. I don’t know about you but I “imagine” I’m capable of all sorts of magnanimities that I wouldn’t ever like to be tested on.

In the 21st century, being gay is no big deal, but being gay in a heterosexual marriage is. There are no reliable figures for Ireland but the US-based Straight Spouse Network (SSN) estimates that roughly one-third of couples who endure same-sex infidelity separate immediately. Another third stay together for a few years, attempting to work things out, but end up separating anyway. And another third survive, for a time at least, by negotiating an agreement that addresses both partners’ needs.

Same-sex infidelity presents particular problems. As Amity Buxton, the executive director of the Straight Spouse Network, says: “Victims face a unique kind of isolation because they don’t feel that they can discuss the situation openly with family or friends.”

It is worth pointing out that your fiancé could easily have hidden his same-sex experience. That he doesn’t want to deceive you is encouraging, but it’s not enough. To move forward, you’ll need to set your personal expectations aside and try to understand the potential implications of your fiancé’s sexual confusion. It would be worth getting him to fill in The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (bisexual.org/kleingrid.html) to help him evaluate his orientation in terms of his past, present and ideal sexual dispositions.

Bisexual men can have successful heterosexual relationships, but you will need to be very clear about your own personal boundaries. If doubts about his sexuality persist, his honesty should, at least, enable you to separate amicably.

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