The Messiness of Coming Out Later in Life

Illustration by Audry Malo

By Justine Harrington

Last summer I fell in love with a woman. This sounds like an unremarkable fact on its own. But it was remarkable — I was a straight, 34-year-old, married woman who’d never even had a same-gender crush. I’d been with my husband, my best friend and the love of my life, since I was 20. What the fuck was happening?

At the time, my husband and I lived in Austin, Texas and were preparing to move back to the Southern town where we went to college. We were leaving behind so much — namely, a cherished community we’d spent a decade building — but we trusted that the lives we wanted to create in our new (old) town would be worth the sacrifice.

Shortly before we were set to leave, my husband’s office threw him a going-away happy hour. I met him at the bar and happily greeted his coworkers, many of whom I’d become friendly with over the years. Then K. approached us. I’d only met her once before but I knew I liked her. She was warm, objectively adorable, and radiated the kind of Midwestern sincerity that always makes me feel right at home.

Almost immediately, the space between us was charged, a beam of light shooting from me to her. My husband peeled off to mingle, and I didn’t even notice. Later, I told him how much I’d enjoyed talking to her, and how sad I was that we’d only just met because I really wanted to be her friend.

Then, the weekend before we moved, a big group of us went out dancing and K. came. I’ll admit I was far from sober, but still, what happened next is strange. When I saw her, I was so excited that I walked up and threw my arms around her neck — and then I didn’t let go. “Is this okay? I asked her. “It’s okay!” she said, laughing. We clung to each other, slow-dancing to a fast song. The strange part is that none of this felt awkward, despite the fact that we barely knew one another. A mutual understanding bloomed between us. “I think I have a huge crush on you,” I said, looking into her wide brown eyes. “I have a huge crush on you, too,” she said. We smiled at each other and proceeded to flirt heavily for the rest of the night.

When I say this crush caught me by total surprise, I mean it. If I was going to realize I liked women, I thought, surely it would have happened by now. I’d been a gender studies-obsessed feminist since college. I gravitated to books by queer authors more than straight ones. I’d watched The L Word in its entirety at least five times. How could I have missed the signs?

In her memoir The Fixed Stars, Molly Wizenberg describes an experience very similar to mine. At the age of 36, after a lifetime of relationships with men, Wizenberg fell hard for a woman. To make sense of her shifting sexuality, she read the work of Lisa Diamond, a psychologist who studies women’s sexual orientations and attractions. In short, Diamond’s findings indicate that one of the defining features of female sexual orientation is its fluidity. This fluidity means that, regardless of their sexual orientation, women may experience desire for people of all genders as they encounter different situations and environments. For some (perhaps most) women, love and intimacy aren’t rigid. For some, it’s not about missing the signs — it’s about embracing change.

This rang true for me. I’d grown up being solely attracted to boys and men, and I recognized the way I felt about K. because it was exactly the way I’d felt about my husband when I met him. The notion that I’d somehow hidden my queerness from myself my whole life didn’t add up. “Maybe we can stop trying so hard to understand the gorgeous mystery of sexuality,” Glennon Doyle writes in Untamed. “Maybe our understanding of sexuality can become as fluid as sexuality itself.”

I agreed with Doyle in theory. And yet, my hunger to understand what was happening to me only intensified. I began to ingest every article, podcast, book, and Reddit thread I could find about coming out later in life. I talked openly and honestly with trusted friends. I started seeing an LGBTQ+-affirming therapist. None of this self-investigation, I’m sorry to say, prevented me from acting like an absolute lunatic during this time. I now knew what it felt like to desire another woman, and this desire did not feel casual in the slightest. It felt radioactive. I did and said things I’m not proud of — things that made me feel utterly foreign to myself — in the name of this desire.  

To some extent, my behavior was to be expected. Many people who come out later in life experience what psychologists call a “second adolescence.” Mood swings, impulsivity, and neglecting to set healthy boundaries are all common. The idea behind this is that queer people often don’t get to have certain developmental milestones until after they’ve come out. Regardless of your sexuality journey, you’re basically living your teen years all over again when you come out later in life — which explains the amount of time I spent masturbating and crying to Angel Olsen songs.

Eventually, after we’d settled into our new home and had countless conversations, my husband and I decided to open our relationship so I could explore my feelings about K. I would date her, long-distance, and he would get on apps and go on dates locally. To say this was an act of generosity and love on his part is an understatement. Of course, we were both also terrified out of our minds. I was terrified of what else I would discover about myself. He was terrified that I would leave him. 

The first time K. and I met up to have sex, I remember thinking afterward, Shit. This is not going to end well. The sex was too good — too simultaneously raw and comfortable — for it to end otherwise. I had visions of myself curled up on the floor, fetal and heartbroken. 

Shortly after this, I started crying when my husband and I had sex. Not every time, and never in front of him. I’d go to the bathroom afterward so he wouldn’t see, and I would cry, big, jagged bursts of tears.

I tried to reason this away at first, to tell myself it was all just a “phase” and that it would pass. To tell myself it was normal to be excited about someone else when you and your spouse have been together since you were practically babies, and that’s all this was. To tell myself there was no way I could actually be interested in women beyond just sex.

K. and I continued to meet up whenever we could, usually just for 48-hour stretches at a time. My husband went on a couple dates, but our small Southern town didn’t exactly have an endless supply of non-monogamous women. Summer had long faded, along with any lingering feelings of crush-induced euphoria. I’d begun to feel like I was living a double life, and it was exhausting. I was unfocused and irritable, with little to no emotional bandwidth for anything else, from reading (my favorite pastime) to maintaining my friendships. I had the persistent sense that I was letting everyone down — myself included.

I was also starting to work through the most painful parts of coming out. I was confronting my own internalized homophobia in therapy, and bristling with rage at the heteronormative standards I now saw everywhere — in contemporary media and pop culture, along with virtually all the cartoons, books, and movies I’d been raised on and the institutions I’d been born into. 

Mostly, I felt a near-constant sense of psychic dread and guilt for what all of this was doing to my husband, the person I loved most in the world. We’d come to this arrangement to save our relationship, but it was making us both miserable.

This is when I made a very good decision: I decided to be still. I’d been talking/reading/therapizing for months and now it was time to just listen. I went for long walks without my headphones. I stared off into space without scrolling Instagram. I began to feel glimmers of clarity, and I grabbed onto those glimmers for dear life.

I was beginning to realize how badly I wanted to be with women. How this desire came from the deepest part of myself. And yet, it didn’t feel like a lightning-bolt epiphany. It didn’t feel like I was “owning my truth,” to use the parlance of all the podcasts I’d listened to and books I’d read. It just felt like a reality I could no longer deny or suppress, no matter how much I wanted to. This reality was achingly, overwhelmingly bleak, because of what it meant for the future of my marriage.

I knew what needed to be done, not that knowing made things any easier. I (messily) broke things off with K., not because I don’t love her but because I do, and sparing her was the most loving act I could think of. For the first time, I came clean to my husband about everything I was feeling — that opening up our relationship had been a huge gift, because it had helped me understand something fundamental about myself. That I would be grateful to him forever. That the best, kindest thing we could do for one another now would be to learn how to let each other go. 

My husband and I are living out the final days of our marriage, though I know this is just one iteration of our relationship. There will be another, in the not-so-distant future. I don’t feel “peace” or “happiness” or any of those other catch-all words we’re told come from being honest with ourselves. But I do feel released from the fear that I won’t make it through this. Because I already am.