Ladies who leave their husbands because they fall in love with other ladies

October 2010

 

They marry a man knowing that it’s a mistake or simply because they think that it’s the right thing to do. They live a calm life as mothers and wives until they fall in love with a woman or decide to end up everything and defy the environment to search for what they never dared before. Marta, Silvia and Helena, ladies with children who have left their husbands and now live as lesbians, tell us their stories.

The day that Marta (31) married Carlos she was 26 years old and had a son of two and half years. Wrapped in her white dress she danced almost all the 80’s songs that had carefully chosen, posed for hundreds of pictures and smiled the whole night. What none of her 130 guests could imagine as they stared was that the shining bride who was playing her role perfectly, had recently discovered she was a lesbian.

It happened a pair of months earlier, during the arrangements for the wedding. “I was so looking forward to start organizing the wedding, but I began to feel a little strange, there was something not working in the relation. Carlos loved me very much, I had everything next to him, but I found something was failing, especially in bed. I wasn’t getting turned on really; at first I did, very much, and I’d been with a lot of boys before. But this wasn’t what I wanted. I began investigating. I wasn’t very aware of what was happening to me, but it I had the feeling I could like girls. I started getting into chats and meeting people, but not to get involved with a girl, but to talk and hear of other people’s experiences”, tells Marta.

Simultaneously while coordinating the guests list, deciding the menus and taking care of hes son, Marta was going out at nights meeting with lesbians who told her their stories, transitions and, especially, what aroused Marta’s curiosity the most: the sensation of loving a woman in bed and in life.

“I realized that was what I wanted to feel. I don’t know why I got married; I think I did it because of the fear of cancelling the wedding, because I was a coward. I thought maybe the feeling would go away eventually. Not because I believed I had a problem with being lesbian, but I had many years of relation with my ex, we had a two and a half year old son, we had a a lot of plans for our life together, we loved each other very much … There were things that were failing, but I deceitfully thought they could get fixed. And I looked forward for that wedding . It was a mixture of egoism and cowardice. I married knowing that I was going to fuck it up.”

When Marta met this girl on the Internet two weeks had passed since the wedding day and and Carlos and Marta’s sexual life was deteriorating.

After the honeymoon, Carlos got back to work and Marta to the computer and the lesbians’ chats. Through a friend she met a girl who lived in Lanzarote. “I saw her through the messenger’s webcam and I absolutely loved her. She was georgeous and I had never met such a beautiful lesbian. From that day we started talking everyday. It was strange, because I started having feeling for her. I wasn’t scared, on the contrary, I wanted to know her, but she didn’t; she had recently broke up with her girlfriend and wasn’t ready to have long distance relationship again.”

When Marta met this girl on the Internet two weeks had passed since the wedding day and and Carlos and Marta’s sexual life was deteriorating.

Anxious to change her life, Marta convinced her and a month later she packed her bags, lied to her family saying she would go away with a friend and took a plane to Lanzarote. “We spent three wonderful days. When we kissed I felt it was the first kiss of my life. I even dropped the purse from my shoulder. Those butterflies, the nerves, the defenselessness, the illusion, the expectations … It was a weekend full of new sensations: her skin so soft, the smell of hes neck, holding her hand.” Before they returned, Marta said that she loved her, cried at the airport and wept for two hours and a half back to Madrid, feeling that she had found the life she always searched for and didn’t want to leave it now. “Coming back home was horrible. It was a reality I felt didn’t correspond me, that I didn’t want. I still hadn’t considered saying anything to Carlos, but he asked me what was happening to me. And I told him without thinking it, told to him that I had fallen in love with a girl. I started crying and so did he. It was very dramatic. He asked me how could I have done something like that to him, why, if we had just got married. The following day we were already discusing how our relation wasn’t going to work. Some days later I moved to my parents’ house. My parents didn’t press me, but they were expecting an explanation. They said I did things the wrong way. His family stopped speaking to me for a period of time, and his sister, who once was one of my best friends, never spoke to me again.” Marten and Carlos got divorced and distributed the care of the child fifteen days each one. Marten kept a long distance relationship for one year. Later her girl moved to Madrid and they lived together another three years. Currently Marta is single, but as her now seven year old son says: not waiting for a prince, but a blue princess.

Educated to be a mother and wife. Until …

Before seeing Maricarmen again, the days in the life of Silvia (47) looked so much alike she could barely differentiate one from the other. Woke up at seven o’clock in the morning, prepared breakfast for her husband and two children. When the husband went to work and the children to school, she turned on the television, picked up everything, cleaned and prepared the meal. On the evenings she ironed, arranged the disaster left by the children, visited her mother, prepared dinner and went to bed at eleven o’clock so the following day she could start again.

Silvia got married at 28 years old and from that day she stopped working to devote herself to the upbringing of her children who are 17 and 14 years old today. “I never thought of another kind of life. It was what I had to live and I believed I was happy. I was resigned, I had been educated to be a mother and a wife 24 hours a day and I was fulfilling my role perfectly”, tells Silvia.

One day, four years ago, Silvia attended a meeting of former classmates at a country club. “Suddenly, in the distance, I saw a friend who I had lost touch with for many years. She had gone to live in Norway with her parents at the age of 15 or 16. She caught my attention because she was very tall, very georgeous, with short hair and dressed more masculine than feminine. Someone asked if she was married or had a boyfriend, and she said in front of the whole world that she didn’t, the she had just ended a long relationship with a woman. We were all surprised. She was very open and not ashamed of anything, but our mentality was narrow. Here in Chile we are more conservative, especially people of my generation. These things are spoken indoors and she shouted it to the wind. I admired her for that and didn’t leave her side all day. ” Since then, the activities that filled Silvia’s days were gradually left behind and replaced by a coffee after dinner, a cocktail before dinner, a movie on the weekend with Maricarmen.

“I started feeling happier dating Maricarmen than in my home or elsewhere. If I was going to meet her one day I dressed up long before I had to leave, if she said I looked beautiful and threw me a compliment I thought about it all day. I felt just like my teenage nieces who walked through the house sighing because the boy they liked winked at them. But it was kind of bipolar, because on one hand I was in the clouds and on the other side I didn’t understand what was happening. At first I thought I felt happy just because I got more out of the house and distracted myself, but she wasn’t like a friend for me. If something good or bad happened to me she was the first person I talked to about it, if I saw something beautiful I wanted to buy it for her, sometimes I was sleeping with my husband or watching TV with him and thought it would be much more entertaining if instead of him it was her. But that romantic feeling confused me. Not that I had never liked a woman before, but it just didn’t fit into my head. All my life raised and educated to be a mother and wife and suddenly I spent the day thinking about a women. Also in my environment, so traditional and rational, I thought they would make fun of me if I said I felt that way. ” Maricarmen and Silvia got involved a month and a half after they met, in the semi-darkness of a cinema. Since then, Silvia’s days never resemble and blend again. For more than a year her housework became less frequent, cooked fast food and every day she saved at least three hours to spend with Maricarmen.

“Everything was going great until jealousy appeared. She couldn’t stand me going back home to my husband, slept and eventually had sex with him. And as I wasn’t a hundred percent there, she said she wouldn’t too and began dating other women. Then I felt I’d die and had to make a decision. I didn’t want to lose her, but I was afraid to tear a family apart. ” The first battle was won by fear. Silvia found herself unable to tell the truth to her parents, husband and children. Maricarmen took distance from her and Silvia’s days went back to what they were before, but this time a little worse, because besides being the same, they were sad. “That was a very hard time because a loto f sad things happened at the same time. My brother got cancer. I couldn’t think straight. Sometimes those experiences help you to understand that life is too short and you have to fight for what you want because we don’t have the rewind button of a remote control. Maricarmen was already dating someone else and didn’t want to risk herself with me again, but I found her and showed it to her. When I won her back, I told my husband. He took it badly, didn’t understand. My parents too. They said I was confused, that gay people are gay from birth and I had spent 43 years of my life with men. ” Silvia’s biggest concern were her children, but interestingly they understood better than anyone that Mom was in love with a woman.

Silvia left her husband and has been living in an apartment with Maricarmen for three years now. At the beginning of the separation she gave her children the option to choose who they preferred to live with. The children, who at that time chose to stay at home with the father, now are living with Silvia and Maricarmen. “At first it was very shocking for everyone: family, friends, children … But things are shocking until you get used to them, you know them and you start seeing them as normal. Maricarmen and the kids love each other. She gets along very well with my parents and my brothers. Everything has its time, it’s a process. But now I’m in a very good time of my life. I’m glad I decided to change my life. I have work, we both run the house and we’re trying to have a child by artificial insemination. So now let’s wait what life brings us, “concludes Silvia.

To come out of the closet in front of the son and the parents

“But what more do you want? We have a good home, a son, cars, two jobs and a good environment, what more do you need? “Elena’s husband asked her when she suggested she wanted a divorce. “I want more. I want to be happy, “she said.

Elena (40) was then 31. He had married at 27 with a boyfriend she had for a decade. When she married she knew that she liked women, but didn’t feel strong enough to dislodge the tradicional and catholic mentality of her family. During her teens, an uncle came out of the closet and the reaction of the environment was terrible for her. Furthermore, the only adventure she had with a girl before marriage had ended in disappointment.

“My marriage was an escape. I said to myself: We’ll see what happens. What happened was that it failed. Life was monotonous and boring. He went from: My mom is the one who takes care of me to My wife is the one who takes care of me. And I was like: This is my life and this is what I was ment to live, to take care of this man. The last two years we had almost no sex life. ”

The last year Elena had a parallel relationship with a bisexual friend who was the engine that drove her to leave her husband and seek meaning in her life, to find a path which make her happier. “I knew I liked women but had to find out if that was what I wanted. Had a bad experience but I had to find happiness. If I wasn’t happy I couldn’t make my son happy. “

Elena divorced her husband and began dating for flirting. “I thought it would be all too easy, go out at noghts and eat the whole world. And it wasn’t, ” reminds Elena laughing. Via the Internet she found a group of friends where she met her current partner with whom she’s been 8 years, Lulú. Lulu and Elena, each one at home, maintained a relationship in the closet for four years. Everything changed when Lulu became unemployed and decided to cut costs by living together and telling the whole world it was just a sample of the “great friendship” that brought them together. The closet became too small and suffocating when the psychologist who treated the child, who was 8, told Elena that her son couldn’t accept the divorce because the fact that his mother didn’t have a boyfriend was an open door to the possible reconciliation of his parents.

She had no choice, she had to tell her son. But as her son ate every day at his grandparents’ home, Elena had to tell her parents too. “I was nervous, I didn’t want to go through that, but on the other hand I felt the need to verbalize it. I gathered them all and release everything very quick: “look mom, look dad. I’m gay. ” My mother said, ‘We know it, why did you have tos ay it?’. My mother is of the mindset that if you don´t say it, it doesn`t exist. My father said, ‘Well, that`s it. Lulu can come to all family celebrations, ‘he is more liberal. My mother said I couldn`t at that time. But it was a process for her. First she was worried she had done something wrong when she raised me, but later she realized I was fine, that my son child was very fond of Lulu and Lulu of him and that my aunts and my family accepted her, so she began to increasingly accept her, has made spectacular meals, treats her well. She now refers to “us” (Lulú and me) instead of only “me” as she did before.”

Elena and Lulu joined the Association of Gays and Lesbians with Sons and Daughters (Galehi), where the son of Elena met children in the same situation and began normalizing his mother’s lesbianism. He became closer to Lulu and every time he wants to take a picture of what he calls his “family”, he poses in the middle of both.