Caught my hubby pants down with his best friend…

With Auntie Agatha,gataedo@yahoo.com, agatha.edo@gmail.com,Tel: 08054500626 Dear Agatha, My husband and I are both pastors. We have been together for five years, while our marriage is nine years old. We are both quite successful. We both hold bank jobs and are both managers. For this reason we hardly get to see, because by the time he is back, I may still be in the office or he is still at work when I am home. And on Sunday, we are always busy with one religious activity or the other. Since meeting him, the only friend I have known him with, his roommate and best friend, has been his only companion. Despite concerns from friends and family members, over the little time my husband and I spend together, I wasn’t worried about him dating another woman. He was committed to me despite feeble complains he sometimes make about my long hours away from home and him whenever he is on leave. It was the least of my problems and a testimony of how much trust I had in my husband. Besides, we are very good friends making the envy of all those close to us. All the years we dated, I never caught him with another woman. I was really very secured in our relationship until I came back home unexpectedly one day to find him and his best friend right in the middle of my sitting room making love. How was I to know that my husband is bi-sexual? Since catching them in the act, he has been everywhere begging me to understand, that though he married me against his nature he has come to love me in his own way and willing to make the marriage work. This is one issue I cannot discuss with my mother or any member of my family. How do I handle this? There is no way I can continue with him, knowing what he is into. But what excuse do I give the church and my children? The past five weeks have been traumatic for me. I have never experienced this kind of issue before. I have heard stories like this, but never dreamt it could happen to me. Who do I turn to? Who do I tell my story? What do I tell the world about the real issues in my marriage? I used to think I had the best marriage in the world, but as it is now I don’t even know the nature of the person I married. I am so confused now. My confusion is so profound that I am even yet to feel the pains of all that is happening to me. I can’t even bring myself to explain to my friends the reason I am living in a hotel room with my children. What do I do? Even if I can bear the thoughts of going back to him, how do I handle his friend? To cap it all, I just discovered I am 10 weeks gone. Please, Agatha, help me the best way you can. You are my only source of hope now. Idowu. Dear Idowu, Until you attain an emotional equilibrium, take sometime off and travel out of town. You need a place to think and sort out your feelings for your husband and home. If I tell you your story is strange, then I am telling a huge lie. Strange things are happening in our contemporary world, something that never was in the old days. If couples are to react to these strange things the way they come, the marriage institution will simply vanish one day. Many couples are coping with very strange things and making tremendous sacrifices these days to keep their marriages. I appreciate the shock and confusion now lacing your life. No woman would remain sober on discovering her rival is a man – the friend of the family she has come to trust. The truth is that if you had been more observant, you would have noticed long before now that there was an unusual closeness between your husband and his best friend. Honestly, there is no way you can be rational or logical given how you feel and the amount of emotional pains you are going through. You need time first to unclog. The best way to begin is to be truthful to yourself. In what ways did you contribute to this problem? Doubtless, he was into this long before you met him, but don’t you think you could have helped in weaning him if you had shown more devotion to him, spent more time with him? The fact that you had a happy marriage with him points to your hidden power to wrestle him from this habit. Your constant absence from home could have kept the other man in his life. No matter how discrete they were, having you around him would have watered down significantly the amount of time available to him and the other man to be together. Whoever the sex of a woman’s rival is, a married woman must never leave her husband alone as you left yours. Absurd as this may sound, the issue here is, would you have taken him back if he was having an affair with a woman? Or is your anger based on your rival being a man? Like I said, a lot of things are happening in marriages these days, so reality demands candidness in resolving the issues. Remember this is your marriage and life. While other women may simply take the exit door, you don’t have to if you think you have the strength to weather and calm the storm. The real challenge in broken homes isn’t the now, but the later. Life is a funny mix. The reasons of today may not be too good later, which is why a lot of caution and tolerance have to be put into any decision such as the one you are about to make. In asking yourself your own mistakes, you equip yourself with the room to negotiate so many things. For instance in your nine-year-old marriage, what are the things you would miss most, those things peculiar to him which you know no other man can give you? If this hadn’t happened, how would you describe him as a person or husband? In the main, how has his sexual preference affected your relationship with him? If you didn’t catch him, would you have known his ‘girlfriend’ is a man? During all those time you didn’t know, did it affect your sexual life or quality of your time with him? Did he at anytime deprive you of his time, attention or presence when you craved and demanded for it? As a lover, how would you score him? These are issues if not properly handled will come back to haunt you later in life. Be sure, whatever you do is based on reason and not sentiment. Don’t do something you will later on regret or ask yourself why you did it. Unless of course you are determined to weather the storm of life on your own, the next man may not really be different from the one you are leaving. These days, both men and women are acquiring some very strange habits, things unheard of before now. The face as you must have found out is a fine mask to hide the bizarre. The fact that you have children and pregnant for him means leaving him doesn’t stop him from being part of your life. We get to a stage in life when we just have to deal with what it offers us instead of running away. Remember he remains the father of your children, hence a limit to what you can say about him or your marriage else you destroy your children in the process. The strength of everyman and home is the woman. What if your daughter-in-law comes to announce to you that your son is bisexual, will you ask her to leave him? Life is not about its beginning and the end, it is the in-between challenges we encounter that matter the most. And, as a pastor, will you tell your female member with this kind of challenge to end her marriage? Your duty would be to encourage her to pray her husband out of it, isn’t it? God does have a way of making His servants pass through situations they liberally tell people to pray over. So what is stopping you from doing same thing? Who says you cannot pray your husband out of this habit? After all, he started it on one day, so he can stop it on another day. Your responsibility as a pastor goes beyond you, it extends to all those God has given you to pastor. There is no escaping the desires of God in one’s life. Pray to God to help you focus on what is right and not what is important at the end of the day. He that has called you has the ability and power to remove those things, you are worried about now, from your marriage. So turn to Him for hope and solutions. Every marriage has its cross and sacrifices. God is your strength, so hold on to Him. Good luck.