“These men genuinely love their wives,” said Joe Kort, a clinical social worker in Royal Oak, Mich., who has counseled hundreds of gay married men, including a minority who stay in their marriages. Many, he said, considered themselves heterosexual men with homosexual urges that they hoped to confine to private fantasy life.

“They fall in love with their wives, they have children, they’re on a chemical, romantic high, and then after about seven years, the high falls away and their gay identity starts emerging,” Mr. Kort said. “They don’t mean any harm.”

-NYTimes: Many Couples Must Negotiate Terms of ‘Brokeback’ Marriages

What’s really interesting about this are the comments by the likes of Amity Pierce Buxton who founded the International Straight Spouse Network. She mentions how many of those men (because it is basically solely men we’re talking about here) who come out to their wives after years of marriage, do so in their late 30s, 40s and 50s. They’ve hidden their secret feelings for decades and only with greater courage and perhaps increased desperation, feel able to come clean. Having literally made themselves ill from the deceit, they see the potential for their real feelings to come forward slip away and decide to take action. Often partners find out about these developments through unintended computer trails of documents, cellphone records and credit card bills. When the individual themselves can’t come clean, company papers often will.

“Once the system is triggered, it’s so chemically powerful that you can easily overlook everything about that person that doesn’t work for you,” Dr. Helen Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, said. “Even straight people have fallen in love with people they could never make a life with.”

This is cold comfort to women who lose not only the men they love, but also their faith in how to parse reality. “A lot of women feel that they were just used as covers, but I know in my heart of hearts he loved me,” Mrs. Remmele said. “You can’t fake the way he used to look at me.

In the same way that the passion fades in many heterosexual marriages after decades of familiarity with their spouse, ‘mixed-orientation marriages’, thought to number up to 3.4 million, normally dissolve after the non-straight partner reveals their true feelings. When the marriage was created the man may have been romantically in love with his wife, may have not really known his true feelings or was trying to repress them to go along with social norms. But some feelings can’t be held back forever.

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