Questioning your sexual orientation in adulthood: when the question comes later

“I’m forty, I have a husband, two children and a mortgage. And for the last six months I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a colleague. I don’t know whether I’m in love, whether I’m confused, or whether I’ve simply been lying to myself for years.”

Sentences like this are not easy to say. They often arrive only after a long detour, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, sometimes with a laugh meant to soften them. And they are almost always accompanied by the same fear: that something is wrong with you, that you have been living a lie, and that now you have to do something — immediately, definitively, with a clear label.

In this piece I would like to slow that fear down a little. Doubting your sexual orientation in adulthood is not rare, and it is not a sign that you have somehow “broken”. It is a question that deserves curiosity, not panic. And the answer to it is not necessarily a single word.

When the question arrives later than you expected

Most of us grew up with the story that sexual orientation is “discovered” in puberty and then stays as it is. If you knew as a teenager that you were attracted to people of the same sex, you had your own coming-out story. If you didn’t, you were simply heterosexual, and the question was closed.

Real life is often more complicated. Some people had these feelings early on but were not allowed, or did not know how, to look at them — because in the family, school or town where they grew up there was no room for it. Others had them and honestly did not recognise them as attraction, but as a “strong friendship” or admiration. Still others genuinely felt attraction mainly to one sex for a long time, and then, in a particular period of life, with a particular person, found themselves in something new.

None of these paths is less real than another. And none of them means your life so far has been a lie. Love for the partner with whom you built a home can be entirely real, even when a question you had not seen before opens up beside it.

What the research says: sexual fluidity

Psychologist Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah followed a group of young women who did not identify as heterosexual for ten years. She asked them whom they desired, whom they were in relationships with, and how they described themselves. She found that roughly two thirds of the women changed the label they used for themselves at least once in those ten years. Most of the changes were not swings from one extreme to the other, but shifts towards broader labels, or towards not wanting a label at all.

Diamond used the term sexual fluidity for this: the capacity for attraction to extend, with certain people and at certain times, beyond what had been usual for you. She stressed two things that are often overlooked in public debate. First, fluidity is not the same in everyone — some people barely experience it, in others it is more pronounced. Second, fluidity is not something a person can choose or will. It happens; it is not done. That is also why it does not follow that orientation can be changed through willpower, prayer or therapy.

Most research on fluidity has been carried out with women; for men the picture is less well studied and may be different. But the message that applies to everyone is simple: for many people, orientation does not close at eighteen, and doubt at forty is no proof that anything is wrong.

Attraction, behaviour and identity are not the same

When people say “I don’t know what I am any more”, they often squeeze three different things into one sentence. It helps to take them apart.

• Attraction is what you feel: whom you want close, who makes your heart skip, whom you daydream about. You do not choose this layer.
• Behaviour is what you do: whom you are in a relationship with, whom you have been with. Behaviour is shaped by your surroundings, opportunities, values and the commitments you have made.
• Identity is the word you use to describe yourself — heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or none of these.

For many people these three layers line up neatly. For many they do not. Someone can be faithful to a twenty-year marriage to a woman and at the same time notice that he is also attracted to men. Someone else feels attraction to both sexes and has no need at all to name it. The gap itself is not a problem that has to be solved by Friday. It is information about you.

How a sense of who you are takes shape is also described in the entry identity in the knowledge base. Identity is not a stone you dig up once. It is more like a story you tell about yourself throughout your life — and sometimes a new chapter opens in that story.

When you are married and have children

It is often hardest when the question does not concern only you. When beside you there is a partner with whom you promised to share a life, and children for whom this home means safety.

In such a situation people often get caught between two extremes. One is to push everything back down: “It doesn’t matter, I have a family, I’ll forget it.” The other is the feeling that they must reveal everything at once, tear it all down and start again, because anything else would be hypocrisy. Both extremes come from the same source — from anxiety that wants to end the uncertainty as quickly as possible.

In reality there is a lot of room between them. First you need to understand what is happening inside you: whether this is attraction to one person or a wider pattern you have recognised for a long time; whether it is also a question about a marriage that may have become empty already; what you need and what matters to you to keep. Only then does it make sense to decide whom to tell, when and how.

It is important to know that people take very different paths after such a realisation. Some stay in the marriage and talk openly about what they have discovered. Others separate and remain good parents. Others need years before they know. No single path is the only right one. If a relationship does end, there are two pieces that may help: How to tell your children that their parents are separating and When you decide to separate: couples therapy that helps you end well.

Saying it out loud for the first time

The first conversation with a partner is rarely the way you imagined it. It is often neither a catastrophe nor a relief, but something in between. It might sound like this (a composite, not a real person):

“Something has been going on with me for a while, and I don’t want you to hear it from someone else. I’m realising that I’m attracted to women too. I don’t know yet what that means.”
“Have you cheated on me?”
“No. But I don’t want to lie to you any more either. I’m scared of what you’ll say.”
“I don’t know what I’ll say. I need time. But … I’m glad you told me.”

There is something in this short exchange that often helps: the person speaking does not claim to know more than she does. She does not announce a final truth, but shares the state she is in. And she leaves her partner room to have his own response — including anger, fear or sadness.

The partner who finds out has an experience of his or her own. The picture of the past may collapse. They may wonder whether they were “enough”. They may be afraid for the children or of what people will say. They too need space, their own support and time. It is not unusual for a couple to seek couples therapy during such a period — not so that anyone gets “fixed”, but so that they can talk about something this big without every conversation ending in a row or in silence.

Shame and minority stress

Much of the suffering people experience around doubts about their orientation does not come from the feelings themselves, but from what they have learned about those feelings. From jokes at the family table. From silence. From the way people at school talked about the classmate who was “different”.

In 2003 the researcher Ilan Meyer described this with the minority stress model. People who belong to sexual minorities experience not only the ordinary strains of life, but additional ones: experiences of rejection, the expectation of being rejected, concealment, and internalised negative beliefs about themselves. It is this extra stress that explains a large part of the higher risk of anxiety and depression that research finds in these groups — not orientation itself.

This is an important distinction. You are not struggling because there is something wrong with your attraction. You may be struggling because for years you have been listening to an inner voice telling you that there is. That voice is usually shame, not guilt — and the difference is large. There is more about it in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters, and briefly in the entry shame.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often look at where that voice comes from. Who in your family said what, what could not be mentioned, how your parents reacted when someone departed from expectations. We are not looking for someone to blame. We are looking for an understanding of why something that is simply part of you became so hard.

What therapy is — and what it never does

I want to be completely clear here. The purpose of therapy is not to change your sexual orientation — in either direction. Practices that promise this are called conversion or “reparative” therapies. In 2009 a task force of the American Psychological Association reviewed the research and concluded that there is no reliable evidence that they work, but there is evidence that they can cause harm: they increase shame, anxiety and depression and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders in 1973, and the World Health Organization did so in 1990. Being gay, lesbian or bisexual is not an illness.

So what can therapy do? It can give you a space where you talk about this without fear of being judged or pushed in any direction. It can help you separate your own feelings from what others have placed on you. It can help with decisions about your relationship and family, with conversations with your partner or parents, and with grieving the life you had imagined. And it can help you bear the uncertainty until the answer ripens on its own.

I will be honest about my role here: I am neither a sexologist nor a sex therapist. I am a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy. With me you can explore what this means for your relationships, your family and the story you tell about yourself — on your own or with your partner. If questions of sexual health come up along the way, the right place to go is a doctor or a specialist in sexual medicine; the piece When to see a doctor, when a sex therapist, and when couples therapy is enough covers where to turn and when. In Slovenia, psychosocial support for people exploring their sexual orientation is also offered by the Legebitra association.

Exercise: a letter you never have to send

This exercise will not give you an answer. But it will help you take the question out of your head and set it down in front of you. Give yourself twenty minutes and a quiet place.

1. Write down what you notice, without labels. Not “I think I’m bisexual”, but “my heart skips around her” or “when I see male couples I feel warm and tight at the same time”. Observations only.
2. Separate the layers. Next to each observation, note whether it concerns attraction, behaviour or identity. Where do the layers match, and where do they not?
3. Write down the voices that speak up. “That’s disgusting.” “What will Mum say.” “You’ll destroy the family.” For each voice, ask yourself: whose sentence was this the first time?
4. Write a few lines to yourself at fifteen. What would you tell that teenager today, knowing what you know now?
5. Write down one thing you need this month — not a decision, but a need: one conversation, a bit of peace, one book, one visit to a professional.

Keep the letter or throw it away. If you ever decide on therapy, you can bring it with you as a starting point.

When the answer is not about orientation

It would not be honest of me to leave this out: not every doubt about orientation is a question about orientation.

Intrusive thoughts. For some people, the doubt appears as an intrusive, tormenting thought accompanied by intense anxiety and constant checking — did I “feel something” when I looked at that person, did I react “correctly”. This form can be part of obsessive-compulsive disorder; researchers describe it as sexual orientation obsessions. The sign is that the thought does not interest the person but horrifies them, and that the checking brings only brief relief. If you recognise yourself here, the first port of call is your GP, who can refer you to a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, as there are well-tested, effective approaches for this.

A crisis looking for a way out. Sometimes attraction to a new person is mainly a sign that something in your current life is dying — a marriage that has become nothing more than logistics, or a sense that you have lost yourself. That does not mean the attraction is not real, but it does mean the question is wider than orientation. This is the subject of The midlife crisis is not a cliché: what is actually happening.

A fantasy is not an identity. One dream, one thought or one fantasy does not yet tell you who you are. We all have a rich inner life that does not always translate into wishes for real life.

When it gets very hard. If in the middle of all this you find yourself thinking it would be better if you were not here, do not stay alone with it. In Slovenia, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

Acceptance as a path, not a destination

People often wish they could wake up one morning and simply know. It is rarely like that. More often it is a slow realignment, in which feelings, words and life gradually move closer to one another. In the knowledge base this is described in the entry acceptance — which does not mean giving up, but stopping the fight with what is.

Wherever the question leads you, you deserve to explore it with kindness towards yourself. Even if you do not have the answer yet. Even if you may never have it in a single word.

What to remember

• Doubting your sexual orientation in adulthood is not rare, and it does not mean your life so far has been a lie.
• Lisa Diamond’s research shows that for many people attraction and labels shift over the years — but fluidity happens; it is not chosen.
• Attraction, behaviour and identity are three different layers; doubt often arises in the gap between them.
• Therapy never changes orientation — conversion practices are ineffective and harmful. It helps you explore, understand shame and make decisions at your own pace.
• If the doubt comes with tormenting intrusive thoughts and constant checking, talk to a doctor.