I (M/30) have been talking to this woman (F/25) for a few years now. I live in the midwest, she lives in the bay area. Met her online via a mutual acquaintance. At first, it was just a ig/twitter/tiktok/social media acquaintance; our interests, sense of humor, shared culture etc. lined up together in a way that completely off guard. and she’s dropped dead gorgeous on top of her wittiness, kindness, etc etc, blah blah blah….basically, over the course of two years of social media to texting to phone calls to meeting in person a few times or whenever we happened to be in each other’s neck of the woods, i have fallen DEEEEEEEPLY in love with her. like in an “every other fleeting thought”, “having trouble sleeping”, “falling asleep over the phone”, high school crush kind of mutual infatuation. to the point where i’ve met her folks, she’s met mine, sexual compatibility…..long story short, this is somebody i want to cohabitate with/be in love with/have children with for the rest of my life.
now the “problem” is: i kinda skipped over the whole “googling your crush and see what comes up” portion of our dating because i guess i just didn’t care enough to, nothing about our in person/phone interactions set off any “warnings” that would lead me to background check her in anyway. well, curiostiy got the best of me and one thing led to another and i came across her reddit she had in college (she graduated in 2019). i didn’t come across her reddit through unethical means; i just searched the twitter/ig name she used on reddit and after glancing at the posts, it was clear that it was her. the only thing that i saw that “bugged me” in a way was a series of posts where she’s referencing a girlfriend and her difficulties being a gay woman…….NEWS TO ME!
i love the lgbt+ community and i’m a proud ally and my qualms have nothing to do with her being a lesbian/bi…..it’s the fact that it has literally never come up once. idk if she was shitposting, idk if she had a phase, idk if she’s bi, idk if she’s gay, but for someone who i have talked two almost every single day since the pandemic, have met her parents, have talked to about weddings and the like….i have this eerie feeling like if i don’t bring up that i found this out, this shit is gonna backfire in the near future. i know this is a television show and not reflective of real life but i really feel like i’m headed towards a Ross from Friends situation where the mother of his first child leaves years in to the relationship because she’s into women and can’t live a lie anymore.
how do i bring this up? “i was lurking the internet and found your reddit from college where you said you were gay, what says you?” just seems like a very difficult question for me to bring myself to ask her. to be clear: i’m not getting any red flags of the like from any of our interactions in real life. my gay/lesbian-dar has never gone off with her. i’m just confused as what to do, how to bring it up, should i even bring it up, i have a persistent pit in my stomach since i found this out and i honestly have no idea what to do 🙁
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TLDR : Found out girlfriend was gay in college and has yet to tell me about even though we’re getting married soon
8 comments
haha look what I found nosing around online. Do we need to have a conversation? I love you girl honesty matters to me.
Have you had the “in a relationship” conversation?
Yeah maybe don’t bring up that you were snooping around online and found her reddit, that’s weird
correction in 2nd paragraph
“basically, over the course of two years of social media to texting to phone calls to meeting in person a few times *a month”
How long have you actually been in a relationship? And you’re long-distance? Have you discussed past relationships?
It seems unlikely she’s actually gay and hiding it from you, so either she’s bi/pan or she dated women for a time but is in fact straight. If you ask her about it you’ll have to admit to violating her privacy which you don’t want to do. So you really can’t do anything other than wait for her to bring it up to you.
I mean, if I had a dollar for every woman I knew in college who identified as some form of queer and who is now monogamously married to a man … I’d be able to buy a cool t-shirt or something.
There are even names of it: BUG and LUG (“bisexual until graduation” and “lesbian until graduation.”) Heck, I remember joking with one woman I know about how, “Remember how mad you were when your parents called it ‘just a phase?'”
So before you talk to her, I really think you need to reframe this in your might a little bit. The “Friends” comment you made makes it sound like you think that *this* is a lie and *that* was the truth, but I don’t think that’s a remotely fair assumption.
And I’m curious how much of an admission this is. I mean, how much have you talked about passed relationships overall? If she’s told you about a lot of her exes then this rises to the level of “hiding” but if you haven’t talked about exes at all, then, you know, it really doesn’t.
All the same, it’s valid for you to have questions here. So make sure you’re not approaching her as if she’s committed some huge lie of omission unless, you know, she has told you about a bunch of guy exes but not about any of the girl ones.
And I don’t think you can pretend to not know what you don’t know. I think the right thing to do is to put your cards on the table. Be blunt, and take your lumps for looking up her old reddit (trying to get honesty through deception is likely to backfire – you get honesty by being honest and being able the handle the truth.)
“So, yeah, I did this thing, which I don’t feel great about, and I’m happy to unpack – later – why I did it. I’m not going to avoid that conversation. But … this is what I found, and it’s making me feel a couple of ways, and I’d love to hear you talk about how you currently identify and what changed, as well as why this hasn’t come up before.”
And if she’s a little miffed that you went digging, that’s okay. You don’t push back against her being miffed. You take your lumps there. But her being miffed is also not an excuse not to answer your reasonable questions.
One last thing: I always try to approach questions on this sub with the starting assumption that the poster’s partner is acting in good faith. A lot of people tend to jump to the opposite conclusion, and sometimes it’s really hard to conclude anything other than that they’re being a shitbag. (There are, sadly, a lot of shitbags out there). But … importantly, there’s also a lot of fear, guilt, and shame, which can create behavior which gets misinterpreted as shitbaggery.
So if I ask myself, why would a person of (generally) integrity not tell you this, there are a couple of very likely possibilities. She might feel embarrassed. She might have not felt safe enough to trust you, but by the time she did it felt like it had been too late to tell you, a problem which just got worse and worse and worse. She might feel like you’re not the kind of person who wants to know details about her past love life.
So, you know, when you ask, listen a lot, and be generous. I would think she would have told you this sort of thing before now, but humans are emotionally messy sometimes, and we all have things that are unreasonably sensitive subjects for us.
People pretend to be people they aren’t online all the time. She might have just been posting to role play as someone else.
I wouldn’t take this too seriously.
Did it not occur to you she’s bisexual?