A woman whose husband revealed he was gay after 15 years of marriage has revealed how it made her feel like she’d been ‘living a lie.’
Carolyn Hobdey, from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, who appeared on today’s edition of Steph’s Packed Lunch, told how he had known about his sexuality since being a teenager.
And when Carolyn pointed out she learned he’d been having an affair during their relationship, Steph asked whether it made it worse that it was a man, not a woman.
‘For me I feel like it made it worse because it was like I’d been living a lie,’ she admitted. ‘The only way I could really describe it was like waking up on my 18th birthday and my parents telling me I was adopted.’
So, everything I’d relied on for 15 years, everything I thought that I knew was a lie. So, all of those love letters, all of those Valentine’s cards and the great times we’d had together, you just start to question all of it in terms of was it really real?’
Carolyn Hobdey (pictured), from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, whose husband revealed he was gay after 15 years of marriage has revealed how it made her feel like she’d been ‘living a lie’
Carolyn appeared on today’s edition of Steph’s Packed Lunch and told host Steph McGovern (pictured) how her husband had known about his sexuality since being a teenager
Introducing Carolyn, Steph asked her to describe their marriage.
‘We met on a training course and got to know each other really quickly as a result of that,’ explained Carolyn. ‘Then over time we started dating and then back in the year 2000 we got married…We were really happy.
‘He was a great guy, funny, we had lots in common. Intellectually we were a really great match – it was my dream come true.’
Steph asked whether Carolyn ever thought her husband might be gay.
‘No inkling whatsoever,’ Carolyn replied. ‘During our marriage over time there was a lack of intimacy and I didn’t really realise that anything was missing from my marriage or that anything was wrong – and somebody else walked into my life and that changed a lot for me.
I ended up having an affair with that person and I thought that the end of our marriage was entirely my fault. And I took that blame for a really, really long time.
‘My ex-husband and I carried on living together during that time because I was just in a really bad place in terms of how I felt about the relationship.
Carolyn admitted she had ‘no inkling whatsoever’ that her husband might have been gay. Pictured, on today’s show
Six years later, some of his behaviour started to change and I realised that he’d met somebody, and I thought that was him moving on and I started to realise that the texts he was getting through were from a man. I just decided to ask him about it.’
Steph asked Carolyn how she felt when she realised this.
‘To start with I felt really relieved because it suddenly made a whole load of things make a whole load of sense in terms of what had gone on in our relationship,’ she explained. ‘So initially I felt relieved.’
‘I actually felt quite sad for him that he’d hidden it for all this time. I was actually his second wife, so he’d been going through this for quite some time.’
Revealing that they were still friends, Carolyn added: ‘Huge friends. I think sometimes you have to make some choices. I’m not saying it was easy, I was really angry!
I was really angry on behalf of my family, angry on behalf of what I felt was a life that had been stolen in some way.’
‘But then I just realised that all those things that were great about him, the things that I loved – his sense of humour, his intellect and how well we got on – I had to make a choice about did I just let all of that go, do I lose all those 15 years, or do I take something away from this?
He was still the person that I fell in love with despite what had happened and whilst I loved him in a different way than I had when we were together, I still loved him. Just keeping that relationship and staying friends seemed more important than any anger or hurt I had.’
Carolyn (pictured) revealed that despite being ‘really angry’ at first, the pair are now ‘huge friends’
Steph asked Carolyn what had stopped her husband coming out earlier.
‘He was 11 years older than me, so we have to remember he was born in the 1960s and homosexuality didn’t stop being a crime until late in the 1960s, so I think we do have to understand that it was a different tinm,’ Carolyn said
‘He was brought up by parents and grandparents who would have had a very different point of view about homosexuality, so I understand that.
His family were reasonably religious, so I just think it was one of those things where you start keeping a secret and that secret grows and grows and in the end it becomes hard to share it.’
Steph asked: ‘So often we talk about the bravery of the men and you’re very much saying that about your ex-husband, but do you feel that you were left out or betrayed in any way as the story has become about him and not you?’
Carolyn replied: ‘I think that gets really forgotten in all of these stories. Sometimes it does create a little bit of irritation within me, particularly when there has been lots of stories in the media of people coming out, that the other half is often forgotten and they go through a whole sense of grief and pain themselves and I do think we need to pay attention to that.’
Finally, Steph asked what advice Carolyn would give to anyone in her situation.
‘I just think you have to see the bigger picture,’ she explained. ‘You once loved and cared about that person, don’t let your anger and your hurt become the thing that you take forward and destroy you.
What you have to take forward is that sense of you loved that person and you’re a good person because you loved them and you cared for them.
That’s who you are, you’re not just the other half of somebody who turned out to be gay.’
Steph’s Packed Lunch airs weekdays at 12.30pm on Channel 4.