10 ms·

Ouch. This hits incredibly hard. I’ve been this dad who sits frozen at the TV every evening. I had the affairs with the emotionally unavailable men, and became

• crossroadsguy 11mo ago
  I have heard this play out too many times. Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a divorce— out of question. Her point was if she had to do all this, why would she have agreed to a marriage in the first place! It was to get society off her back and her parents. Well, he filed for divorce, and it resulted in false dowry cases (yes, it's that part of the world), cruelty.. a long list. He was in lock-up for almost a month and a half, his almost 80 father and 70 mother was in a case of beating her up - (they met her exactly once – two days after marriage for a day when they went to his native village and after that they barely even talked to her on phone when they came back to they city they worked in), he lost almost everything he had, and finally, he just broke down in court and, against his lawyer's advice, just told the judge to give her whatever the judge wanted and just grant him a divorce. This was after almost three or four years of struggle. This guy is damaged now. We were in two sports team together in the college. One of the gentlest people I know. He had a minor stroke recently. He has sleeping issues. He is still fighting to just stay alive. It's difficult for him to get jobs because there's police record against him. He worked for a major MNC bank and he was fired summarily. No, this is not an isolated cruel example of extreme and from the hinterland of the world - this is an example of people fucking others over, mercilessly. No, this is not fighting to stay afloat in the water. It's like kicking someone off the boat because they were closer to the life jacket on the boat by few feet of another available lifeboat that the person could have taken instead. No, it's actually worse! I am sorry for how the world treated you and him, but no, fuck no! Life fucked him – or could have fucked him, so he gets to fuck others, right? Awesome! > but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person. No, he is a bad person! Ffs.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • woodpanel 11mo ago
    [flagged]
  • geoffmanning 11mo ago
    > No, he is a bad person! Ffs That is quite the judgement of a person you've never known, based solely on the view of one person's brief writing processing a deeply emotional experience. Your judgement reflects poorly on you.
    • l2silver 11mo ago
      There's too much apologizing for people's horrible actions these days. Nearly everyone is a sympathetic character when you get to know them, but that doesn't excuse them. There were other people, in his situation, who took different approaches that didn't result in locking a woman away in a loveless marriage for her entire life. I'm sure a lot of us come from easier situations, but the people who come from hard situations will probably tell you, yeah, it was hard, it was horrible, but he didn't have to do that.
      • geoffmanning 11mo ago
        I'm not apologizing for anyone's actions. This is not to say he is a good person. It is to say that there isn't enough evidence to judge one as a bad person. A lot of good people have made bad choices, and these writings reflect a mere sliver of a man's life choices from the very thin perspective of one person's grief laid bare.
        • schneems 11mo ago
          I agree. To me, it's like a blameless retro. You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once. The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding. I think the last line makes that clear: > the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well And it's not to say someone can't attach judgement to characters, or that no one should hold blame. But I think it's important to honor what the author is seeking.
• ycombinete 11mo ago
  Have you read John Cheever’s diaries? It’s the same story. I can’t really get into his fiction, but the diaries are astounding. He gave them to his son to read and publish posthumously.
  • pavlov 11mo ago
    Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to read that!
• anal_reactor 11mo ago
  My father had an affair, with a woman. It came to light but remained contained within the family. My parents are still married. The whole situation taught me that life is complicated and sometimes situations that seem morally obvious on the surface can actually be very difficult and have lots of nuance. When I was a teenager I dated a married man. On paper it's easier to explain "gay dude in a homophobic society" but in reality, he was an asshole and a coward. No empathy for him.
  • caminante 11mo ago
    This is the sober take. People will try to explain away all kinds of behaviors that violate trust a la "they'll never find out..."
    • lazide 11mo ago
      When a lot of dudes get murdered for it (historically, and currently in many places), there is also a pragmatic aspect. I agree on the immoral part, but I’ve seen so much immoral behavior over the years this seems (relatively) mellow. If you’re in the medical field, you see some wild stuff.
      • caminante 11mo ago
        I know what you're saying, but pragmatic doesn't apply here. We're talking about secretly dating a teenager while married with children. This is more than serving "societally taboo" urges on a transactional basis.
        • lazide 11mo ago
          Hey, at least the teenager didn’t get pregnant, and wasn’t related? (Cringe, I know) And also seems pretty consensual, despite the age difference. Also, no one got murdered or blackmailed to cover it up apparently? Or even bullied into leaving town? Any small town has half a dozen or more of these types of stories.
• JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  I wasn't in any way judging the father harshly when I read it. I also read between the lines that there was additionally "traditional Asian culture" as another factor. I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union", but I can easily imagine that it was his wife's desire. A very sad story in general. I lost my mom a few years ago and I suspect I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.
  • mallets 11mo ago
    Having kids is half the reason (or more) for such marriages, nothing completes the nuclear family picture quite like it. And not like it's easy for gay couples in accepting environments to have kids either, surrogacy is banned in most countries ("liberal" ones too, US is kind of an exception here) and adoption is nigh impossible. Some countries like Italy go as far as selectively making both illegal, but only for gay couples. I would say many asian parents care very little about the partner, as long as they get their grandkids. A mix of that and "what would society think".
    • WheatMillington 11mo ago
      Where did you hear that surrogacy is banned in most places outside the USA? That's just not true, and I suspect you've been indoctrinated with more US-exceptionalism. Surrogacy is not banned in the UK, Australia, NZ, much of Europe, Iran, much of Asia, etc.
      • mschild 11mo ago
        Surrogacy is illegal in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Finland, and Turkey. Also banned in China, some states in the US and Québec. Thats a pretty hefty chunk of the worlds population. A lot of other countries also have a limbo status where there is either no clear law making it illegal but put so many hurdles up that its impractical. Some countries, like Italy, also make it illegal for Italian citizens to go abroad to a country where it is legal and then do it there.
      • mallets 11mo ago
• arkitct 11mo ago
  pavlov: Thank you for sharing!
• armchairhacker 11mo ago
  I see his actions as immoral (not as much as most violence) but could seem justified to a person in his circumstances with reasonable moral judgement. He grew up in a social environment where coming out as gay would make everyone around him sad and angry/ashamed at him. But he was gay, intrinsically. Eventually (possibly because of societal acceptance, possibly because he decided total suppression wasn’t worth it), he secretly broke his traditional relatives and friends’ trust by acting gay. Something most people today see as justified. But he also broke his lovers’ trust by having multiple affairs, something most people today see as unjustified. A caveat is that he didn’t even confide in his daughter, who is gay; he didn’t file for or allow divorce, to make things easier for his wife; and perhaps he should’ve noticed that, in the changing times, being gay became acceptable but not cheating. Again, I don’t think he was right, and I can imagine a different person in his position handling the moral disconnect better for his family, who I believe he still cared about. But my understanding is that being gay is really taboo in some cultures, and has been in many more even a couple decades ago, so I can understand him being really suspicious and assuming those taboos held more strongly for more people. In which case to him, doing anything gay was setting up emotional damage to many people, and every affair was just setting up damage to one more person.
  • kronicum2025 11mo ago
    > He grew up in a social environment where coming out as gay would make everyone around him sad and angry/ashamed at him That's the good case. The bad case would be he would lose his job, and be forced into poverty.
  • moravak1984 11mo ago
    It is incredibly hard to judge actions taken in the past with a values system from the present.
• billy99k 11mo ago
  "Before you judge the man in this story too harshly" I will judge him harshly. Instead of getting a divorce, he emotionally abused his wide and child, which probably means therapy for the child for life. He's a selfish asshole, that doesn't think about anyone but himself. He also could have brought diseases back home to his wife (Just hearing the stories of his selfishness, he would have kept this hidden or not even gotten tested at all). "The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you." This is the worst case scenario. He could have gotten a divorce, and lived the life he wanted. This guy deserves zero sympathy.
  • pavlov 11mo ago
    It’s really easy to prescribe what other people should do when you don’t have to walk a yard in their shoes.
    • Drupon 11mo ago
      Most of are out here in our own shoes walking home faithfully to our own spouse. The man in the story neglected his own spouse and CHILD to go and spend time with another partner. I understand not being warm and loving toward a wife you were forced to marry, even if I also know it means you're punishing her on top of the fact that she's dealing with the same thing. To ask her own family to verbally abuse her into not divorcing you so that you have the LUXURY of staying closeted and hooking up with various partners during the height of the AIDS epidemic. But to treat your child as worth nothing to you like this man did is a disgrace. I'm glad the author isn't taking it personally. Imagine growing up effectively without a father because another man has taken all of his affection away from you and your family.
  • msteffen 11mo ago
    Not to mention the partner who he made move to another country and then still wouldn’t tell anyone about. The more I think about this post the more insanely controlling the guy seems!
    • Drupon 11mo ago
• agumonkey 11mo ago
  I rarely judge people in these situations (sexuality or whatever the reason, there's a million different way to get stuck in a false life due to social pressure, "weakness" [aren't we all at times?]...) I'm just floored by the misery most people go through, the misery we inflict on each others... it's not easy to bold, to be free, to be you.
• nobodyandproud 11mo ago
  At 57, that means he entered university during the early to mid 1980s. That was peak AIDS phobia (for good reason), and the anti-gay rhetoric was also at its peak. There was a lot more to lose coming out during those days, beyond just marriage and family cold-shoulders. By good reason, I mean people were panicked because people didn’t know which activities could spread the virus. Anyone else remember toilet seat fears?
  • yanslookup 11mo ago
    Describing it as "good reason" is something. But I don't think you meant it that way. For anyone reading that wasn't around it was very much an irrational hysteria. The bigots latched on to it to spread fear and justify their dehumanization of gay people. There were people that tried to bring reason and science to the conversation but they were drowned out by the panic/bigotry. There was no good reason for the AIDS phobia in the 80s.
    • nobodyandproud 11mo ago
      I knew as I wrote that someone would feel compelled to respond. Too late to unwind. It’s only in hindsight and it wasn’t just bigots. Safer sex as we know it today was directly from the AIDS scare. AIDS was no less than a death sentence. It was incurable, untreatable, and the cancer after-effects were pretty nasty. Broad research and public transparency took a long time to take hold and that left regular people speculating for years. Even medical doctors turned away suspected AIDs patients, because everyone was pretty scared. For a bit, even as a kid I remember it being on par or scarier than nuclear war because so much was unknown.
• snapplebobapple 11mo ago
  Once i realized he was gay and chinese it just read how i expected it would go for most in that situation and time period. I am not gay, traditional, chinese or quite as old (probably i am 15 years younger than the gay dad) but i hope i would pull it off as well as he appears to in that situation. He raised only minorly messed up kids, managed to find a little of what his heart felt was love. Biggest fail was not finding a lesbian in the same situation to pull this off together and avoid the lieing and resentment and pain caused to the other partner from a marriage only known to be a sham to one party.
• ericmcer 11mo ago
  You can extrapolate this on to anyones life, not just someone with such a huge and dramatic secret they were hiding for the stability of their family life. If your parents get old/sick or you have kids or a bad relationship or you get stuck in a job or any other myriad life events occur, the weight of your own days can suddenly drain so much time and energy that years fly by. Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
  • ta9000 11mo ago
    And this is why society is going to shit. “Live free, no regrets” has to be one of the most narcissistic memes I’ve ever heard of. If a person commits to a partner and/or a family, they shouldn’t just hit the reset button because they’re bored or upset with how life turned out. Talk to your partner. Tell them the truth. It’s wild that this has to even be said. Obvious caveats for abuse or depression, but come on. Have some grit.
    • senordevnyc 11mo ago
      No one advocated for anything you're railing against.
      • ta9000 11mo ago
        > Suddenly you wake up in an aging body and your ideal life seems far away. As I get older I kind of understand the people who just flee their lives. Being saddled with responsibilities you never wanted you are forced into choosing to either strangle your own desires or be perceived as a terrible person for not fulfilling your societal obligations.
        • senordevnyc 11mo ago
          Recognizing that people face difficulties because of their responsibilities is not the same thing as encouraging them to abandon those responsibilities.
• gwd 11mo ago
  There's judging people, and there's judging actions. - Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this. - Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation. - Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country, stringing him along with the idea that someday you'll leave your wife and live with him, when in fact you intend neither to leave your wife nor to be exclusive: Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad. - You know your wife wants to start a new life with someone else. But that would make it harder to hide your current life. So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.
  • gritten 11mo ago
    >Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK In what world is this ever "OK"?
    • tomrod 11mo ago
      Several cultures are okay with open marriage. Usually you have agreement between parties, however.
      • gdilla 11mo ago
        those aren't called affairs though. just relationships.
    • jjj123 11mo ago
      “OK” is an over-simplified word to use here. It’s incredibly complicated. And it changes with the era and location. If it’s illegal to be gay where you are, or if there literally is no societal understanding of gayness like in the 1700s or whatever where staying a single man is not always an option, I don’t think asking someone to be celibate their entire life is reasonable either. It’s still not _great_ but I don’t blame the individual as much as I do society. Now, the 90s are a different time than the 1700s, and I do think it’s a bit selfish and myopic to think that having affairs in a marriage is your only option. But if I’m being honest, as an out gay person who strongly considered staying in the closet forever, I understand and can empathize.
• mgh2 11mo ago
  He placed duty, responsibility (family) above passion, choice (romance)- although not perfect, there should be some respect in that.
  • moravak1984 11mo ago
    He did the best he could with the information he had at the time. Yes, it is sad, and it may even feel more a "selfish" life in many ways in a "modern" society. (I would say "Western" but that would include the retrograde, homophobic dictatorship the US is currently).
• celloductor 11mo ago
  this was a man who had affairs but still refused to agree to a divorce initiated by his wife? so proceeded to be selfish anyway? times change, people can too and should take responsibility for themselves