Bonnie Kaye’s Straight Talk: A Collection of Her Best Newsletters About Gay Husbands. Bonnie Kaye

me. They wanted the pretty cheerleaders or the girls who radiated confidence. I was the girl who fell in love so often but always had her heart broken time after time when some girl who was prettier, thinner, or more graceful crossed my path. Ultimately, I was the girl who got left out. There were so many of us when I was growing up, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I wanted so badly to be someone worth loving, but that didn’t seem within my reach.

      For that reason, I made poor choices in relationships from early in the game. I just wanted to be wanted to badly, that I was willing to “settle” for guys, later men, who were not worthy of having a relationship with anyone. They were men who had value systems that were different than mine, but yet, my desperation kept me moving in their direction because they seemed more obtainable.

      In my mid-twenties, I was nearly 270 pounds and at five feet tall, I wasn’t long for the world. I began to care about living after having extensive chest pains, and started to lose weight. First I lost it in a healthy manner; then I developed an eating disorder when the healthy way just stopped working very well. Within 18 months, I lost approximately 130 pounds so I was feeling quite good about myself. I was never thin, but I was looking good, feeling good, and doing quite well in life. I was very vain at that point, and that was fine too. It was time for me to finally feel good about myself. Professionally, I was where I wanted to be, and personally, I was testing out the waters and looking for the right somebody to love.

      Maybe if I had married a wonderful supportive man, my selfesteem building process would have continued on an upward trend. But instead, I found a man who was downright cruel who used to find great pleasure in knocking me down whenever I dared to stand up to question any of his unusual behaviors. This was his way of fighting back. My ex wasn’t really a bad man, he was just a sad man. He was sad because his life was falling apart being married to me. He was lying all over the place to cover his tracks, and every time I would uncover just one little crack, he became so angry. He was trying to tie that web of lies together but I seemed to be untangling them faster than he could tie them.

      Rather than accept responsibility for his misactions, my ex would yell and scream about my inadequacies. He would magnify every molehill into a mountain when it came to my imperfections, making me believe that I was the awkward, gawky, overweight teenager all over again. I didn’t have enough “self-confidence” time accumulated to make me believe differently. After a while, I bought into all of the lies that my husband kept telling me about me as he shredded away the few good years of feeling good and reverted me back to my original form of feeling inadequate.