By Anonymous, as told to Jessica Kowal

updated 2:00 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2008

"You have chlamydia," my obstetrician told me as I lay on the examining table, six months pregnant with my fourth child. "You've got to talk to your husband." I was in total disbelief. "This is impossible," I protested. "We're both monogamous." But of course I knew that wasn't really true, and the doctor's words forced me to finally acknowledge what I'd suspected for a long time: My husband was most likely gay.

When I confronted my husband, Chris (not his real name), with my test results that night, he denied he was to blame. "They've got to be wrong, or I must have picked up something in the gym," he insisted. "I haven't done anything wrong." Instead of arguing about how I felt or figuring out how I wanted to handle the larger issue, I focused on what I needed at that moment — to take medicine and get healthy — much as I had throughout our rocky marriage. It took a few more days of wrenching confrontation for our marriage to disintegrate. When Chris spoke to a health official who called to check on me (my case had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta), he realized our baby was at risk for premature birth and newborn pneumonia, and he became hysterical, as though he were having a nervous breakdown.

That evening, after we'd watched our three children play on the lawn of our home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he curled into a fetal position on a porch chair and admitted more than I ever wanted to know: He had been having anonymous sex with men. "I don't know how this could have happened," he stammered. "It's nobody that I knew ... it was mostly oral sex ... it just happened...; At gay bars, there are back rooms with holes in the walls..." A wave of nausea swept over me as I listened to his agonized confession. But I kept quiet and thought, I've held up as long as I could. And I am done. With. You.

I was 30 years old when this happened, and Chris and I had been married for 11 years. We looked like the perfect family in our Christmas card portrait. Both of us grew up in the small-town South, and Chris was in the military. Yet I finally understood that our entire married life, except for our children, whom we both loved completely, was built on a falsehood. At that moment, I felt as if I were standing alone in the world, stripped of all dignity, with a big sign on me that read idiot.

The movie "Brokeback Mountain" turned a spotlight on gay men who lead double lives, having sex with other men while they are married to women. But that film only scratched the surface of their wives' miserable experience. When I saw the movie, I started to cry as I watched Ennis, the young cowboy played by Heath Ledger, wed his sweetheart even though he'd been involved with another man. I wanted to scream: "It is such a lie! Don't do it!" My mind flashed back to my own wedding day, when I was the virgin bride standing before family, friends and a minister. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

This kind of union happens more often than people may think; research done by University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, Ph.D., estimated that between 1.5 million and 2.9 million American women who have ever been married had a husband who had had sex with another man. That means there are a large number of women who have no idea what their husband does in secret.

We periodically see stories about married men in public life who are gay or have been implicated in homosexual behavior — such as Senator Larry Craig (R–Idaho), who was arrested last summer for allegedly soliciting a male police officer in an airport bathroom, and former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, who proclaimed that he was a "gay American" when he announced his resignation from office. While the media focuses on the men, I watch their wives standing next to them and wonder about the suffering, lies, emotional confusion and rage that they may be living through. Because I've lived it all.

There are so many obvious questions for a wife like me: Didn't I realize he was gay? Did I ignore red flags? And if I had suspicions, why didn't I confront him earlier or divorce him?

I suppose I was always suspicious, but I was in denial. Early in our relationship, Chris told me he'd had homosexual experiences as a teenager but assured me it was youthful curiosity. I didn't think there was anything wrong with being gay — I have an openly gay cousin. And I didn't care what went on behind others' closed doors. But I also didn't believe that a gay man would ever be attracted to a straight woman, and I was naive — too naive to see why a homosexual man would marry and spend years lying to his wife, his friends, his family and himself.

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