i just found out after 6 months that our gap is not what i thought it was. it’s much bigger. and he has a family.

hi everyone. this is going to be a bit of a read so i apologize, but i really need some kind words and support. if you read this to the end, i will be eternally grateful.

i have been dating my lovely partner for an incredibly lovely 6 months. i’m 26 and i met him when i was 25. i am a bisexual trans masc / nonbinary guy comfortable with being both feminine and masculine, he is bisexual and truly embraces every part of me. the queer nature of our relationship is a huge strength for both of us, so i’ve included it for context. queer relationships can often move a lot faster. we have yelled at each other, seen the worst of each other, and every single time we have helped each other pick up the pieces and try again together. we are both hurt people. we’ve weathered huge miscommunications, boundaries disrespected, all sorts of things. in my eyes, i have loved through the good, bad and ugly.

it was electric from the beginning, we started thinking we would be fwb / (kink) play partners and it quickly snowballed into us falling deeply in love for each other within a couple months of meeting. neither prepared for it at all because we were both used at keeping sex emotionally at a distance and for ‘play’, but both of us were willing to put in the work because we understood the intense love we felt. neither one of us had ever dated more than a few years outside of our age and never really were looking to, our souls just met and did the rest. we live 3 hours apart, work opposite work schedules and do everything we can to see each other every other weekend. we’ve talked seriously about me uprooting my life and moving closer to him and transferring my shitty job because all of my immediate family is states away (i’m the only one left in our hometown) and i have nothing to lose. he has definitively told me he wants a future with me.

4 months into our relationship i had a complete meltdown crisis at work, had to take leave, and was diagnosed with both childhood PTSD (i was mercilessly abused since i was a child regarding my gender expression and sexuality) and autism. what a hurdle. i’ve had to relearn myself. he’s spent a lot of this time supporting me emotionally, setting me up with a therapist that has helped me make huge emotional strides in my life, helping me pay for it, and helping me through hours, days, & weeks of intermittent tears and confusion. he’s a good person. however, every time i shared what i went through as a kid, he would freeze and get SO ANGRY at my parents for what happened to me. (i have a decent, but still unsupportive relationship with one, the other is a deadbeat meth addict.) i never quite understood the pure anger but i felt his love. i also felt comfortable enough to give my whole story fairly quickly given the circumstances since he was able to shoulder it and help me. this quickly set us on a course where he knew almost everything about me, but i honestly didn’t know a ton about him.

my partner has a heart of gold but is quite an anxious person. he always worries that i am going to judge him and he has a very negative and self-hating internal monologue. he has endured a lot of past relationship abuse (as have i) and we can both be a bit anxiously attached and afraid to lose each other, but we are intentional and kind with one another and i have never more than gently pushed him to share things until recently. around the 6 month level in july, i started to be anxious about some things he wasn’t sharing. for example, he didn’t want me to see his home. (as he was previously a single male, i thought it was perhaps a cleanliness problem. depression happens to the best of us and he has a history of it. this will be relevant later) but the important part!! at some point in the first amazing six months of our relationship, i had gotten a number in my head — i genuinely can’t even remember where, but i know for a fact he didn’t lie and say it to my face. i remember him telling me he was a child of the 80’s and gen x. i spent a lot of the first few months trying to find out things about him on my own that he was scared of sharing. another example is he never told me his last name, i found it from his packages he’d send to my place. things like that. i was okay with things like that for the first few months, i figured he’d come around when he was ready. i never dug for his facebook or any socials tbh, never went through his phone, never did any of that. to me it felt dirty.

so i got the number wrong. in my head, he was 48 right around the time i turned 26, so in my head we had a 22 year gap, and i verbalized this ‘22 year gap’ a lot. he is not great with ages and years and has often forgotten exactly old i am a few times (usually off by a year or two.) 22 years apart!! challenging, but workable. i searched this sub constantly for situations close to ours for advice because i wanted to do everything right. i felt good about our gap.

saturday he sat me down and told me that he has been doing me a disservice and avoiding some very important conversations, and he said he would understand if i reached out and slapped him and told him never to come back. (i would never.) we probably quietly talked, cried, and held each other’s hands for 8 hours with small breaks for snacks and food and restroom.

after we filled in every gap we’d skipped over — turns out he is 57. he was not quite a ‘child’ of the 80’s i assumed like my own mother. he had just barely come into his adulthood, it was his formative years. another miscommunication :(. he is gen X, just the older side. our age gap is 31 years. he is 4, nearly 5 years older than my mother and 3 years older than my (gone) father. the gap is bigger than my age. he never once lied to my face, but he also never corrected me because he was terrified of scaring me off. i also learned why he wanted to share very little about his life at home, and it was NOT cleanliness or hoarding — it also turns out he has two lovely kiddos, 22 and 19 (oldest is applying to med school and phd programs and skipped several grades. his autistic youngest is special needs, a little behind, but capable of a normal life with support and my partner has taken countless measures to raise him in a supportive, loving environment. i’ve been screaming my). my partner is still living with the mother of his kids, married, who is verbally abusive, intimacy has been gone and he’s been playing in the kink scene for for several years (how we met), but the biggest cog in the wheel is his spouse has reoccurring cancer and one can not exactly pack up and leave in that scenario, especially with a kid at home that needs him.

he loves those kids more than anything in the world, and the way he saw his life going was as soon as they flew the nest he’d get divorced and give up and just life his life alone and focus on his kids and making the best out of the time he had left, and then i crashed right into it and everything changed. i was so excited to have met i never really probed for basic information out of an abundance of caution regarding making him comfortable and meeting him where he was. it was the perfect storm, and he’s spent the last few months with this snowballing guilt unable to find an opportunity to speak out, especially while i have needed so much support myself in the last few months with my diagnosis and treatment and the whole nine yards.

this is where i might be stupid and making a huge mistake. i still love him. i feel better knowing what is happening in his life, while simultaneously processing the pain that i felt due to feeling misled and i wouldn’t have we spent a lot of time establishing that our baseline from now on was now honesty and direct communication. after feeling like i had 10% of his story for 6 months, i now have 100% of it after one weekend. i asked for it though, and i got what i wanted. he said if he really truly could, and there was nothing holding him back, he would take me to the courthouse tomorrow and tie the knot. we are that close. but he can’t yet. and it might be years.

to me the biggest feeling i’m feeling is not regarding whether what he did to me was okay. i’m past that. for better or for worse, i love him so much and we went about our conversation this weekend so intentionally and thoughtfully that forgiveness was the easy part. i cannot tell you how delighted i am to find out he is a GOOD DAD. he has done exactly for his lgbtq kiddos what i spent so long hoping for as a child, and i was met with constant, painful abuse it’s exactly why talking about my parents enraged him so much — it was effortless and second nature for him to love and accept his kiddos, especially ones he had with someone he never wanted to, and at the exact same point in time in our lives, i was being beat relentlessly for the exact same queerness. his daughter is going to med school and skipped grades despite adhd — i had no support and flunked out of college within a semester and have been just working enough to pay my rent with no life goals. the contrast is stark. he’s cried and told me he would’ve pulled me out of there so fast and would have taken care of me. i spent my young years waiting for a rescue that never came. i pulled myself out of there and made an okay life for myself alone.

of course he should have told me even though he was scared. i also i should have caught a clue. i should have looked him up. he’s grayer than you’d expect for someone in their late 40’s, my reference point being my mother. he’s got more soft wrinkles that tug at his eyes than my mother. his voice is wiser, older, more experienced. and i love every inch of him. i can’t stop. but dammit, it feels like i just lost 9 years, and what i thought was going to be an easy (as easy as it can be as two queer guys, 1 transgender, in an age gap relationship) journey where i moved close and we lived happily ever after, and now it’s truly sinking in that this is going to be incredibly complicated. but he affirmed to me he still wants our happily ever after, we just have to move carefully and have lots of things to work around.

so, so much of what i’m feeling right now is a mix of shock, surprise, a tiny bit of hurt, and worst of all — the fear of time running out. i feel like i just lost 9 years with him. 26 and 57 is a LOT. my grandmother was born in the 50’s. his father was born in 1911. i don’t require my mother’s approval for anything after what she did to me as a child, but it was hard enough for her to process that i was dating a man close to her age (i never gave numbers.). i’m going to tell her today and act like i lied to her. (i don’t want to demonize my partner any more in her eyes, and she absolutely will, because he’s the liberal older guy that’s enabling her confused ‘daughter’. i have been living as a guy for 12 of my 26 years.) his wife is hateful and has cancer. i also know for a fact that i would have been much too terrified to ever start dating him if i’d known he had a wife and kids and was over twice as old as me, but now that i’m here, i can’t even imagine letting him go. so in a way, i don’t even regret that he wasn’t immediately forthcoming. i guess i just wish he’d been forthcoming sooner so my brain didn’t start trying to fill in gaps incorrectly.

i guess the long story short — am i stupid for thinking we can still do this? i’ve never loved anyone more in my life and i’ve had plenty of experiences in both sex and relationships. i know for a fact what we have is different and he truly loves me so much that his biggest fear was he’d devastate me and that i might lock the door behind him and tell him to never come back. and he told me that he can’t any promises and he will refuse to let me wait forever for him to sort things out, but that we can work together towards a nice future.

i want this to work but i’m scared. scared about having a short life together, scared about being judged MORE (very large age gap, queer, trans, one of us is married, jesus fucking christ), scared about everything.

am i delusional?