3 weeks post-discovery — my husband's secret double life with men (we're a gay couple), is this salvageable?

I'm a gay man. Married ~5 years, together ~7 years, husband's secret double life just came out — how do I know if this is salvageable?

Husband (39, gay, Muslim, from a culturally conservative background re being gay) and me (42, gay, liberal values but believed in monogamy or at least discussed boundaries). We have been together since just before Covid in 2019.

Ten days ago, on a trip abroad, I discovered he's had a hidden sexual life running alongside our marriage — multiple secret accounts, encounters with other men ('professional' massage where he was nude, male masseur wasn't, non-professional casual massage exchanges in the nude, apparently only one in-person meetup for sexual contact, ongoing explicit chats/ sexting and nude image exchange across multiple platforms), going back an unclear length of time. He says it "only started this year," but the scale and sophistication of what he'd built makes that hard to believe. Admitted only to professional massages as his discretion throughout the whole relationship.

Since discovery: lots of trickle-truth (I've had to find almost everything myself), a written "disclosure" that still feels carefully worded to avoid full honesty, and now individual therapy has started for him with him asking to change this to a couples session in a couple of weeks.

Our sex life had been a long-standing problem before any of this — I always initiated, raised it repeatedly, nothing changed. I suspect a lot of our intimacy was obligatory on his side rather than desired.

He says he loves me and is committed to fixing this. But remorse mostly only shows up when I push for it, not unprompted. Day to day life has weirdly settled into a kind of uneasy normal.

I'm not making big decisions yet — just watching whether real change follows the words, or whether this is as much honesty as I'll ever get.

Has anyone been through something like this? What actually told you whether it was worth staying, and how long did it realistically take to know?

8 comments posted: Tuesday, July 14th, 2026