The girl i was dating came out as gay

If you’ve been in a relationship that has ended, you’re almost certain to have an “ex”: someone you were romantically involved with but aren’t any longer. Relationships with an ex-partner are among of the most complicated and delicate it’s possible for your average human to maintain, and there are countless sitcom plots exploring this.

There are good reasons for this. An ex-partner often represents a significant part of someone’s life being intimately linked with numerous experiences and important milestones (interpret that how you will). But they’re also often a source of serious emotional upset and unpleasantness, depending on why they’re an “ex”. Some break ups are amicable, but many aren’t at all. Hence, a lot of people dwell on an ex-partner, a process made considerably easier (and more worrying) with the advent of social media.

As a result, despite the ending of the relationship, what your ex does can still affect you. Ergo, there are countless thinkpieces and columns available on how to deal your ex finding a new partner, getting engaged/married, or even passing away. But there seem to be an increasing number of people baffled by their ex coming out as gay.

Many people have exes who end up coming out, e.g. me. Others have similar stories. So here’s a quick scientific guide to what to do if one of your exes comes out.

Don’t trust your memories

Your ex coming out may compel you to analyse your relationship, to see how you “missed” something as significant as incompatible sexual orientation. Fine in principle: it might prove frustrating for you, but at least nobody else is involved. Maybe this new information makes you interpret things in a new light. Maybe your ex-boyfriend was surprisingly fond of Lady Gaga? Maybe your old girlfriend did have more checked shirts than you’d expect? But these “glaring” clues are probably just confirmation bias coupled with unfair and exaggerated gay stereotypes you’ve picked up without realising.

The fact is your memory, the only real record of the minutiae of your relationship, isn’t going to be as reliable as you’d hope. There are so many inherent biases that change what we think we remember, especially for emotional things. You could end up tearing yourself up internally, obsessing over details that never really happened. That’s not fun.

You can probably ignore what your friends say

There’s no established etiquette yet for how to respond when someone informs you that their ex has come out. There’s no greeting card saying “Sorry your ex is gay now”. Why would there be? So if you tell your friends, they’ll just wing it. No doubt they’ve got the best of intentions, but you can probably ignore much of what they say. Things like “How come you didn’t know?” aren’t helpful; your partner was in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, so concluding they’re gay would have been a bit of a leap at the time.

My own personal favourite was a friend who, upon hearing that my ex-girlfriend had come out as a lesbian, asked me if I was “waiting for the call”. Turns out he meant the call to join them in their bedroom activities, suggesting he had failed to grasp both the terms “lesbian” and “ex-girlfriend”.

It’s nice when people try and be supportive, but you can probably just nod and smile at them in this context.

Don’t worry that it was “your fault”

Numerous people (in my experience) seem to worry that they were in some way “responsible” for their ex coming out. Some are joking, others are not.

Either way, it’s probably nonsense. The factors influencing someone’s sexual orientation are incredibly complex, and there’s no sexual orientation bell that goes off in someone’s head when they reach sexual maturity, like an oven alarm telling them the pie is baked. Human sexuality is very confusing: we know it’s not a conscious choice, but exactly what does determine it is very varied. Social factors, genetics, upbringing, experiences, physiology are all thrown into the mix.

You’d have to be extremely reprehensible indeed to provide such an odious example of your sex that you turn someone off it forever, and such people are rarely prone to introspection, so the fact that you’re worried about it shows you can’t be all that bad.

Accept that it’s not actually about you

Society, while improving, is still not exactly as tolerant of homosexuality as it could be, to the extent that coming out is still a very big (and potentially traumatic) deal, so it’s no wonder that many put it off or don’t realise until well into adulthood, or can only truly be honest with themselves at a later point in their lives. Hence they end up in heterosexual relationships.

Regardless of your feelings, your ex coming out is something that happened to them, not you. If your ex gets in touch with you, fine. If they don’t, also fine. The ball’s in their court on this one. It may feel weird, realising you’ve shared intimate moments with a gay person, but if so, ask yourself why. This may require some evaluation of your own views and beliefs, so no need to involve your ex. They’ve probably got enough going on right now without having to deal with your angst.

Do you really need to do anything?

Your ex is gay. So what? The best thing about being an ex is that, typically, you no longer have any obligations regarding your former partner’s situation. It may well be the case they’d prefer you didn’t get involved with their life at all. If they come out, that is officially their business. It’s hard to think of anything that would be more their business. So why do anything at all? Why does this article even exist? Is there really that little going on since the Pluto images? What’s the point?

The point is that, despite it being the most logical option, doing nothing might be difficult. A big chunk of your personal experience may now feel like it’s “changed”. What you were previously certain of is now not so certain, and the human brain doesn’t really like uncertainty. As a result, people can feel compelled to analyse old memories or get new information, meaning staying indifferent can actually require effort. But it’s probably worth it in the long run if you can manage it.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone, or even most people, probably. We’re especially not talking about the particularly traumatic examples. Sexual repression often manifests in seriously ugly ways, and someone constantly battling their own desires due to socially-imposed sensibilities can end up deeply resenting and lashing out at those who care about them, i.e. those they’re in a relationship with. Mistreatment, abuse and mental anguish are a whole different ballgame, regardless of whether repressed sexual orientation was a factor.

But for the more casual or less traumatic breakups where a former partner comes out as gay (or Bi, or Trans, or anything else of this nature) there are a number of emotions and feelings that are likely to occur, so recognising and anticipating this is just one way to make life easier for everyone.

Dean Burnett doesn’t have any issue with his ex’s coming out and even got her to sign off on this piece before publishing to prove it. He’s on Twitter, @garwboy