The realisation

The morning I knew, I was 47, in a hotel room in Melbourne, and I had been awake for two hours watching the ceiling change colour as the sun came up. Nothing dramatic had happened the night before. A work dinner. A walk back through the city. A man I'd spoken to at the bar for forty minutes. We hadn't done anything. Then I'd gone back to my room alone and slept badly, and at five in the morning I admitted to myself a thing I had spent thirty years not quite admitting.

I am writing this for the man reading this in his own version of that hotel room. Whatever room you are in. Whatever age you are.

You do not have to do anything today.

That is the first thing I would tell you. The instinct in the first week is to do everything at once. The realisation feels like an emergency, and your nervous system is treating it like one. It isn't. Another ninety days won't change what's true.

What the moment is, and what it isn't

The moment looks different for different men.

Some men have always sort of known. The realisation isn't really a realisation; it's a refusal that finally collapsed.

Some men genuinely didn't know. Forty-five years of believing you were straight, and then a chance encounter, and the floor moves.

Most men are somewhere in between.

None of these versions makes you a liar. The man who marries at 24 with a quiet sense that something doesn't quite fit, and then loves his wife for twenty years anyway, has not deceived her. He has done what most men do, which is take the version of the truth he could see and try to live a decent life around it.

The decision not to decide

For the next ninety days, you make no decisions.

Not about the marriage. Not about telling her. Not about telling anyone. You sit with what you now know, you find a therapist, and you let the first wave of the realisation pass through you before you do anything that can't be undone.

Three reasons:

• The first wave is the loudest, and the loudest wave is rarely the most accurate.
• You don't yet know what the actual question is. Is it sexuality? The marriage? Intimacy?
• The people around you will live for the rest of their lives with what you do in the next year. They are owed a man who has thought about it, not a man who panicked.

What the ninety days actually look like

You go to work. You come home. You see your kids. You eat dinner. From the outside, very little changes.

You find a therapist. You let yourself read about other men who've been through this without converting it into a plan. You don't sign up to dating apps. You don't tell your closest mate over a beer.

The shame, briefly

There will be shame. Almost all of it is unjustified.

You did not lie for twenty years. You lived the version of the truth you could see. You did not trick a woman into marrying you. You raised children you wanted, in a family you built.

The cultural inheritance most men carry about being gay is a generational weather system that landed on a million men. You are not the first. You will not be the last.

Notice the shame. Don't argue with it. Don't act on it.

Sit with what's true. Tell no one. Decide nothing.

Further watching

• Alan Downs author of The Velvet Rage speaks on shame and more
• It All Adds Up — SunSmart, Cancer Council SA