"My Wife Left Me for a Woman".

Tony Moore [*] was a young newlywed when his bride dropped a bombshell: She was a lesbian. Here he tells the traumatic tale of her betrayal.

I was 18 years old when I met my first girlfriend. Nina and I attended neighboring high schools in Idaho and shared friends and a love of music. And as two of the few non-Mormons in our neck of the woods, we hit it off right away. In 1992, we started going to the same university and soon began dating. After being together for less than a year, I asked Nina to marry me. I only wish I had known then what I know now: that Nina and I had more in common than music, friends, and school. We both had an attraction to women.

With a petite build and adorable blue eyes, Nina was by no means unfeminine. But looking back, I should have suspected that she might be insecure about her sexual orientation because she made a big point of being almost hyperheterosexual. At first, she would just drop sexual innuendos here and there. Eventually, she started making suggestive comments about men when we passed them on the street or in the mall, comments like "Check out the bulge in that guy's pants."

Not that this bothered me at the time. It felt great knowing that I didn't have to walk on thin ice around her and could be crass if I wanted. One day on campus, though, she went beyond what I thought I could handle. At this point, we had been dating for almost seven months. It seemed a couple of guys in one of her classes had been flirting with her, and she wanted to know if I thought it would be okay if we started sleeping with other people.

"Are you kidding?" I asked. "I've been pouring my heart into this relationship, and you're asking me if we can fool around with other people?" Inside, I panicked because I had really become dependent on Nina and didn't want to lose her. She was the first woman ever to pay attention to me. I was in love with her, and while our sex life thus far was timid and cautious--we both still lived with our parents and commuted to school--I was enjoying it. So when Nina suggested that we see other people, I tackled the problem by asking her to marry me. She said yes right away.

Mystery in Our Marriage

We were married in June 1993 in a ceremony that was completely traditional, down to the horse-drawn carriage, but our life took a nontraditional turn. Soon after we found a place to live, Nina became very sexually aggressive. One night while driving home, she suggested that we stop by an adult video store, where we rented the first of many erotic movies that became a routine part of our love life. She especially enjoyed the scenes that included more than one woman. Disregarding what should have been the second hint about her sexual orientation, I just thought, Whoa, this is cool. I have a kinky wife.