Atticus   

Jake: OMG! Jessica found some old e-mails to a guy. She knows. What do I do now?

After I read the text message, my face must’ve flushed hot. I hadn’t said a word, but my friend Bill asked, “What just happened?”

The two of us were at breakfast with my friend Steve and three of Bill’s friends whom I’d just met. Jake’s news had stunned me.

I’d been warning him for months that this would happen, that women are far more cunning than men give them credit.

She is checking up on you, I had told him. They know when something’s wrong, but they don’t always let you know they’ve caught on. The two of you aren’t having sex, which she knows isn’t normal, a man lacking interest in physical intimacy.

But Jake insisted his wife had no inkling of an idea that her husband was having sex with men.

It turns out he was right. When she accessed his Yahoo! e-mail account – which she claimed she found when trying to find out where to take their two boys for soccer practice while Jake was out of town – she decided to take a look at the rest of her husband’s inbox.

That’s when she discovered the e-mails between Jake and Doug.

“I just need to know,” she said to him by phone, trying to contain her emotions, “whether you and this Doug have been having sex.”

Yes, he told her, we have. She erupted.

What he didn’t tell her was the two men had met at one of their sons’ soccer practices and had been getting together sporadically for months.

He also didn’t tell her he’d taken a day off work a couple of months ago to take a commuter train into the city, where he spent the day having sex with another man with whom he’d developed a friendship online.

“This explains everything,” she said. “There was more passion from you in those e-mails to Doug than anything I’ve ever gotten from you in all the years of our marriage.

“I could destroy you if I wanted to do so. I won’t because I still love you. But I’m going to need you to make a decision on this,” she said. “You’re either going to be with me and never look back or you’re going to take this path of self-destruction.

“If you choose me and then venture into this again down the road, I’m gone.”

I met Jake online four months ago. We live thousands of miles from one another but became friends by phone and e-mail because we grew up so similarly: Southern Baptist, big Southern public university graduates, small-town sensibilities and involvement in church. Our age difference is only a year.

I was the only gay man with whom he’d spoken who didn’t try to convince him to leave his family and embrace his sexual orientation. Instead I helped him weigh the pros and cons, to see both options as best as he could.

After our many discussions, he decided, though admittedly a gay man, he wanted to stay with his wife and sons and lead a life committed to them. Now things have gotten complicated.

I know the road he faces. Soon Jake will enter into a reparative therapy program. He will have accountability partners. And he will be instructed to break ties with anything from his previous experiences involving homosexuality.

That termination will include me.

I found out today that Jake told Jessica about our friendship. She said God used me to help him. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I helped save a marriage. But maybe I just aided in delaying the inevitable. Only time will tell.