By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
Ask most people what happens to a relationship after one partner comes out, and they'll describe an ending, sometimes a slow one, sometimes sudden, but an ending all the same. Nobody tends to picture what happens in a lot of the couples I see. Two people, some months on, arguing about whose turn it is to do the school run, irritated with each other over something small and ordinary, still together. The coming out itself is now a fact of their history rather than the live crisis it once was. That picture doesn't get told as a story anywhere, because there's nothing dramatic in it. It's just a relationship, continuing.
Mixed orientation relationships get less attention than they probably deserve, and what little attention they do get tends to arrive framed as either tragedy or curiosity, rarely as the ordinary, workable thing many of them turn out to be. This piece is for the couples in the second camp, the ones who've decided, or are trying to work out whether, staying together is genuinely right for them, not because they're avoiding a harder truth, but because it might be true. If you are the partner who has just learned something and is still reeling, I have written a separate piece, Is my partner gay?.
In brief
Many people assume these relationships must end. Couples in them often meet that assumption from others, and it can do damage.
The research on these relationships is limited, so I will tell you what it shows and where it runs out.
In one study, relationship commitment was the strongest single predictor of relationship quality among people in these relationships.
Who you tell, and in what order, is worth deciding together.
Adjusting takes time, and I cannot give you a reliable timescale, so be wary of anyone who does.
Couples therapy can help whatever you decide, including if you decide to separate.
Staying together isn't a failure to properly separate
Two assumptions tend to sit underneath most conversations about these relationships, and between them they do a lot of quiet damage to couples who are doing fine. The first is that the relationship is inevitably heading towards ending, and that staying together now is just delaying the obvious. The second is that whichever partner isn't LGBTQ+ must be settling, staying out of fear, financial dependency, or a kind of martyrdom dressed up as loyalty. Both assumptions are common, and neither is necessarily true.
Researchers have heard the same thing from couples. In interviews with 38 men and eight women in mixed orientation relationships in Israel, the men were non straight and in relationships with straight women. Participants mainly met negative attitudes from other people, and perceived that others saw their relationships in terms of conflict, impossibility or a transitional stage. These attitudes affected how close couples felt able to be to others, producing a constant tension between wanting to be open and close and needing to conceal and keep a distance (Adler & Ben Ari, 2021). If you have felt that everyone around you has already written the ending, you are not imagining it.
What do we know about couples who stay? In a study of 265 people, made up of 105 who experience same sex attraction while in a relationship with a partner of the other sex and 160 heterosexual spouses, relationship commitment was the largest single predictor of relationship quality, followed by partner focused forgivingness. Together with marital values, these accounted for roughly 43 per cent of the variance in relationship quality. The data were not dyadic, meaning the two groups were different people and not couples (Kays et al., 2014). It describes what was linked with relationship quality among people who were still in these relationships. It does not tell us how many couples stay together or how they fare over time, and I would be cautious of anyone who quotes you confident figures about either. What I see in the room is that outcomes vary a good deal, and that some couples do stay, and do well.
The martyrdom idea doesn't hold up any better on the evidence I can point to. A study of 142 mixed sex couples in which one partner identified as bisexual found that feelings that bisexuality is not a legitimate identity, and outness to family, were negatively associated with the sexual and relationship satisfaction of both partners, while intimacy was positively associated with sexual satisfaction for both. The authors concluded that it matters to acknowledge bisexual identity, even in long relationships, and to address the issues around it with couples (Mark et al., 2020). That is not a study of resignation. It is a study of people for whom acknowledging the identity, and the intimacy between them, was linked with satisfaction. It was cross sectional, so it shows associations and not causes, and it concerned couples in which one partner identified as bisexual and not every kind of mixed orientation relationship.
It's worth being precise about the difference between genuine choice and quiet resignation, because they can look similar from the outside and feel completely different from the inside. A partner who has truly chosen to stay can usually tell you why, in their own words, beyond simply loving the other person. A partner who is settling without saying so tends to describe the decision in terms of what they'd lose by leaving rather than what they'd gain by staying. That distinction matters more than whether the relationship looks conventional from the outside, and in my experience it's usually the first thing worth getting honest about in the room.
What the research can and can't tell you
You deserve to know how much of this is well researched, and the honest answer is not very much. A review of empirical studies of spouses in mixed orientation marriage, covering social science journals from 1988 to 2008, identified only 15 articles in eight peer reviewed journals (Hernandez et al., 2011). The authors of the commitment study I mentioned above also note that few researchers have studied this population, so understanding of these relationships is limited (Kays et al., 2014). The studies I describe come from different countries and different kinds of samples, and several are small or qualitative. They are best read as windows into people's experiences, and not as forecasts for any couple.
Who to tell, and in what order
There is something couples rarely think to plan for in advance, which is that who finds out, and in what order, changes the emotional weight of the whole process. The evidence I can point to is limited. In the bisexual identity study above, outness to family was negatively associated with satisfaction for both partners (Mark et al., 2020). That is an association, and it may reflect how families respond and not outness itself, so it is not a reason to hide anything. In interviews with people in mixed orientation marriages in Israel, researchers identified six different patterns of secrecy and openness, from complete secrecy to complete openness, and their findings challenged the idea that secrecy is always harmful and openness always helpful (Adler & Ben Ari, 2017). So there is no single right answer to how open to be.
What I can offer is my experience. In practice, it is worth deciding together, deliberately, who gets told and roughly when, rather than letting it unfold by accident or urgency. Friends who are likely to respond with curiosity rather than judgement are usually a safer place to start than family members who have made their views on sexuality known over the years. None of this is about permanent secrecy. It is about sequencing a difficult process so that the people most likely to make it harder are not the first ones in the room. And the partner who did not have anything to disclose often carries a disproportionate share of what comes back, so their wishes about who is told deserve real weight. If the person who is coming out is still working out what to say, coming out to your partner and Am I bisexual? may help.
For the partner who has come out
I want to say something to the partner who has come out, because it is easy to feel that your distress is not what anyone is asking about. In interviews with 16 gay and bisexual men in heterosexual marriages in Australia, participants described anxiety and depression, made worse by the stigma around same sex attraction and by overwhelming shame and guilt about infidelity in the marriage. The researchers concluded that coming out resolved the men's distress by allowing an integrated sense of self (Hopwood et al., 2020). That was a small interview study of men in one country, so it cannot speak for everyone. But it fits what I often see: that the relief of being honest can sit alongside real grief and real guilt, and that both deserve to be heard.
For the partner who has been told
If you are the partner who has been told, you are likely to be dealing with a lot at once. In a study of family members of people who came out after years in a heterosexual relationship, spouses felt shocked and angry and described the ground being pulled from under their feet. They also reported needing a range of support options, and found forums, counselling and the chance to talk with others helpful, though these were more accessible to women than to men. The study combined interviews with a German language survey of 188 family members, recruited through LGB+ online forums and organisations, so it describes people who went looking for support (Niedlich et al., 2022). If you are a man in this situation, it may take more effort to find that support, and it is worth the effort.
What changes, and what doesn't have to
Once a couple decides to stay together, the work rarely has one single approach or path. Most of what I do falls into three overlapping pieces, and which one dominates depends entirely on the couple in front of me.
The first is reworking what commitment means for the two of them specifically, rather than inheriting a definition neither of them chose. Monogamy was likely assumed rather than agreed when the relationship began, the way it usually is, and this moment forces a conversation that was probably overdue anyway. Some couples land exactly back where they started, monogamous, just now by explicit choice rather than default. That's a genuine outcome, not a consolation prize. Getting there usually means naming, out loud, what monogamy is protecting for each of them, security, simplicity, a particular vision of family, rather than assuming both partners mean the same thing when they use the word. Two people can use the word monogamy for years without ever having compared notes on what it rules in or out.
The second is deciding, seriously rather than reflexively, whether some form of opening the relationship fits them. This isn't the right path for every couple, and I'm careful never to steer anyone towards it as though it's the more evolved option. What tends to separate couples who explore this well from couples who struggle with it isn't the decision itself, but whether both partners are answering the same question. One partner wanting occasional acknowledgment of attraction and the other assuming full non monogamy is being discussed are two different conversations wearing the same words, and confusing them causes more damage than either option would on its own. For couples who do explore it, I have written about opening a relationship and what to think about before you do, the difference between open relationships and polyamory, what consensual non monogamy is, and, where the partner who has come out is a gay man, gay open relationships. Jealousy often comes up, and there is more in jealousy in non monogamous relationships.
The third, and the one people most underestimate going in, is managing the gap between how much has really changed and how much it feels like everything has. A single conversation can make a relationship feel unrecognisable overnight even when almost nothing about the day to day partnership is different yet. Part of the work is helping a couple notice that gap and not let the feeling of upheaval convince them the whole relationship needs rebuilding from scratch when most of it is still standing exactly as it was. This is often where the most immediate relief comes from in early sessions: not resolving the bigger questions, but simply confirming that the parts of the relationship that were working before are, for now, still working.
MMixed orientation relationships get less attention than they deserve
How long this tends to take
Couples tend to badly underestimate the timeline, expecting weeks to produce what often takes much longer. I have not found a reliable figure for how long it takes, and I would be cautious of anyone who offers you one with confidence, because it will vary with the couple, the history and the support around them. What I can say from my work is that couples who go in expecting a quick resolution tend to be harder on themselves and each other than couples who expect it to take time, and that is a good reason to be patient. In the sections above, the experiences researchers describe, such as shock, anger, grief and relief, do not follow a tidy schedule either.
The practical texture of an ordinary week
Couples who do well tend to stop treating the coming out as the headline of the relationship quickly, not because they've minimised it, but because a relationship has to keep running while the bigger questions get worked through. Bills still need paying. Someone still needs to pick up milk. The relationship's ordinary infrastructure, the division of labour, the friendships, the shared jokes, mostly survives intact, and in my experience couples who lean on that continuity tend to fare better than couples who treat every part of the relationship as suddenly up for renegotiation at once.
Where things do shift, it's often smaller and more specific than either partner expected going in. A particular kind of physical affection that needs renegotiating. A social circle that needs updating, and a decision about pace and order for that, which connects directly to the disclosure sequencing above. Sometimes a change to how the couple talks about their relationship to their own children, if there are any, which deserves its own careful thought rather than being folded into every other conversation happening at once.
Children tend to need a version of this conversation calibrated to their age rather than the adult version delivered wholesale. Couples often benefit from thinking through what to say together before either parent is asked directly, rather than improvising an answer in the moment. Older children usually cope better with straightforward honesty than with an atmosphere of obvious tension they aren't given any explanation for. What unsettles children is usually less the fact itself than the feeling that something significant is happening around them that nobody will name. These points come from my clinical experience, and I have not cited a study on this. If you are weighing up whether to stay together with children in the picture, I have written about whether to stay together for the kids.
Friendship groups shift in less predictable ways than family does. Some friends turn out to be far more capable of holding this news well than either partner expected, and some, including ones assumed to be entirely safe, respond badly enough to end the friendship. Couples sometimes describe this as one of the more disorienting parts of the whole process, discovering that who copes well and who doesn't rarely tracks with who they'd have predicted beforehand. It's rarely worth trying to guess in advance. The safer approach is watching how someone responds, once, before deciding how much further to bring them into the rest of it.
How therapy can help
As with any relationship work, I don't come into this work with a preferred outcome, staying together, separating, or opening the relationship up. Where I am most useful for clients is slowing the conversations down enough that whichever choice they make is one they've genuinely made, rather than the choice that happened to them because nobody paused long enough to properly consider the alternatives.
There is research on long term relationship satisfaction more generally that points to why the foundation matters. In a study of 300 mixed gender couples followed for 10 years, couples whose satisfaction was high at the start and stayed fairly stable reported the most favourable outcomes at the end, with more positive affect, better mental health and higher life satisfaction, compared with couples whose satisfaction was declining or lower (Roth et al., 2025). That study was not about mixed orientation couples, so it does not tell us how they fare. What I take from it is that the state of the relationship a couple brings into a hard conversation seems to matter, and that is something therapy can work on.
That foundation isn't fixed in place before therapy starts, either. Couples who arrive feeling like the ground has already given way underneath them are often able to rebuild a surprising amount of stability quite quickly, simply by having somewhere structured to have the conversations they've been avoiding or mishandling on their own. In my experience the instinct to wait until things feel calmer before seeking support usually works backwards. Support tends to be what creates the calm, not what follows once it's already arrived. More generally, a review of a decade of research on couple therapy concluded that it positively affects about 70 per cent of the couples who receive it (Lebow et al., 2012). That review was not about mixed orientation couples specifically, so I offer it as background and not as a promise. If you are wondering whether it is the right time, I have written about when to go to couples therapy and how to choose a couples therapist in London.
For couples who do stay together, the work doesn't stop once the initial crisis has passed, and I'd be doing them a disservice to imply it does. Revisiting the agreement, whatever shape it's taken, on purpose rather than only when something goes wrong, tends to be what separates the couples who stay well from the couples who stay resentfully.
I'd also gently push back on the idea that this work is fundamentally different from other couples therapy, because in most sessions it isn't. The specific content is less common however, the underlying task, helping two people communicate honestly, rebuild trust after a shock, and decide together rather than separately what they want, is the same work I do with couples navigating any major rupture. Treating it as an entirely separate category of therapy tends to isolate couples further, when what usually helps most is being reminded that plenty of relationships have weathered something this disorienting and come out the other side intact.
None of this comes with a guarantee, and it would be dishonest to pretend it did. Some couples do this work carefully, together, with real support, and still conclude that separating is the right outcome, and that's not a failure of the process either. What tends to matter most isn't which outcome a couple reaches, but whether they reached it deliberately, with enough time and enough honesty, rather than being carried towards whichever ending required the least difficult conversation along the way. If that is where you land, life after separation may be useful.
If you're navigating your way through this right now, from either side of it, and think that now might be the right time to get support from a therapist, I offer a free 30 minute consultation, in person in London or by video.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
Adler, A., & Ben Ari, A. (2017). The myth of openness and secrecy in intimate relationships: The case of spouses of mixed orientation marriage. Journal of Homosexuality, 64(6), 804 to 824.
Adler, A., & Ben Ari, A. (2021). Between mainstream and marginality: The case of men and women of mixed orientation relationships. Journal of Homosexuality, 68(11), 1813 to 1832.
Hernandez, B. C., Schwenke, N. J., & Wilson, C. M. (2011). Spouses in mixed orientation marriage: A 20 year review of empirical studies. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 37(3), 307 to 318.
Hopwood, M., Cama, E., de Wit, J., & Treloar, C. (2020). Stigma, anxiety, and depression among gay and bisexual men in mixed orientation marriages. Qualitative Health Research, 30(4), 622 to 633.
Kays, J. L., Yarhouse, M. A., & Ripley, J. S. (2014). Relationship factors and quality among mixed orientation couples. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 40(6), 512 to 528.
Lebow, J. L., Chambers, A. L., Christensen, A., & Johnson, S. M. (2012). Research on the treatment of couple distress. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 38(1), 145 to 168.
Mark, K. P., Vowels, L. M., & Bunting, A. M. (2020). The impact of bisexual identity on sexual and relationship satisfaction of mixed sex couples. Journal of Bisexuality, 20(2), 119 to 140.
Niedlich, C., Steffens, M. C., & Dieckmann, J. (2022). Reactions and feelings to a close relative's coming out in a heterosexual relationship. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 836428.
Roth, M., Landolt, S. A., Nussbeck, F. W., Weitkamp, K., & Bodenmann, G. (2025). Positive outcomes of long term relationship satisfaction trajectories in stable romantic couples: A 10 year longitudinal study. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 10(1), 8.
