In today’s episode, Aideen discusses how growing up in an extreme Christian cult primed her for marrying a closeted gay man. The intersection of that religious prohibition against homosexuality and her own lack of education and experience with men (as dictated by the purity standards of the community), understandably resulted in her own mixed orientation marriage, which fell apart after years of abuse, gaslighting and denial.

In Aideen’s own words: “My religious background set me up for the straight spouse experience. I joke that I was so clueless about gay men that I wouldn’t have known a gay man if he stood at the altar with me. There were loads of gay men and women in the cult, and 100% of them were closeted, because it was a sin, and it was supposed to be wrong. And then you add to that all of the heterosexual people are so sexually repressed and have such severe restrictions on their own sexual development and sexual expression, and you take those two things together and you are guaranteed to have mixed orientation marriages.”