My Husband Was Gay (And I Didn’t Know) - How Finding Out Led Me To Becoming A Sex Coach

My (ex) husband and I on our wedding day in January 2019.

Hi! I’m Sabina Wilde, a Sex and Intimacy Coach and former French & Psychology Teacher.

My work as an integrative sex coach weaves together the science of sex and pleasure, a deep understanding of pleasure anatomy, and a trauma-informed, nervous-system-led approach. I don’t believe in pushing, performing, or fixing. I believe in safety, pacing, and meeting the body exactly where it is.

This story has taken me six years to tell publicly.

It’s about the night I discovered my husband was gay and the five seconds it took for my entire life as I knew it to collapse. It’s also about what came after: the heartbreak, the identity rupture, and the unexpected path that led me back to my body, my desires, and myself.

Finding sex coaching was a turning point for me. It helped me understand pleasure not as something frivolous or sinful, but as a powerful way to reconnect with myself (mind, body, heart & soul). It gave me language for the damage of being unseen in intimacy, and it supported me to reconnect with my own desire after years of erasing it.

This post includes the full podcast episode embedded below, followed by the transcript for those who prefer to read. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

You’re welcome to listen, read, pause, or step away whenever you need.

Content note: This episode includes themes of emotional neglect, domestic violence, relationship rupture, and identity collapse, infidelity.

Podcast Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Sabina Wilde

00:34 What is an Integrative Sex Coach?

01:32 Understanding Pleasure as a Resource

02:51 Personal Journey: Marriage and Heartbreak

05:13 The Turning Point: Discovering the Truth

11:40 Rebuilding and Self-Discovery

12:47 The Role of a Sex Coach

16:18 Conclusion and Future Topics

You may also like: You’re Not Asking for Too Much: Wanting More Intimacy, Sex & Aliveness as a Woman and How Losing Everything Helped Me Find Myself

Full Transcript

Sex Coach and Educator: Introducing Sabina Wilde

Hi, my name's Sabina Wild, and I thought I'd just pop on here and introduce myself. I am not wanting to make this a podcast where I just talk. I do enough of that in my everyday life as a sex coach and a teacher, and a wife and friend and auntie, and all of the roles I play. This channel really is for my meditations and visualizations and other practices I wanna share with you as an integrative sex coach.

Integrative Sex Coaching: A Trauma-Informed, Nervous-System-Led Approach

You might be wondering, what is an integrative sex coach? So basically it's a sex coach that combines the science of sex and pleasure. As well as our incredible pleasure anatomy, understanding our bodies from a scientific perspective, while also combining it with a trauma informed lens. So really approaching this from a place of nervous system regulation and safety, and understanding that this work can only be done at your pace. So there's no pushing or force or emphasis on performance or hitting certain goals. We work with the individual with where they're at, and that's one of the things that makes this work so beautiful is that it's tailored to the individual.

Intimacy Sex Coach for Women: Understanding Pleasure as a Resource

The other aspect of this work that I absolutely love and are so passionate about is the pleasure aspect. So looking at pleasure. As a nervous system resource, and often we think of pleasure, we think of sex, or some of us, especially like myself, who come from a very Christian upbringing can really shy away from the word pleasure.

In fact, it can have connotations of being dirty or sinful and something that we feel shame about. And so when we understand that pleasure. It's actually a nervous system resource, and that pleasure isn't just sex or related to the sensual aspects of life, but can be having a beautiful tea outside in the sun.

It can be touching beautiful fabrics. It can be eating and savoring beautiful food, listening to an incredible piece of music. All of these things are examples of nonsexual pleasure, and all of these things help us become more connected to our internal pleasure. So I am just so passionate to be able to be bringing this work to women all over the world.

Marriage, Desire, and Feeling Invisible in Intimacy

I haven't always been a sex coach, but I have always been a teacher and now that I get to bring this work to the world. I am just so excited because six years ago I was in a marriage. We had been together for six and a half years by that point, and he no longer looked at me. He no longer wanted to touch me. I felt invisible.

I felt ignored. I was only 27, we'd only been married for a year, but together six and a half, and I felt like the ugliest woman in the world. I looked at women in the street and I just thought, oh my God, their partner is so into them. What do they have that I don't? And my part, my husband would say, oh, you'd be so much easier to love and to if you were kinder.

There was always some reason that I was difficult to love or difficult to be around, and it broke my heart. I wasn't even 30 and I was with a man that didn't wanna touch me. I was with a man who didn't even notice when I was naked and I was fucking beautiful. I had a metabolism that still worked perfectly, right!?

Desire Mismatch in Long-Term Relationships: Spontaneous vs Responsive Desire

I was in my prime and I was, feeling very sexual. I had a very high libido. I was ready to go anytime. We call that spontaneous desire. I'm someone that could be doing the dishes and then all of a sudden I'm like I could have sex right now! And most women don't have a spontaneous desire, and that's completely normal.

Most people have what we call responsive desire, where there's context and certain things have to fall into place before you feel turned on to the idea of sex. That's responsive. And 70% of women have responsive desire. So there I was with this raging libido, spontaneous desire, and a man that just wasn't very interested and it was heartbreaking.

Emotional Neglect and Self-Blame in Marriage

Instead of looking at him and thinking what's wrong with him, I just looked at myself and I turned on myself, I tried to point my finger at all the things are wrong with me and why I was broken. And it took another few months before things got really bad in our relationship.

It was COVID, it was May, 2020, and he was drinking a lot and we were both working from home mostly. And it was a really challenging time for couples all over the world. And I put it down to COVID, that we were stuck at home and it was very stressful and that's why things were getting worse when in actual fact.

Relationship Breakdown During COVID: Fear, Aggression, and Instability

But it was a whole lot worse than just COVID-19. And so one night we had a particularly bad fight and I was actually a little bit scared for my safety. He was so aggressive and he was screaming in my face and I was on the floor with my arms, around my knees protecting myself. And he'd never lashed out at me (physically), but I really felt like maybe he would this time. And so it was really terrifying. And after he stormed upstairs, I just sat there on the floor in tears and I was crying and crying.

Discovering Infidelity

And then finally the thought occurred to me, if he's not loving me, then who is he loving? I just dropped into my head this idea that love is an energy. It flows. So if the love was no longer flowing to me (because clearly it wasn't) it had to be flowing somewhere else. And so I went upstairs to check on him and he was so drunk that he had passed out. And so I felt around in his pocket for his phone and he was the person I trusted the most in the world.

I hadn't had anyone in my life that I had been able to depend on as much as him and. I trusted him so much and we had never, ever looked through each other's phones or computers before. I'd never had a reason to. And so I started to look through his phone. I knew his passwords 'cause, we had nothing to hide and, there was nothing in text messages, nothing in emails or phone calls.

Discovering the Truth: When I Realised My Husband Was Gay

And then I saw the Bumble app. I thought, oh, okay. We'd both actually downloaded Bumble six months earlier because a friend a year earlier had recommended it as a great way to find friends. So platonic friendships. And I downloaded it, I'd found it completely useless and I'd quickly deleted it. Anyway, he had it on his phone.

I thought, oh, okay. Interesting. Clicked on Bumble and sure enough the answer was there. And I was expecting to find messages from a woman, but in actual fact, I found messages from a man. And in that moment I read through the messages and I just knew, I was like, oh my God, my husband is gay. And literally in the space of five or 10 seconds everything collapsed.

Relationship Rupture and Betrayal of Intimacy

My entire life as I knew it ended. I just knew that I couldn't stay with this man. I couldn't be with a man who was gay. It didn't matter if he was going deny it or not. I could tell from those messages that he was gay because he spoke about intimacy. These fantasies of intimacy with another man that he had refused to experience with me and that's what hurt. It wasn't the explicit erotic chit chat that he was doing back and forth between this guy - it wasn't that. It was this story. He had this dream of lying in bed and resting his head on this other man's chest and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that is what I'd wanted to experience with him on my honeymoon. And he had refused that experience because he had told me it was wasting time. That lying in bed together was wasting time. And so that was what broke my heart was seeing the messages of him wanting to waste time in bed with this other man.

I Need A Divorce: The Moment Everything Ended

And in that moment I just knew, oh my fucking God, my husband is gay. And it just ended in that moment. I just knew there's no going back. And he was still passed out, and it was 11 o'clock at night by then. And I just thought, I have to speak to someone. I have to tell someone.

So I hopped in my car and I drove to my auntie's house and by the time I got there, it was like 11:30 at night. And I knocked on the door and she opened the door and I'm just like I need a divorce. I just raced inside. I'm just like, I need a divorce, and he is gay and there it was.

It's just crazy to think that a few messages on a phone could completely collapse my entire life as I knew it.

Trying for a Baby: What He Was Never Going to Tell Me

And he wasn't going to tell me this, we were two months off trying for a baby. I was a month into being on these preconception tablets. We were full steam ahead to having children to, we had the house and the nice fence and the nice car and the careers and all of those things.

And we were just two months off trying for a baby. When was he going to tell me this? He wasn't. And so when I, the next day did confront him about this, he was in absolute denial. He got really angry to begin with and then really sad. And it was an absolute rollercoaster of emotions. And at points I asked myself, am I making the wrong decision?

And it was really difficult. And I didn't tell people because, I was worried about their reactions. I was worried how they might treat my husband. I was worried about my husband's mental health. I was so worried about everybody else. I barely checked in with myself and what I needed…

Losing My Husband, Home, and Job: Identity Collapse

Through this experience of heartbreak and betrayal, trauma and my whole life collapsing and subsequently, having to move out and then sell our house, and then even losing my job in that same year…

So in the space of six months, losing my husband, my house, and my job, I got fucking connected to myself because that was all that was left. And that in itself was the biggest gift that came from this experience being so raw, everything being stripped away and being left with who am I? Who am I now that I'm not a wife? Who am I now that I'm not a French teacher in this amazing school? Who am I now that I don't have this house, that I don't have this, future life planned out with babies and this and that for the next 60 years? That is a very exciting, terrifying, confusing place to be.

Why I Chose a Sex Coach Instead of Traditional Therapy

And it was from that place that I reached out to a sex coach because I knew that I didn't need another counsellor. I didn't need another therapist. I wanted a woman that would be able to listen to my experience and understand the damage of being invisible for all those years, the damage of your husband not wanting to touch you, the damage of initiating or asking for sex, and being rejected over and over again. It was so important to me that the person sitting opposite me understood how important it is to be seen and received as a sensual and sexual being in partnered intimacy.

And so that led me on this really beautiful adventure with a sex coach. And I love telling this story because my workplace, which was actually a Catholic school, paid for it. I remember contacting the Employee Assistance Program and being like, I need a sex coach. And them being like, oh, we have relationship co relationship counsellors. And I tell them no, I really need a sex coach. And sure enough, they found this absolutely incredible sex coach out of Sydney who was registered with them. And I had all of these sessions that my Catholic school ended up paying for, which I just think is so fabulous. And she helped me on so many levels.

Online Intimacy Sex Coach for Women: Reconnecting With My Body and Desire

And, oh, I would love to talk about this in future episodes, maybe I will share a little bit more about this moving forwards. But she really helped me first come home to my own body, connect in with my body, and to find a place of safety within myself. And then from that place, she helped me reawaken desire. She helped me recognise what it was that I wanted. To be asked, what do you want? It's such a powerful question because when you've been in a long-term relationship and your desires haven't been met, when your wants haven't been acknowledged or valued or prioritised to be asked, what do you want is so powerful.

And so we worked together for more than a year just, on and off and as I needed, and it was absolutely incredible.

Pleasure, Healing, and Becoming a Sex Coach

I am forever grateful for finding her (my sex coach) and for having the privilege of working with her, and now being able to help women moving forwards in their lives in unraveling shame, in being supported in their desires, in helping them realise that pleasure is not sinful. That pleasure is your birthright as a woman. And that pleasure is a nervous system resource that is inherently healthy for us to experience pleasure.

Whether that's taking the time to drink a beautiful cup of tea or sexual pleasure, orgasmic pleasure, all of that is important. All of that is necessary, and so I can't wait to be able to share a little bit more about my own journey in becoming a sex coach and being able to share this incredible work with you.

Online Sex Coach for Women: Sharing This Work and Offering Support

And I want to thank you for stopping by my podcast. I welcome you to reach out to me on Instagram or visit my website. I have lots of other blogs there. And in future I'll be sharing more about my experience of discovering my husband was gay.

What I did the journey there, the help. I got some really specialised support because a lot of therapists and counsellors are not trained to deal with this very specific issue. And it is hard and it's very difficult to be the wife of a man that is attracted to men that comes out as gay because there aren't the supports and it's very misunderstood.

So I'd love to share a little bit more about that experience with you as well in the future.

And thank you again for stopping by all my love,

Sabina xx

For the Woman Ready to Come Home to Her Body, Reclaim Her Eros & Befriend Her Soul

If you feel the pull to reconnect with your body, soften into your femininity, and experience the kind of healing that comes from being deeply witnessed, I invite you to join The Wonderfully Wilde Women’s Collective, a monthly circle opening in 2026.

If you’d like to explore deeper one-on-one support, you can learn more about Online Sex Coaching for Women here.

And if you want embodiment practices, rituals, meditations, and stories of feminine reclamation, you can explore the full Sabina Wilde Blog here.

With wilde tenderness,
Sabina Wilde x