Is it even worth it?

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Hi,
I won't go into my history too much but over the last few months I've started seeing someone, and then I totally fell in love, head over heels etc all that nonsense. She happens to be the same gender as me, so meh, I must be bi. I've just started to come to terms with it myself then holy cow, we were faced with the thing of coming out and being a proper couple.

So my town is a small rural town and I like it here but everyone knows everyone and it's super conservative. For a few reasons I'm fairly well known around town, and I'm on the fringes of a number of different groups. One of them is people I've all grown up with who all go to church, and one of them is the small community theatre crowd in the area. Everyone knows my gf is bi and she works in theatre/drama so is part of that group, and no one cares, but she knows no one outside of here. I on the other hand am not out of the closet (well, I only just got in there recently!) and also work at a very conservative, blue collar job. I'm quite masculine but they don't seem to take much notice.

To start with I was just riding on the waves of love and we told her family (they suspected us), some theatre people (they suspected us), and some of her friends who are musicians (they suspected us). It was great...and then I told my family.

My family are very traditional and some are very Christian. They said that they support me but they also say regardless of whether I love my gf or not and whether this is a serious thing or me just experimenting I'm making a huge mistake and am going to be ostracised for the rest of my life. They said that my old churchy friends will leave me, the people at my workplace will hate me, my extended family won't know how to deal with it, and my bro said that while he supports me, he's going to get harassed by his church. I'm terrified and feel sick thinking about it. I don't want to leave her, but I don't want to wreck my life and hurt my family. I'm really not dealing with this at all, and my gf has AS too plus other things and she's dealing with other unrelated stress so I don't want to burden her either.

So anyone else out there been in this sort of situation? Anyone else out there from a small rural conservative town? Should I just walk away while I can and before too many people find out, or should I ride it out?

Cad

Hmm well your situation has some similarities to a situation I was in a few years ago, but yours sounds more extreme. So I don't want to claim it's the same or would have the same outcome, but basically what happened was I was told that people in my extended family would react badly, as you were. And it really wasn't a big deal at all. So they were wrong about it.

But let's assume your family have predicted accurately...I'd never advise someone to hurt themselves to prevent possible "hurt" to others, when its not an intrinsically hurtful thing that you are doing. You're seeking happiness in your life, that's your business and others will have to deal with it. If you flip it around, would you want your family and friends to only date people you approved of? Or is it their happiness that matters? Assuming nobody is actually hurting anyone, of course.