The Closet Professor

I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married
By Aaron Smith

to a man who’s dating a man who’s
married to a woman. The husband

of the man I’m dating knows he’s
dating me and my boyfriend knows his

husband is dating the man who’s
married to the woman who does not

know her husband is gay. The guy
she’s married to—the boyfriend

of my boyfriend’s husband—just told
his mom he’s gay and she’s happy

because she never liked his wife
which is kind of funny but mostly

sad and I feel sad that her husband
who’s dating a man is also a man

with a mother who has never liked her.
I tell my boyfriend to tell his husband

to tell his boyfriend that he needs
to tell his wife sooner rather than later

and I know he knows that but still it needs
to be said. My boyfriend said his husband

said his boyfriend plans to tell his wife
Memorial Day weekend when his grown

kids are home from college and everyone,
I imagine, is eating potato salad by the pool.

She works at a flower shop two towns
over. I want to go there when she’s not

there and buy her flowers, leave a note
with her coworker at the counter:

You deserve happiness, Natalie.
You deserve love.

Love,

Your husband’s boyfriend’s
husband’s boyfriend.

About the Poem

Aaron Smith’s poem “I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married” is a witty, layered, and poignant exploration of queer relationships, secrecy, and the tangled webs of love and obligation. At first glance, it reads like a piece of small-town gossip, the kind of convoluted story that grows more confusing the more one tries to explain it. Smith himself admits he “wanted this poem to seem like gossip and to sound convoluted in the way these scenarios sound when we try to convey them.” And indeed, the poem succeeds—its sentences loop and overlap, names vanish into pronouns, and each relationship branches into another until the reader feels caught in the same dizzying spiral as the speaker.

The poem begins plainly enough: the speaker is dating a man who is married to a woman. But very quickly, the cast expands—his boyfriend has a husband, that husband has a boyfriend, that boyfriend is still married to a woman, and on it goes. Each turn introduces another complication, another layer of secrecy or disclosure. The humor lies in the almost absurd wordplay of “my boyfriend’s husband’s boyfriend’s wife,” a construction that captures both the awkwardness of explaining queer love in heteronormative contexts and the entangled reality of lives lived in partial closets.

But beneath the comic tangle is sadness. At the heart of this web is Natalie—the unsuspecting wife, working in a flower shop two towns over. Her husband is living a life she doesn’t fully know, and the speaker’s compassion for her emerges in the imagined gesture of leaving her a note:

Your husband’s boyfriend’s
husband’s boyfriend.

It is the poem’s emotional crux. For all the confusion and gossip, Smith doesn’t let us forget the human cost of secrecy, the pain of those excluded from the truth, and the longing for everyone involved to find honesty and love.

The ending drives this home. The planned revelation is postponed until a convenient holiday weekend, when the family gathers “eating potato salad by the pool.” The image is almost comically suburban, yet it underscores how deeply closeted lives are woven into everyday rituals. Queerness is here, already part of the family table, even if it hasn’t been named aloud.

Smith’s poem is, in its way, deeply queer—not only in subject matter but in form. It resists straight lines, tidy categories, or simple relationships. It embraces convolution, contradiction, and the messy truth that love doesn’t always fit the scripts we’re handed. It is funny, yes, but also sad, compassionate, and achingly real.

For LGBTQ+ readers, the poem may feel familiar: the half-truths, the awkward explanations, the struggle to claim love openly without hurting others along the way. And for straight readers, it may pull back the curtain on just how complex closeted relationships can be—not only for the queer person hiding but for everyone around them.

Smith reminds us that at the end of all this gossip, the heart of the matter is love—love withheld, love shared, love denied, love deserved. And that is a truth worth repeating, even if it takes a whole poem of tangled pronouns to get there.

About the Poet

Aaron Smith is the author of several poetry collections, including Blue on Blue Ground (2005), Appetite (2012), and The Book of Daniel (2019). His work often explores themes of queer identity, desire, humor, and vulnerability, blending candor with a sharp, conversational style. Smith has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and his poems have been widely published in literary journals. Known for his mix of wit and emotional honesty, Smith often examines the complications of gay life in America—balancing comedy, longing, and sharp social observation.