Finding out your best friend has had a lifelong secret can be a very difficult realization. I think it’s common to have a series of emotions not just about your friend being LGBTQ, but also about not knowing your friend was LGBTQ in the first place. Once you do have the realization, you first have to accept that your friend kept this secret from you. You’ll probably ask yourself a ton of questions: Why couldn’t they tell me? Did I make them feel like I wouldn’t still love them? Did they feel like they couldn’t trust me?

The second part of having the realization leads to another series of questions: If I didn’t know this huge part of them and their life, what else don’t I know? Do I even know this person at all? It becomes a very self-centered and self-focused situation, often more difficult to accept than the actual friend simply being LGBTQ.

Just like in the movie, 4th Man Out, I think it’s a very normal response to replay so many situations and think about where you could have possibly missed the clues. There is no puzzle to be solved and no mystery game to be played, and yet people find the need to go back and find that “a-ha moment” where they can say, “Ooohhh! That’s why that happened,” or “So that’s why you liked that bar, that music, that shirt, that—whatever.” The game of justification takes over instead of simply focusing on the here and now and the newly-redefined future of your friend or family member.

Relationships are hard and require commitment and work from all sides. Sometimes the best advice you can give someone isn’t advice at all. It’s just being willing to listen and give someone the support they need, as they need it. If someone “finally” comes out to you, let the moment be about them and not about you. The situation doesn’t need to be about how or why you didn’t know, but now that you do know, how are you going to step-up and be the true friend that person needs?