Long answer:
Let's start by defining what it means to be out of the closet. There are varying degrees of being out of the closet. At the risk of oversimplification, the degrees of being out are, in increasing order of "outness":
- Out to yourself;
- Out to other gay people;
- Out to straight friends and other people you take a risk being rejected by, but whom you can ultimately cut out of your life if need be;
- Out to family, colleagues and other people you still have to interact with whether you face rejection or not;
- Out to the general public.
Where you are at in the stages above matters. Very simply, the further you are along in being out, the more likely it is that you will be in a successful relationship.
Someone who is not even out to himself (stage 1), i.e. he is still in denial or unsure about his orientation; such a person is not in any shape or form ready for a relationship, straight OR gay. Clearly, someone in that situation has deep existential and identity issues that they need to work out before they can embark on a healthy relationship with someone else.
It's not possible to start a relationship without dating first, and dating requires a person to meet other gay people, so by definition, someone who is actively looking for a relationship would be at stage 2. Just about everyone who is reading this post right now would be at stage 2 at least. But there's a big difference between someone who is at stage 4 and someone who is only at stage 2 in terms of how relationship ready they are.
[Stage 5 is irrelevant for most people unless you are a public personality, e.g. the former politician Vincent Wijeysingha.]
"To love at all is to be vulnerable." - C.S. Lewis
The reason why being out matters to the health of your romantic relationships is because being in a relationship is about being emotionally available to your partner, and also being vulnerable to your partner on emotional terms. It is not possible to feel deeply for someone without exposing yourself to being hurt by that person.
It is possible to be in a relationship despite only being at stage 2 above, but the benefit of being further along in being out is that it lends a sense of greater authenticity to all of one's relationships, whether those relationships are with friends, family or colleagues. That greater authenticity in turn makes it easier to open oneself up to intimacy with a partner.
Gay people growing up in a environment hostile to their sexual orientation frequently develop preternatural instincts in shielding themselves from emotional contact with those they are unsure of acceptance from. That includes family and friends. Without being out to one's family for instance, a gay person, on some subconscious or conscious level, might fear that their family's love and concern for them is purely conditional on them being straight and "normal". That fear of being hurt creates emotional distance between the gay person and the people who are closest and most important to him.
If that emotional distance was to be confined to just being between a gay person and the people he was not out to, it would not be such a great problem. But the problem is that the emotional distance oftentimes carries over to all of a gay person's relationships, diminishing the quality of friendships, closeness to family, collegiality at work and yes, emotional intimacy with one's partner.
Someone who is only at stage 2 is more likely to be emotionally guarded and hence less available emotionally to their partner. That makes it harder for a relationship to progress. As Woody Allen once quipped, a relationship is like a shark, it has to constantly move forward or it dies.
Second Order Effects
A second reason why being out helps make a romantic relationship stronger is that it places considerably less stress on a relationship, particularly if between the two people in a relationship, one is further along in being out than the other.
Someone who is not out is constantly censoring his answers to questions like, "How was your weekend?", or finds it impossible to share a large part of his life with other people. He may feel compelled to play the pronoun game, or simply avoid any mention of his personal life at work.
He may also feel uncomfortable appearing too close in public with his partner, or live in fear of being seen with his partner by his family or friends he's not out to. All these "second order" effects can place a budding relationship under considerable stress when the partner who is more out may resent how the less out partner is forcing him into intolerable situations.
Being in a gay relationship is hard enough, what with the lack of positive role models and societal acceptance, and how men in general, gay or straight, are not socialized to negotiate intimacy and emotions from a young age. A closeted man can still be in a successful relationship, but it will certainly be much harder and require more understanding and communication between the two guys in the relationship.
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