After starting to work as a stock manager at a fabric warehouse, Seel set up an association to help the local destitute families by giving out food and clothes. He also cared for his ageing and ailing mother, with whom he grew close and the only person to whom he related his experience for over thirty years. For four years, the beginning of what he called the years of shame, Seel led a life of "painful sadness", during which he slowly came to decide that he must renounce his homosexuality. Following in his parents' footsteps, he contacted a dating agency and on 21 August 1950, he civilly married the daughter of a Spanish dissident (the religious marriage took place on 30 September 1950 in the Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire church of Saint-Ouen). He decided not to tell his wife about his homosexuality.