This is where I’m going to write some stuff. I’ve tried writing about this several times before, in a personal journal (erratic), forum posts (overly dramatic and maudlin), to friends (clingy and demanding). I’ll try here, again. Maybe the illusion of an audience will help me set the right tone, hit the sweet spot.
Maybe a quick rundown of what’s happened so far.
2006ish-2019: Marriage to my dear partner (DP). Something was wrong. She told me (cishet male) she was bi, which was weird at the time, since I was in my fourth decade in a pretty anti-queer religion. It wasn’t that weird, though, because I was in my second decade as a mental health professional and researcher. Or, it wasn’t objectively weird, it was just a bit weird for me. I loved her dearly, though, and this didn’t matter. Why should it? I loved her, she loved me.
Something was wrong. Lack of intimacy (on all fronts). After the honeymoon, everything went cool and sad. I tried lots of things. I thought this was a bump in the road toward marital happiness. Looking back, it wasn’t a bump, it was who she was, or at least who she was with me. Despite being quiet, introverted, and unfailingly considerate, DP had a deep, anxiety-driven need to control her experience and therefore everything immediately around her experience. Or that’s what I think, right now. She didn’t do things she didn’t plan, be it travel, an evening in, listening to a song, watching a movie, having sex, having a child, or having a conversation. If she didn’t plan them or didn’t want to do them, we didn’t do them.
I soon felt locked out of her life and mind. I still don’t know, except in broad strokes, what she was thinking or experiencing for the first decade of our marriage. Her communication to me started to feel like press releases, sometimes: she told me what she had carefully planned to allow me to know, in a carefully phrased format. Obviously, intimacy in general suffered. Physical intimacy did, too. Again, I tried things, tried to fix things, tried to assess the problem… I want to go back and tell my younger self to just stop. He wasn’t going to fix shit. It was pretty obvious she wanted as little intimacy with me as possible, whether that was conversation or getting naked. She wanted me to be happy, at least to some extent, so she tried, but often that’s exactly what it felt like: someone trying very hard to do something they didn’t want to do. That fucks you up.
We had a life for over a decade. We lived in two or three places. We had a child. We had jobs and started careers. We bought a house. The problems never got better. Every six months or so (I think, more or less) I got so frustrated that I tried to force a conversation about the mother of all elephants in our room (often our bedroom). I tried this gently, nicely, and sometimes demandingly and with my frustration showing. It didn’t matter. Questions about what she was thinking or feeling, what she wanted from this marriage or from me, how she felt about me, and anything else in that general domain received silence. I could wait five minutes or five hours. She’d tear up, sob, or sit quietly, but she wouldn’t say a word. Except sometimes she would. She would say of course she loved me or of course she wanted the same things I wanted. Nothing substantially more. If I pointed out that the statements contradicted years of my observations, the silence.
2019. A TV show about a lesbian. Lots of people liked it. She liked it. She watched it and learned the episodes. She joined an online group for discussing it. They were pretty much all lesbians, except a few bisexual women like her, and a very few trans people. She started telling me she was feeling things. I watched the show with her (it’s very good). She became emotional and told me she wanted to be like the protagonist (or possibly be with her). I knew DP was bi, so this wasn’t a shock. The shocking part was that she was talking to me about things she hadn’t dared to discuss since we dated.
A little while after that she told me she wanted to explore her attraction to women. Then, another few weeks or couple of months later, she told me she’d met someone in the online group. Then that she wanted to meet them at a conference and see what happened.
Fuck.
Well, yes. That’s what she wanted to do, I guess, but the word also expresses my feelings at the time. I’ve since come to know her girlfriend, and she’s a lovely person. Still… fuck.
The conference didn’t happen. Covid-19 happened. She visited the girlfriend (other side of the country) twice or three times during full-on pandemic. She was incredibly careful in every way possible, so I don’t have any issues with her safety. Quarantining happened on both ends, bookending each visit. Of course, that means each visit was a month of no sex for me (A week or two of visiting plus two or three weeks of quarantine), which was a bummer because we had a sex life again.
An extremely important piece of this is that, as DP explored her sexuality fully, she also opened up to me more. We were talking. Like, about important things. I knew something of my wife’s inner world. And she was open to having sex with me more often; sometimes she even wanted to for no particular reason. It was a heady, wild time in my pedestrian life, I can tell you. I didn’t think it would last (and the sex side didn’t), but it was great for a few months.
None of this has been easy for me. I know it’s not easy for her, either, and I think I understand why she was so closed off all those years, at least partly. She was trying every day, in our conservative religion, with conservative, anti-queer religious friends (and my family), to be the good, faithful, not-queer femme. That meant she had to control every word, thought, and gesture. Not a great situation for a happy marriage, at least not the kind I wanted.
A few years before the Second Coming (out) of DP, we left our conservative church. We had a faith transition. For her it was a transition back to the ideology (or lack of it) she had before age 19 or so. For me it was an abandonment and betrayal of several generations of religious observance in my family, extended family, and friend circles. Fucking sucks. Not easy. But I no longer have the purity-based sexual mores and anti-gay ideals. I didn’t really have them before, but I tried to live the religion; it was my worldview and I was trying to do my best. I didn’t think God wanted queer people to be treated differently, but I hoped for His mortal representatives to eventually get a clue… blah blah. Not what I believe any more, which turned out, a few years later, to be useful.
So here we are. DP shares with me. We have been in couples counseling for a few months (massively helpful), we’ve been talking, and I’ve been supporting her sexual identity journey. It’s a hard, dramatic journey. She should write a book. It’s compelling even when it makes me unhappy (which it does from time to time, still). She’s back to wanting sex absolutely no more often than I (carefully) communicate I need it. Communication about her sexual feelings toward me is still in the denial phase, I think. She says (if pressed) that she’s attracted to me, enjoys sex with me (this seems true, actually), etc., but we’re back to where almost anything is a reason to cancel the weekly sex appointment (yes, we do that; it’s probably the only reason we haven’t gone down to once every six weeks), and essentially nothing could motivate her to have sex (or anything like it) at any time except the weekly appointment. This is not the behavior of someone who is attracted to another person, I don’t think. That’s an area we might eventually get to in therapy: Yes, I trust DP in most ways, and believe most of what she says about us and her, and me, these days, but not that. I don’t trust her on that issue any farther than I can throw her (not that I’ve ever tried).
I guess that’s a good recap. Oh, and partly to see if I can get some needs fulfilled in my life, partly to just try to balance things out, and partly exploring the possibilities for long-term satisfaction, I’ve begun to check out the weird and interesting world of ENM/polyamory. “Check out” so far means making an account on a polyamory dating app and now chatting with two (extremely interesting) women, neither of which lives near enough to make a visit realistic any time soon. Both are married/partnered. Both have or have had other poly partners. It’s an interesting and unfamiliar thing.
I can’t write about this and be in a remotely good mood. I am convinced that the right thing to do is support DP’s journey and development, but so far we have me supporting her in doing things that make me unhappy. That’s pretty much it. She tries to compensate in small ways, which I appreciate, but I asked a question in therapy a few weeks ago that still rings. It was something like,
“What happens when all this honesty and communication doesn’t lead to things that are fun for you?”
That’ll be an interesting day.