I'm not sure if anyone is going to read this. I feel the need to write this all down, both because it helps me to do so, and on the off chance that this helps anyone else down the road. While this is a true story, I've omitted details that are to my mind irrelevant or would serve to identify me too exactly.
I am a Hispanic male. I met my now-wife when I was still in High School. At the time, I was not sexually active, nor was I particularly interested in sex as a thing. I feel like I was a late-bloomer in that regard, and that I did not come into my own, sexually, until later. We started dating after attending a school dance together. Due to some personal issues (we've all heard the story of the angry young man) I did not have an overabundance of friends; having a beautiful girl take a romantic interest in me was a life-changing event. She was my best friend, and now my girlfriend, and, as the hormones kicked in, my first sexual partner.
We discovered sex together. We explored our sexuality together. We were adventurous and passionate in the way that only hormonal young adults can be. My still-developing sense of sexuality became hopelessly and gloriously tied up in her person, in her body. I was infatuated and enamored, I was in love and she was in love with me. She gave me a reason to focus (I have ADHD, and since her, I have no longer needed medication) and a reason to live (so long to the angry young man). We married in my senior year of college. Exactly 9 months later, we had our first daughter.
But something was wrong. With me. Despite what I could unreservedly describe as an idyllic/storybook marriage, I began to notice men. Sexually. I found myself wondering what it would be like to be with the checkout guy at Publix, or that actor on TV. This made no sense to me; I wasn't gay! I had a wife and a kid and everything, and I'd been raised in a conservative Catholic household. Gay may have been considered wrong, but we were taught not to judge others. I loved my wife! What was wrong with me?
I bottled it up. I supressed it to the point where I was no longer doing it conciously. I was wrong. This was wrong. Moreover, it was stupid; I had nothing to gain and everything to lose. I LOVE MY WIFE. This is some hormonal imbalance, or some misfiring neuron, nothing more. I LOVE MY WIFE. Even if I had somehow been wrong all this time, and I really was gay, that did not change that I LOVE MY WIFE, and I would rather be miserable for the rest of my life than betray her trust or endanger my life with her. After all, I noticed women sexually too; that didn't mean I was going to cheat on my wife.
Time passed. I kept my problem to myself, and didn't even spend a lot of time thinking about it. I would, from time to time, when I was certain nobody was home, pull up some gay pornography and masturbate furiously, but that didn't mean anything. It was just porn.
Life got complicated. We now had two beautiful children, a small house in the suburbs which was massively underwater, a mortgage, and a job in a cubicle farm. Fortunately, my lifelong hobby of computer programming had turned out to be a lucrative field, so I was able to support my family financially, even if the hours meant that I was occasionally missing 'milestone moments' in my children's development. My odd predilection for gay and group porn was just a personality quirk, easily offset by the penance I did working long hours. My occasional fantasy of staying home all day and being the house-husband, doing the chores and cooking, was probably just a reaction to those same hours, and did not merit serious consideration. I was raised to believe that the menfolk were to work themselves to death providing the financial stability that was the core of a family, and the remaining work was "women's work". I still loved my wife, even if we no longer spent as much time together as we used to.
Life got stressful. I changed jobs in pursuit of a higher paycheck, and wound up with more stressful deadlines, more urgent projects, more long nights at a desk away from the world slaving over source code. Possibly as a reaction to that stress, my homosexual and group fantasies increased in degree and urgency. I began to fantasize about dating again, about feeling that rush of discovery with someone new. I fantasized about having multiple relationships, with men and women. I never gave voice to these desires, because I LOVE MY WIFE. I couldn't imagine how crushed she would be, or worse, how angry she would get. I could not imagine a world in which these things were possible, and I did not lose her. We started to argue more than we ever had; I realized I had started to resent her for getting in the way of who I was. Then I hated myself. I was the most vile, disgusting person I could imagine. I had taken this beautiful woman, my best friend, who had given me everything of herself and provided this idyllic life for me, and I was resenting her for it. I did not have the guts to risk what I had to pursue who I was, and I was taking it out on her. I was most certainly going to hell, and that thought provided me with a sick sense of comfort; I clearly deserved it, so at least one thing would be done right.
I turned to the bottle. Up to this point in my life, I had practically never drunk alcohol, as it interacted badly with my ADHD (brain like a butterfly + no filter = humiliation). But now I retreated to hard liquor. To cope with the stress of my job and the stress of my life. Johnny Walker could be the friend that my wife could no longer be. If I just drank enough every night, then everything would be alright.
It was not. There were good reasons I did not normally drink, and going from not normally drinking to heavy drinking meant that I did not have a good personal sense for when to stop. With my judgement impaired, I said things I would never have said sober. I told my wife I found some men attractive, and somehow (drunk logic sucks) explained it as being "OK, because I only want their dicks". I had an old male friend from high school over one night, and I hit on him and threw myself at him, leading to him awkwardly excusing himself and not really hanging out anymore for a while. I started going on internet chat rooms, especially male-focused ones, and "play-acting" gay sex scenes, "just to see what the fuss is about". My wife counseled me against the dangers of alcohol, but I didn't see a problem (what drunk does?).
I started to actively hate myself for who I had become. As penance, I threw myself into my career. I volunteered for every assignment, worked late at every opportunity, and aggressively negotiated for more pay. If I could just make enough money to provide everything she would ever want, then it might offset the horrifying sin of getting her to marry someone like me in the first place. Worse, I could tell she knew something was wrong, but I refused to discuss it; that would merely trigger the apocalyptic separation, that moment when she realized the full degree of her mistake, that moment when she would take my kids and leave me, and I would have to agree with her actions as the right thing. I was certain that moment was coming; it was only a matter of time. I comforted myself by thinking that if I could only postpone it until she had a sizable amount of savings built up, and then commit suicide in some convincing way shortly afterwards, the life insurance would set her up for life, and despite my own personal trip to hell, there would be some redemption in her life after me with my children. Maybe she would find the right guy, and he would not have to miss those moments, because I could have provided for them financially. Then my life would have had meaning, because she could be happy. I LOVE MY WIFE.
She knew something was wrong. She knew I was miserable. She wanted to help, but I kept pushing her away. I couldn't risk her finding out too early; I couldn't risk her leaving before I was ready. But the damned alcohol was my undoing again; I got drunk one night, she asked a few too many questions, and I broke down and sobbingly confessed the entire plan. She was horrified. I explained it away the next morning as the ravings of a drunken madman, but she clearly didn't believe that for one second. She claimed that she would rather indulge my fantasies and sexual proclivities than lose me. That made me feel worse; now, I was an even worse person for effectively forcing my wife to be a part of my sickness, and she was a better person for being willing to sacrifice herself that way, which made my debasement of her all the worse. She kept bringing it up, telling me that she might even enjoy it, and that she would feel perfectly comfortable doing "those things" with me, and I would have none of it. I was drawing a line, and I was taking a stand. I had corrupted her this far, and I would go no further. The one shred of self-esteem I had left was tied to the integrity of my marriage vows; whoever or whatever I was, I had taken an OATH before GOD, my friends and my family to honor her, and if it killed me, I was going to uphold that. She insisted that the oath was TO her, and that if she was consenting, than it was not a breach; but that was clearly her just trying to make me feel better.
I went on a business trip. I hate business trips; airplane rides are just the right combination of boring and uncomfortable so as to put me in a bad mood. I grabbed an eBook from the 'adult' section of the eBook store, so as to have something to read; I was hoping that mildly exciting material might offset the tedium of the flight. That book was called "Sex at Dawn", and it was a anthropological look at the development of human sexuality. So, not the erotic thriller I was hoping it was, but I read it anyway, for lack of anything better to do.
It was while reading this book that I felt like I was struck by lightning. In my head, marriage was a THING. It was some preordained, perfectly defined, THING that all of mankind has in common. But this book tore into that idea, and gave examples of how even in the modern world, each culture has their own definition as to what is expected in a marriage, if the concept even exists in the culture at all. But there were as many different ideas as to what marriage was as there were cultures on the planet, and even in the cultures that had "looser" definitions, cultures that included homosexuality and polyamory, people were happy.
People were happy.
People were HAPPY.
I realized on that plane over Alabama somewhere that my marriage, if it was a THING, was a THING between my WIFE and I. I LOVE MY WIFE. By denying her the right to be involved in my life this way, by denying her the right to know me this way and to choose to live with me in this way, I was VIOLATING my oath. I had sworn to love and serve her, and I was breaking that oath by hiding from her. This was not MY marriage; this was OUR marriage, and I was bungling it. I called her from the hotel that night, and confessed to her.
I am a Hispanic male. I met my now-wife when I was still in High School. At the time, I was not sexually active, nor was I particularly interested in sex as a thing. I feel like I was a late-bloomer in that regard, and that I did not come into my own, sexually, until later. We started dating after attending a school dance together. Due to some personal issues (we've all heard the story of the angry young man) I did not have an overabundance of friends; having a beautiful girl take a romantic interest in me was a life-changing event. She was my best friend, and now my girlfriend, and, as the hormones kicked in, my first sexual partner.
We discovered sex together. We explored our sexuality together. We were adventurous and passionate in the way that only hormonal young adults can be. My still-developing sense of sexuality became hopelessly and gloriously tied up in her person, in her body. I was infatuated and enamored, I was in love and she was in love with me. She gave me a reason to focus (I have ADHD, and since her, I have no longer needed medication) and a reason to live (so long to the angry young man). We married in my senior year of college. Exactly 9 months later, we had our first daughter.
But something was wrong. With me. Despite what I could unreservedly describe as an idyllic/storybook marriage, I began to notice men. Sexually. I found myself wondering what it would be like to be with the checkout guy at Publix, or that actor on TV. This made no sense to me; I wasn't gay! I had a wife and a kid and everything, and I'd been raised in a conservative Catholic household. Gay may have been considered wrong, but we were taught not to judge others. I loved my wife! What was wrong with me?
I bottled it up. I supressed it to the point where I was no longer doing it conciously. I was wrong. This was wrong. Moreover, it was stupid; I had nothing to gain and everything to lose. I LOVE MY WIFE. This is some hormonal imbalance, or some misfiring neuron, nothing more. I LOVE MY WIFE. Even if I had somehow been wrong all this time, and I really was gay, that did not change that I LOVE MY WIFE, and I would rather be miserable for the rest of my life than betray her trust or endanger my life with her. After all, I noticed women sexually too; that didn't mean I was going to cheat on my wife.
Time passed. I kept my problem to myself, and didn't even spend a lot of time thinking about it. I would, from time to time, when I was certain nobody was home, pull up some gay pornography and masturbate furiously, but that didn't mean anything. It was just porn.
Life got complicated. We now had two beautiful children, a small house in the suburbs which was massively underwater, a mortgage, and a job in a cubicle farm. Fortunately, my lifelong hobby of computer programming had turned out to be a lucrative field, so I was able to support my family financially, even if the hours meant that I was occasionally missing 'milestone moments' in my children's development. My odd predilection for gay and group porn was just a personality quirk, easily offset by the penance I did working long hours. My occasional fantasy of staying home all day and being the house-husband, doing the chores and cooking, was probably just a reaction to those same hours, and did not merit serious consideration. I was raised to believe that the menfolk were to work themselves to death providing the financial stability that was the core of a family, and the remaining work was "women's work". I still loved my wife, even if we no longer spent as much time together as we used to.
Life got stressful. I changed jobs in pursuit of a higher paycheck, and wound up with more stressful deadlines, more urgent projects, more long nights at a desk away from the world slaving over source code. Possibly as a reaction to that stress, my homosexual and group fantasies increased in degree and urgency. I began to fantasize about dating again, about feeling that rush of discovery with someone new. I fantasized about having multiple relationships, with men and women. I never gave voice to these desires, because I LOVE MY WIFE. I couldn't imagine how crushed she would be, or worse, how angry she would get. I could not imagine a world in which these things were possible, and I did not lose her. We started to argue more than we ever had; I realized I had started to resent her for getting in the way of who I was. Then I hated myself. I was the most vile, disgusting person I could imagine. I had taken this beautiful woman, my best friend, who had given me everything of herself and provided this idyllic life for me, and I was resenting her for it. I did not have the guts to risk what I had to pursue who I was, and I was taking it out on her. I was most certainly going to hell, and that thought provided me with a sick sense of comfort; I clearly deserved it, so at least one thing would be done right.
I turned to the bottle. Up to this point in my life, I had practically never drunk alcohol, as it interacted badly with my ADHD (brain like a butterfly + no filter = humiliation). But now I retreated to hard liquor. To cope with the stress of my job and the stress of my life. Johnny Walker could be the friend that my wife could no longer be. If I just drank enough every night, then everything would be alright.
It was not. There were good reasons I did not normally drink, and going from not normally drinking to heavy drinking meant that I did not have a good personal sense for when to stop. With my judgement impaired, I said things I would never have said sober. I told my wife I found some men attractive, and somehow (drunk logic sucks) explained it as being "OK, because I only want their dicks". I had an old male friend from high school over one night, and I hit on him and threw myself at him, leading to him awkwardly excusing himself and not really hanging out anymore for a while. I started going on internet chat rooms, especially male-focused ones, and "play-acting" gay sex scenes, "just to see what the fuss is about". My wife counseled me against the dangers of alcohol, but I didn't see a problem (what drunk does?).
I started to actively hate myself for who I had become. As penance, I threw myself into my career. I volunteered for every assignment, worked late at every opportunity, and aggressively negotiated for more pay. If I could just make enough money to provide everything she would ever want, then it might offset the horrifying sin of getting her to marry someone like me in the first place. Worse, I could tell she knew something was wrong, but I refused to discuss it; that would merely trigger the apocalyptic separation, that moment when she realized the full degree of her mistake, that moment when she would take my kids and leave me, and I would have to agree with her actions as the right thing. I was certain that moment was coming; it was only a matter of time. I comforted myself by thinking that if I could only postpone it until she had a sizable amount of savings built up, and then commit suicide in some convincing way shortly afterwards, the life insurance would set her up for life, and despite my own personal trip to hell, there would be some redemption in her life after me with my children. Maybe she would find the right guy, and he would not have to miss those moments, because I could have provided for them financially. Then my life would have had meaning, because she could be happy. I LOVE MY WIFE.
She knew something was wrong. She knew I was miserable. She wanted to help, but I kept pushing her away. I couldn't risk her finding out too early; I couldn't risk her leaving before I was ready. But the damned alcohol was my undoing again; I got drunk one night, she asked a few too many questions, and I broke down and sobbingly confessed the entire plan. She was horrified. I explained it away the next morning as the ravings of a drunken madman, but she clearly didn't believe that for one second. She claimed that she would rather indulge my fantasies and sexual proclivities than lose me. That made me feel worse; now, I was an even worse person for effectively forcing my wife to be a part of my sickness, and she was a better person for being willing to sacrifice herself that way, which made my debasement of her all the worse. She kept bringing it up, telling me that she might even enjoy it, and that she would feel perfectly comfortable doing "those things" with me, and I would have none of it. I was drawing a line, and I was taking a stand. I had corrupted her this far, and I would go no further. The one shred of self-esteem I had left was tied to the integrity of my marriage vows; whoever or whatever I was, I had taken an OATH before GOD, my friends and my family to honor her, and if it killed me, I was going to uphold that. She insisted that the oath was TO her, and that if she was consenting, than it was not a breach; but that was clearly her just trying to make me feel better.
I went on a business trip. I hate business trips; airplane rides are just the right combination of boring and uncomfortable so as to put me in a bad mood. I grabbed an eBook from the 'adult' section of the eBook store, so as to have something to read; I was hoping that mildly exciting material might offset the tedium of the flight. That book was called "Sex at Dawn", and it was a anthropological look at the development of human sexuality. So, not the erotic thriller I was hoping it was, but I read it anyway, for lack of anything better to do.
It was while reading this book that I felt like I was struck by lightning. In my head, marriage was a THING. It was some preordained, perfectly defined, THING that all of mankind has in common. But this book tore into that idea, and gave examples of how even in the modern world, each culture has their own definition as to what is expected in a marriage, if the concept even exists in the culture at all. But there were as many different ideas as to what marriage was as there were cultures on the planet, and even in the cultures that had "looser" definitions, cultures that included homosexuality and polyamory, people were happy.
People were happy.
People were HAPPY.
I realized on that plane over Alabama somewhere that my marriage, if it was a THING, was a THING between my WIFE and I. I LOVE MY WIFE. By denying her the right to be involved in my life this way, by denying her the right to know me this way and to choose to live with me in this way, I was VIOLATING my oath. I had sworn to love and serve her, and I was breaking that oath by hiding from her. This was not MY marriage; this was OUR marriage, and I was bungling it. I called her from the hotel that night, and confessed to her.
- I am a bisexual man.
- I like the idea of being submissive, even though I was raised to consider that to be weakness or cowardice.
- I am attracted to other people.
- I am an idiot.
- I LOVE MY WIFE.
