Hi! I'm a noobie!

I like men both sexauly and romantically

 

Thanks - I am like 99% sure I know what I want. I just get a bit hung up sometimes on the things that I know I will need to let go of.

 

It is nice to chat with you

 

Hey all,
i'm new here as well, this is my first post. Still getting familiar with the site.
A little background for context since i don't see a space for detailed profile (sorry if i totally missed it). i grew up in a religious culture that didn't allow for my attraction to guys, i grew up conditioned to believe my attraction is "sick and sinful," (putting it succinctly). As a result, i married a woman (who i love/loved) and essentially went through a very long process of trying to de-gay myself (i'll spare the details here).

With that scant background, one of the results of my own process and journey was learning how much our cultural conditioning growing up, as well as our everyday living now, affects how we feel and think. And, just how much of that flies under the radar.

For instance, our conditioning affects our standards and notions of what constitutes 'healthy' or 'unhealthy.' my own journey to self acceptance came at a high price, but it was worth it to live real and honest. One of the bigger factors is/was realizing and measuring the realities of who and how we are along side the often unconscious notions of who and how we are supposed to be. It can get really emotionally conflicting to address questions of sexual or romantic need that may not fit into our current circumstances. We can find ourselves wrestling between what is and what should be. Reality can sort of force us to examine, and even confront our ideas of how things should be when the standard mold doesn't fit.

 

Thank you for the welcome. Also, thank you for your open posts and sharing yourself and experiences. i think many here feel alone, isolated. Open forums like this where people like you share stuff that so often remains hidden makes for a community.
cheers!

 

Good to chat too.

 

I can relate very much to what you are saying. What you have posted is the story of my life up to two years ago. As many people on this forum have found, the desire for same sex relationships does not go away when you get married, and oddly enough, they get stronger. I reached a point recently where I have decided I definitely want to experience a gay life. I have both romantic and sexual attraction to women so it is very frustrating to stay in my marriage. I feel like something is going to happen, something must happen, but I still have love for my husband. I really don't know how this will work out. If you are bisexual, it may be easier for you to stay in your marriage ( and be happy with it).

 

don't have any advice to offer you, JT. In some ways you are "in limbo" like I am. I had a wonderful courtship with my husband, but oddly enough, two weeks after I got married, I was arranging meetings with another woman. The strange thing is, I didn't feel guilty about it, at all. it just felt like a normal part of my life. I have flirted with women throughout my marriage, and he has not suspected a thing. However I think he would be accepting of it. We are both pretty open-minded. I just choose not to tell him the extent of it right now. I am not suggesting this will happen to you, but it is something you should be aware of.

 

Im married to my wife for 14 years and still want a same sex experence

 

Appreciate it. I think it’ll always be possible for me to be honest with him, I don’t know why I started to feel uncomfortable about it though. Once I knew we were moving in together, it started to feel like have a female fwb was somehow wrong, like I was doing wrong by him. Even though he knew, we’d talked about her and he’d even seen photos. Also, “What would people think?” started to be more of a concern, when most of my life I’ve never really been interested or cared. But I told myself I’m not going to do anything behind his back and I’ll stick to that.

 

Where i was going with my initial reply is being different than the status quo has more than one option. Emotionally, often our initial response is that we have to maintain the status quo. I.e., if we got married, we have to remain married and monogamous... or to take it a step further, continue to hide in the closet.
But the reality of being different can also bring us to a place of questioning the status quo. E.g., why do we feel/think marriage, monogamy and relationship with one person are the only options available to us? Why do we think exploring other options would make us somehow bad? Why can we not be open and honest with all in our life who matter? Why would we hide, lie, cheat instead? i think these are all valid questions to ask ourselves vs just accepting the status quo and feeling (being) 'stuck.'

 

Well for me, marriage and a solid relationship with one person feels like a great option vs either being single or having multiple relationships that come and go. I've always wanted to have kids too. I am sure I could have been a completely happy straight woman and probably would never have even thought about women sexually had I not ventured down the rabbit hole in my teens. It was a choice I made, not because I felt an attraction to women but because it just kinda happened with a friend and it was a happy, satisfying experience and all I'd had at that point with boys was disappointing and zero communication. Its accept its not the typical journey of self-discovery that most non-straight people have. I don't really consider my sexuality to be a major part of my identity, its just incidental.

I'm fairly comfortable with ethical non-monogamy as an idea. I can be attracted to more than one person at a time and my relationships with women, while they have been very intense sometimes I've never felt possessive. Not like I wanted her all to myself forever. I have often wondered if polyamory would work for me/us. You can't read a magazine without reading about polyamory these days. But I am not sure. I am pretty possessive of my fiance. If he told me he liked another woman and wanted a fling with her, purely physical, it'd be devastating. That feels hypocritical to say, but still. I don't mind that he looks, and when we are out together we often point out a beautiful woman to the other, I enjoy it. If there is a sex scene in a movie, it doesn't bother me at all if he says she has a great body. Usually it'll be me that's first to point it out! The threesomes were fine, emotionally. I knew he wasn't ever going to be into her as they are such different people, despite her being pretty and probably most men would prefer her body to mine. But could I have a live-in third person, as much a part of the relationship as me and him are? I really don't know, probably not? It would definitely have its challenges. There's a lot of pro-poly content on Youtube and I do watch it, but obviously they only show the good stuff and not the difficulties.

I don't think non-monogamy is inherently bad if it works for everyone involved. What do you think? Could you be in an open relationship or a 3-way thing? It does feel like monogamy is the safe choice, tried & tested.

 

I second this. My attractions to women aren't a threat to my relationship because I can control my impulses. I was pretty impulsive in the past but I always had an eye on consequences. Now I am maybe more of an over-thinker. What's annoying is having to live with unresolved desires. But its definitely something I can live with.

 

Monogamy is what most of us grow up with, though that is changing, it's still status quo. As you note: "tried & tested." Yet half of all US marriages end in divorce, the top two reasons being sex and money. While monogamy is tried and tested, for longevity, is it tried and true? And i'm not thinking of this in strict black or white terms, or proposing one was is better than another, or new and improved.

Monogamy is a heterosexual model for relationship. More recently, many gays have adopted the model, or variations on that model, but is that because it's a reasonable, rational thing to do, or are we accommodating feelings that we don't fully grasp or are even aware of?

i'm not suggesting an either or situation, but questioning the what and why's behind our standard choices? We dig so far and seems we stop instead of continuing to dig to see what lies beneath the beneath. i've come to see myself and others as a sort of box of puzzle pieces. Some of our pieces match up with others, some do not. It seems many of the cultures we develop in have a standard assumption of a 'soul mate,' someone who magically alines with us.

We speak of 'love' as something we "fall" into, as though it were a mud puddle we slip and "fall" into. We don't learn things like self knowledge, how to articulate about who and how we are in order to find compatibility in relationship. The idea of polyamory makes rational sense to me, that it's impossible for any one person to aline with all our "pieces." But i also get that poly can also violate emotional disposition, even when it rationally may make sense for say a bisexual person to be in intimate relationship with male and female vs having to choose to have just one need/desire met. i'm not suggesting that this is the right way, or why we should even limit ourselves to 'just' two lol. i think it makes sense to ask, explore, question our standard notions of how and what relationship should be instead of just accepting the standard model/s and trying to conform ourselves to those models.
Why can't relationship be custom made to individuals?

 

Good question. I don't know - but I do know quite a lot of bi and lesbian women and almost all of them also seem to favour monogamy too, even when they have multiple failed relationships for whatever reasons, often mixmatched sex drives and infidelity. But maybe you're right in that it is just deeply ingrained socially. Anyone deviating from that is seen as a, well.. deviant.

Puzzle pieces is a good analogy. My partner and I click together very well on most levels. We did from day one, although we are now both very different people than we were then, we seem to have grown together. Being with an older guy has definitely matured me faster than some of the people I grew up with (he's almost 10 years older than me). We definitely didn't "fall" in love though, it was more of a slow burn thing. A lot of my relationships with women were like throwing petrol on a fire. This is coals in a stove by comparison. Poly would maybe make sense for me purely from a sexual orientation perspective but I know it isn't something he's interested in, maybe apart from the base-level caveman fantasies that I'm sure a lot of red-blooded straight guys have. Also, while poly might work really well in a child-free relationship, I wonder how well it would work with parenting?

This is a very good discussion - it really deserves its own thread if you feel like doing the honours?