Coming to terms with sexual orientation

Hello

I’m new here. I’ve made one other post. I’m really afraid of being judged but I hope online is safe to put it out there. I was married to a man for 26 years. Before that I tried coming out as a lesbian but was not believed. The therapist I was seeing seemed to think I was asexual instead. She didn’t use that term, but she talked to me about my relationship with my late husband. She said she knew couples who didn’t have sex because their relationship wasn’t about f***ing. So she saw me as straight but without much or maybe any sexual desire.

This is the part where I’m afraid of judgement. My husband and I had an almost entirely sexless marriage and we weren’t physically demonstrative for the most part. He was my best friend and I loved him a lot but that did not include romantically or sexually. We both thought that because of my child sexual abuse history (by presumably straight boys/men) that I was just not comfortable having sex. But as time went on and I dealt with those issues in therapy it didn’t get any better.

I thought I was asexual for a long time because I felt that explained how I could love my husband and not be interested in sex. However I have now allowed myself to reexperience the desire for women I experienced when I was much younger before I met my husband. I now identify as lesbian.

He never confronted me about all this because as I said we both thought the problem came from abuse. He dealt with illness his whole life. The last nine years of our marriage he started to decline. At that point he had cancer. He beat the cancer but wasn’t the same afterwards. From there it was one thing after another until he was sick all the time. Much of it was cardiac disease but he had other serious problems. He was 13 years older than I am. As he got sicker the relationship became more about dealing with his illness. He was able to be at home but died in the hospital after spending a week there.

For a long time I have had the belief/image in my head that if I survived him I wanted to have another relationship if possible and I wanted it to be with a woman. I’ve had that thought for so many years I can’t even remember when it first occurred to me. Now I believe that if I were asexual that would be fine but I’m attracted to women.

 

Thanks I appreciate it

 

Thanks. As I said in another post I have a different therapist now. I’ve seen her for a long time and she’s great. I came out to her last week or the week before. I thought she’d be shocked. It turns out she knew all along meaning from the very beginning when I started seeing her a long time ago. She could tell from writing I did. But I have bipolar disorder and I had to get on the right doses of the right medications. That took seeing several psychiatrists and time. Now with the right meds and therapy I’m doing much better.

Has it really happened to other women that they are lesbian and were told/made to believe they were asexual instead? I thought it was just me.

 

Hello

I think I’ve heard of it. It’s the assumption that everyone is heterosexual and that’s just the way it is? And if someone isn’t that’s bad and wrong? Unfortunately I grew up Catholic in a devout family with parents who were active in the Church. I also attended Catholic school. I begged my parents to let me go to public school but they said no. They were/are (my father recently passed away and my mother is alive and well) politically liberal but socially fairly conservative. They were volunteers for Marriage Encounter. Obviously all straight marriages back then. The message I got is that’s how it should be.

 

That’s sad that the church did that to her. I stopped believing in college. Lack of interest in the Catholic Church was something my late husband and I had in common. He was raised Catholic, Catholic school etc, but he stopped believing in childhood. He was an atheist. We didn’t have kids due to illness.

I hope the woman found happiness.

 

Yes this forum is very helpful and I really appreciate your posts. I will be moving in about three weeks. I have found an LGBT center in the town where I’ll be living and they have Wednesday morning coffee meetings for people my age. I hope to make friends that way and find out about other activities.

 

Thanks ☺️