The Big Talk With My Wife...

DAY FIFTEEN:
Yesterday was weird. I got up early, got the kids ready for school. Had an appointment with my trainer at the gym. I felt guilty taking me time to work out after dropping a bomb just 24 hours earlier, but I did it anyway. My wife was on an early work call anyway.

Work was busy which took my mind off things… an appointment with my new therapist where I rehashed some things. I really talked about the discussions on this thread. What is love?

I got home from work around 8:30. I was so tired. I decided to not bring any work home with me so if we needed to talk we could… but I was tired… so so tired. I wanted to toke a bit to help me sleep even though I’ve really stayed away from the stuff since this all started. I heated a couple of slices of pizza and thought well, you can’t eat pizza without some sort of alcohol. I wanted a shot of tequila and I started digging around the cabinet. I was ready to be numb.

Then my wife started the conversation. I really won’t go into it because as she says we’re talking in circles, saying nothing new. She talked and I cried. I cried and cried and cried. I felt like I went to the dark place she did when I first came out to her. It some point I felt nothing… absolutely nothing.

She finally said I needed to eat, but the idea made me nauseous. I’d had a turkey sandwich at lunch and that was it. I’ve certainly last a few pounds since this all started. She slapped the greasy pizza on a plate and said “come on it”. I refused. When she went to brush her teeth, I put the food back in the fridge. I could barely walk. I felt like the walking dead.

I slipped into bed and closed my eyes. She reached over and held my hand. It stayed there until I fell asleep.

I never remember my dreams, but I had so many vivid ones. The first was that my wife were having sex. I was so into it and wanted to prove that I had it in me, but she didn’t touch me and rebuffed me. The second dream, I was at a resort with my kids. My wife wasn’t there. I ran into some childhood friend of hers. She followed me to my hotel room and threw herself at me. I told her I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t going to cheat now, and if I was going to it wasn’t going to be with a woman! She took off her top and then my son walked in as if catching us in the act. The third dream was the most painful. I came out to one of my best friends, the one person who I considered confiding in before I came out to my wife. I didn’t because he lives on the other side of the country and I wanted to have a face to face conversation. I know in real life he would be understanding and kind. I have no doubt about that. But in the dream he reacted worse than my wife did. He was vile, thought I was stupid and said I was throwing away my good life. I woke up with so much hurt.

While I was asleep my 12 year-old crawled into my bed. Even at that age he says, I love you dad and I just need to snuggle. I wrapped my arms around him. And then, from behind, I felt my wife wrap her arms around me, and held me. I laid in the middle of all this love and I felt safe, and warm and secure. It was the best I’d felt in days.

I was going to end my post there, but I got a call from my dad a half hour ago to tell me my grandma passed away. I’ve gone through so much these past two weeks that I can’t even wrap my head around this latest news. I took in the information and now I’m sitting with it. I’m not getting emotional… no crying… just something else that’s been heaped on top of everything else. Something else to make this “the worst week ever”. I can’t even call my wife about it. She is just now getting out of therapy and we have couples therapy in a few hours. I don’t want to unravel any work she’s just done in her session. And I’m at work so there’s no outlet here… So I sit along with this news… numb.

 

Thanks for the kind thoughts guys. I appreciate it. :icon_bigg

---------- Post added 4th Mar 2016 at 08:43 PM ----------

I really thought long and hard about whether or not I should post this next piece. On one hand, I feel like sharing these stories feels narcissistic. We all have our own problems, why wallow or delve into mine? On the other hand, this journaling process is very therapeutic. And if my writing isn't interesting then I suppose it can just be ignored and that's that. But if anyone is still with me, thank you for reading.

This is more about who I am as a person and my past and trying to figure out how this all fits into my present. It's about my self discovery of what made me who I am. It's sort of an ugly warts and all post so I feel a little more vulnerable. (Although how vulnerable can I be in an anonymous forum in a far tiny corner of the internet?)

Peace!

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DAY FIFTEEN (pt. 2)
Another day of couples therapy.
I asked my wife to meet up with me a few minutes before the session so I could talk about something unrelated to our relationship issue. She said the whole time in the car on her way to our session she was waiting for some other fatalistic shoe to drop like the one two days ago. I told her that my grandmother passed away and she put her arms around and hugged me. It was really the first time I’d shed a tear about it since I found out a few hours earlier. She was loving about it.

In therapy we dug into our past, how we met… our life story. Along the way, she pointed out things I’d done to disappoint her in our relationship. Some of them I can explain, some I can’t. We started dating our senior year in college in Montana. It was our last semester and we’d both be graduating in December. We’d only been dating 3-4 months when we were having discussions of what to do with our relationship when school ended. I had plans to move back to my home town in California. I didn’t even think twice about it. That’s where all my family was. I was the first in my family to even go to college. I was a 4th generation guy from Sacramento. I thought that’s just what you did after college… go home. I didn’t think about the fact that I was a grown up, that I could make other choices. In my mind I didn’t think I had a choice. So that’s what I did. My wife said she’d come out a few weeks later after I found an apartment. But once home, I couldn’t find any nice places and I didn’t have any money. I felt stuck. My mom got my future wife on the phone and said “he’s not going to find a place until you get our here”. So she came.

I got a dead end job doing data entry, just what everyone wants to do with a four-year degree. My wife couldn’t find work. Her parents were successful people and she wanted to do something with meaning. I’d work all day, then go out with friends leaving her behind. It was an asshole thing to do, and I feel its the most abusive thing I ever did. She described it today as I “left her home alone like a puppy.” To this day I can’t explain why I did it. I’m not proud of it and it breaks my heart to think that I was capable behaving that way. I chalk it up as I was immature when it came to being in relationships, but is that all? It’s horrible.

Five months later she’d had enough of Sacramento. She knew friends who worked the salmon canneries in Alaska. She said I’d rather can salmon than stay one more day in Sacramento. So we decided that’s what we’d do. Our relationship was new. Either we were going to become best friends or one of us was going to be left on the side of the highway. We drove all the way to Alaska (along with her ex-boyfriend) and the two of us lived in a two-man tent over the muskeg swamp for three months. We went to the cannery every day where we worked 12 hour shifts for minimum wage plus over time. Once summer was over, we traveled around Alaska, considered settling down there, but then made our way to New York where her parents lived… 10,000 miles on the car in one summer. The adventure of a lifetime.

Anyway, about the disappointments. I always harbored secrets. Some were stupid. I was always into tattoos, but felt she didn’t approve, so over the years I’d come home with one after another without really discussing with her first.

She mentioned body piercing (always a fetish of mind… don’t judge). When I brought it up she said it was such a turn off for her. After that, I was afraid to ever bring up anything sexual. Yet a bought a barbell and kept it out, hoping she’d find it so we could have another conversation. Passive aggressive… stupid… another dumb thing I did. There are things I did that I’d tell her I was interested in pursuing that she didn’t like but I’d just go do it anyway. She calls it defiance like I’m trying to rebel.

I once got a medical marijuana card that she found. Why was that a secret? The truth is I didn’t think she’d approve. Her response: Why wouldn’t she approve? As a teenage she’d done every drug there is.

There were more secrets she brought up. I don’t remember, oh… the sex toys, which I’ve mentioned before. She thinks I get a charge out of the secrets. That’s wrong. I feel embarrassment about wanting certain things and that’s why I go behind her back. After therapy she said see, here’s the problem. You go do what you want and don’t think about me in the equation. It all sounds so stupid when I type this out. These are dumb things, but they all seem to add up to something bigger.

She brought up the fact that she wanted marriage and I rebuffed saying I didn’t believe in marriage as an institution. I said I pledged my life to her, but I don’t need a piece of paper to prove my love to her. I remember she cried our last night in Paris because she thought I’d propose and I didn’t. The honest truth is that I would never propose in Paris because it was too cliché for me, and she hates that I thought that way. I finally came around when she explained that to her, marriage was a way of celebrating your love with a community. Once she put it that way, I was in. I finally proposed at our next trip in Costa Rica.

And we had an AMAZING wedding that people still talk about to this day. And I was happy.

She brought up other things like I never say she’s beautiful, that I don’t dress and groom myself in a way that’s attractive to her, like I purposely go out of my way to make myself look undesirable to her. (I had a long beard at one time that she HATED and begged me to shave. She saw it as a barrier for our intimacy.) But again… I went and did what I wanted.

Don’t get me wrong. She tells me what a generous person I am, that I’m kind, great with the kids, don’t have a mean bone in my body and says I’m truly a good person. But when I hear a list of these incidents from the past 20 years listed all together, it makes paints an ugly picture and makes me feel like a horrible person. And it brings up a lot of questions for her… and me.

Why do I behave this way? Why are some of these things I do so juvenile, yet became so important to me? It makes me sound so fucked up!

She keeps saying to me I’m your wife, not your mother! And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I definitely have mother issues. I came from a family that was very much like the 50s “Leave It To Beaver”. Dad came home at five, dinner was on the table at 5:30. We lived in suburbia. Nobody ever discussed their feelings. My mom once gave me the silent treatment for three days because I came home with bad grades. We even went on a trip to San Francisco during that time and when I said “Look at The Golden Gate Bridge” she turned her back on me. I was always trying to be the perfect child. I wanted approval so I never tried to disappoint. To this day, when I’m talking to my mom on the phone and at the end of the conversation I tell her I love her, her response is “mmm hhhh, Good-bye”.

So when my wife says in therapy she’s defeated because I never call her beautiful, I wonder where that learned behavior comes from.

Our therapist said that unfortunately, the direction of my wife’s and my relationship lies with me. I have to make the decision. My wife has no say in the matter. And frankly that sucks.

I feel like I painted an unfair picture of my wife. She is the most kind hearted person I know. She dedicates her life to saving the environment. She’s so smart and funny, and she really gives our kids the very best unconditional love and support. She bends over backwards for them. She is so selfless. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. We are both equally good people. And I love her to pieces.

After therapy, there was another hour of her asking me why I did all these horrible things that I mentioned. She doesn’t understand why I always do what I want, that I don’t give her a say in the matter. And here we are, I laid this nuclear bomb in her lap and in the end, it’s up to me to choose which way our relationship goes. I get my way in the end. She has no say.

More anger… then saying she understands that some things are out of my control.

She’s very fortunate that she’s been in and out of therapy for years. She has the tools. She has a lot of emotional growth and I’m emotionally stunted. We both spoke in analogies. It’s like she’s trying to have a conversation with me about algebra, but I don’t even know how to add yet, so I can’t possible explain or understand my behavior. That’s why I need to go to therapy to figure this shit out.

And she’s frustrated because she has to wait for me to figure it out. And she said she’s going to get angry about it sometimes. But she doesn’t want to wait forever. She doesn’t trust me right now, and I’m going to have to make some pretty grand gestures if I want to win her over, to prove that I want to keep this relationship working. She wants to be desired and I have to figure out if I’m capable of that. She has to be enough for me. But if I come back with the decision where she doesn’t fit into the equation, she hopes that I come to her in a way like I’m ripping off a band-aid.

So that’s where we left things before I went back to work.

I feel like there’s this whole sexuality thing that gets lost in the mix. How important is that to me? Where do I fit on the scale?

It’s scary that I can’t emphatically say “yes, you’re enough”. There’s acknowledgement that I need to figure it out, which is scary in its own right. My sex drive right now is nil, nothing, zero, zip… which makes this all the harder to figure out. I’m not lusting after anyone or anything.

She also recognized that this isn’t like I’m dealing with some sort of deviant behavior. She couldn’t imagine if I had other sort of sexual issue like pedophilia or rape… that what I’m going through is on the spectrum of normal.

She says she’s my friend and she loves me as a friend and then she said I’m really sorry about your Grandma…. My grandma who died today and has been lost in all of this other shit I’m dealing with.

So now I go home and deal with all this for the next few days without help or guidance. It’s a long time until we hit our next therapy appointments. I guess we muddle through… How many weeks or months of therapy before I come to some conclusion on the other side of this mess? How long can we wait?

 

Thanks again for the feedback guys.

So very very true random. How funny that how I can envision less for myself than I can for those I truly love.

I do question thecodependency thing. My wife admits she has codependency issues. I thought I understood that what meant, but I guess I really don't. This is the only long term relationship I've had so it's hard for me to know what makes this situation codependent. What would a healthy non-codependent relationship look like?

I appreciate all your sage advice SiennaFire. You're really making me look in the proverbial mirror to face myself and my situation. You're telling me what I need to hear, but also what I'm afraid to hear. I don't know your story but I sense you are very secure in your situation and that you came out the other side a better person. I'm certainly nowhere near that. But I love that you are making me see things in a new light and that you're pushing my comfort level.

P.S. I haven't had two seconds to pick up the book at the library yet, but I did find an article by him about mixed couple marriages online.

 

DAY EIGHTEEN

Friday evening, my wife suggested we table our conversations about what we’re going through with my sexuality and talk about other things… have a “normal” weekend, I suppose.

Which is what we did. And it was quite wonderful. To be able to joke, laugh, tell stories, talk politics, go to my son’s baseball game, celebrate my daughter’s birthday with friends, and to talk about my grandma’s passing. Then there was the snuggling… holding her in bed, giving each other massages…. It felt so good to be tactile with my soul mate again. There were some moments where I doubted whether I’d really outted myself or if it had all been a bad dream because it was feeling like a regular weekend. It felt so surreal.

I got an email on Sunday from our therapist saying she had a cancellation on Monday if we wanted to come in. The truth was, I’d spent the last two weeks talking and talking and talking about our relationship and my sexuality and now that we’d had a couple of days to normalize ourselves, I wasn’t really ready to go back to the therapist so soon. But my wife wanted to go, so I agreed. She asked me last night if I knew what I wanted to talk about and I said I hadn’t had time to think about it. I still didn’t know what to talk about when we went in.

My wife turned things over to me. She felt she’d done so much talking the first time. We talked about ways to handle our intimacy issues. I explained I wasn’t ready to try having sex with her right now because of performance anxiety. I feel noise in my head when trying to be intimate because I’m trying to analyze the situation instead of just letting myself go. She said she loves the snuggling, but it’s frustrating for her because she gets so horny.

We spoke about giving me time to figure things out, and not pressuring me to quickly figure out what I want. It’s funny how we speak so matter of fact about the potential demise of our marriage.

I expressed how hurt I was at our last session hearing a laundry list of all my faults and missteps in our 20 years together. The therapist gave me permission to let go of some of those missteps due to the fact that I was much younger. And both she and my wife agree that my misdeeds never came from a malicious place.

I also voiced again that what I’m going through is something that I have no control over. For the first time I really explained the pain I was in by living with this secret for so many years. How it was eating me alive and it was something I thought about nearly every moment of every day. I said there’s no way you can ever know what that feels like, but the energy it took to suppress my true self was exhausting. I keep thinking about all the better things I could have done with that energy. Even now, I’ve already forgotten what that pain is like. It’s so nice to not live with it anymore. Yes, there is the hurt of what my coming out is doing to my wife and eventually my kids, etc., but that relentless gnawing of the secret is gone.

My wife heard me say these things before, but I feel like this time, she really HEARD me, and really got a sense for the amount of pain I was in.

She said, if you were feeling all those lows, then you probably couldn’t be enjoying all the wonderful highs in your life as well. Nail hit on the head! And I’m so glad she had the ability to point that out on her own.

My wife really does get it. She knows how hard this is for me. She understands this is not a choice. She understands that I need to be happy. I know she hopes there is a place for her… for us… on the other side of this. She knows it’s up to me to figure that out. She knows it’s going to take time. She knows she can’t push me, or it might push me away. These are all things she’s told me. I’m so grateful that she has the ability to rationalize this way.

We are far from out of the woods. There’s so much to figure out, but for now we’re in a place of understanding and I’m being given my space. It’s a generous thing for a spouse to give when her entire marriage and future is in limbo.

--------- P.S. ----------

My really good friend who I’ve known and worked with on and off for years just came into my office to check on me. I’d let him know that I was going through some personal stuff but I was keeping it vague. He wanted to make sure I was doing okay. He recently went through his own personal crisis of losing a baby. I trust him very much so I just told him what I’ve been really going through. The first person to know outside my wife and therapist. It felt nice to tell someone.

---------- A QUESTION (or ten) -------------

For those of you who are choosing to stay married to your spouse, what is intimacy like for you? Are you present in the moment with your spouse during sex or are you fantasizing about someone / something else? Do you find it hard to get turned on by your spouse knowing that you're attracted to someone of the same sex or is that not an issue? Do you feel completely satisfied being intimate with just your spouse or do you crave something more? How did you build up the trust with your spouse in order to be intimate after coming out? Discuss!

 

DAY TWENTY-TWO

Another therapy appointment down. Jesus, how people go through this process of coming out to their straight spouses without therapy I’ll never know!

My personal therapist and I talked about whether or not there can be love without sexual intimacy. My therapist said the current thinking is that there are three components to Love. The first is sex. Sex for me in my current relationship is very low. I’m not very interested in having sex with my wife. I’m gradually accepting the fact that it is really only dudes that turn me on. The second component of love is affection. That’s cuddling, being tactile and being there emotionally for her. We’ve been doing a lot of cuddling… sometimes all night and it feels so good. I’ll rub the back of her head and kiss her cheek. We give each other massages. It’s a nice way to connect. The third component is action. That’s taking care of her in everyday life like helping out around the house, giving a hand on a work project she may be overwhelmed with, taking care of the children together, etc. The second and third components are very high for me. I love the tactile aspect of our relationship and I love being a support in her life. These are ways of being in love. Unfortunately, the sexual intimacy is very low for me. (Strangely enough, I still LOVE her breasts. I love holding them, suckling them… love, love love! I also love touching her ‘til she reaches orgasm. I can get so turned on by this. But if she touches my penis, I become a limp noodle… sorry if that’s TMI… but this is anonymous so fuck it! LOL)

I discussed with my therapist the fact that my wife says she knows I love her, but asks if I am “IN love”. My therapist said that’s such a poor choice of words and can mean different things to different people. I acknowledge that I love her and should stick with that.

The other night I came home from work and she greeted me at the door because I had my hands full of groceries. I leaned in to kiss her like I usually would, then tried to casually back off. We both silently recognized what I did. After the kids went to bed, she asked do you not want to kiss me anymore? I said I did, but I don’t want to confuse her and I want to give her space. She said, if I need better boundaries, I’ll let you know. Affection between us is sooooo awkward despite the fact that I like our affection. I hate feeling this way!

My therapist laid out four future scenarios. 1) Stay in a monogamous relationship with my wife. 2) We have some sort of open relationship. 3) We separate but don’t get divorced. We give each other our space and don’t show up unannounced at each other’s place. 4) We divorce. I’m willing to face those choices, but I don’t know if my wife can. Now that I’m coming out of the fog of my big reveal, I realize I can’t stay in a monogamous relationship. I’d essentially be going back into the closet. I’ve worked too hard to get to this point to turn back. I keep telling myself to push through this painful process. The second scenario of having an open relationship is not going to work either. My wife has made it very clear that it is not an option, and if she relented, I still couldn’t do it knowing that she would never be truly comfortable with it. I’m actually okay with the third scenario of getting my own place and trying on this new identity. I still want my wife to be in my life somehow. I don’t want to give up the emotional bond we share. What scares me about this is the financial fallout. We live month to month and don’t have much savings. I can’t imagine having to pay rent every month on top of the mortgage we have. Living in Los Angeles ain’t cheap. We now live semi-comfortably, and the idea of financially struggling and living with bare bones Ikea furniture in my 40s sounds a little depressing to me.

Then there’s the whole idea of dating. I don’t know if I can find the emotional stability that I have in my current relationship. Dating sounds so unappealing to me. I can’t even envision starting a new life with a guy. I read in Joe Kort’s book (yes I finally read it), that gay men who marry women can be so much more emotionally mature because they’ve navigated a relationship with the emotional reasoning of a woman (I worded that poorly, but I hope you know what I mean). Kort suggests in may be harder to find a gay man who has that same sort of emotional maturity.

So lots of questions… lots of things to think about… and not many answers.

My wife is pining to talk about this more at home, but she’s trying to give me my space. She keeps talking about a night when the kids are away and we have 24 hours to ourselves. That actually scares the bejeezus out of me. I can’t “perform” in bed to prove my love to her. I think she’s worried my silence means things are coming to an end. This morning she asked “Are we going to be okay?” I replied “I hope so.” I don’t think I was lying. I do hope we’ll be okay, whatever this new relationship is.

She admits the hardest part is that she processes by talking. She wishes she could talk to all her friends so that they know what she’s going through. She wants the support of her close knit community. Keeping it bottled up is painful for her (tell me about it, I did it for 15 years). She’s been avoiding some of her friends for fear that she’ll spill things in a moment of weakness. That makes me sad for her. She’s told two people, and I’m okay with that. But we do live in a small community and gossip spreads quickly. Maybe we’ll come to a resolution sooner rather than later so we can be more open. I’m not afraid of the moment this all goes public, but I think we need to have our lives in order before we do.