Whatever happened to Yossarian?

Hi, to those who remember me from last year and before. The last time I posted about myself sometime last year, I thought I had settled in to live the rest of my life as a married guy, out to his wife, and content to drivel away the rest of my life in the closet to the rest of the world. Going to the gym, playing racquetball, riding my bike, occasionally finding someone to wrestle with to enjoy some semi-legitimized skin-on-skin time for male bonding. Turns out the story did not end quite that way. Turns out it really isn't going to end at all, just take a different direction than what I expected.

Someone responded to one of my wrestling ads. He came over to wrestle with me. He was younger than me, and a lot stronger than me as it turned out, so I got creamed and realized we couldn't really wrestle together other than for fun. We wrestled for a while, then he had to go. I asked him if he would like to play racquetball with me some time. He said yes, and we did, several times. Then we went out to dinner together a couple of times at a sports bar, when the local college football game was being covered on TV. Then we went on a trip together to work on a rental house he owned in another town for several days. The more time we spent together, the more I realized that I was beginning to fall in love with him, something I thought I would never be able to do beyond a physical attraction to men in general. Then something amazing happened. He told me that he was in love with me. This sort of "blew my mind". Another man was actually attracted to ME. Sixty-nine year-old me. Not some olde pharte like myself, but someone half my age and handsome, who all his adult life has been attracted only to men significantly older than himself.

Could this be real? I know what Chip will say about young-old relationships. That they rarely ever work out. I understand that, and was very skeptical and cautious for months, while keeping things as platonic as possible. He came to the house when my wife was around; we all did things together; we were all friendly to each other. It was awkward. It was stressful sometimes. I was not trying to hide him from her, or keep things on the down low, only trying to keep them real for all of us. Meanwhile, I was trying to decide what to do about my marriage, when it had not seemed to make a lot a lot of sense to end it or to continue it. We talked a lot about what we should do, about what I wanted to do, about what she wanted to happen. There was a lot of crying all around. She felt "blind-sided" by the possibility of our marriage ending just as she was preparing to retire from her job. Assumptions had been made about how we would drivel the rest of our lives away together in a final house we would build for our retirement together. We were financially prepared for that, but not for the possibility of TWO different houses and each having half of the income we expected to retire on. What should we do? What should we do?

While all this is going on, I am experiencing a guilt trip of the highest order, torn between the possibility of living the life I SHOULD have been living for the last 50 years, and the semi-comfortable life I had been preparing both of us for for the remaining who knows how many years, knowing now that I am gay, and therefore always have been, and that is why my married life has never felt quite right, and now feels quite wrong, having seen what an intense love for someone of the same sex CAN feel like. I never intentionally mislead my wife about myself, I just did not understand the feelings I had about other men and what they should have meant. Same-sex relationships simply did not exist where I lived when I was growing up in the 1950s. You got married, had kids, got old, and died. That was life. That was all I expected of life. When I looked at other well-built muscular men, all I saw was what I wanted to look like myself. I envied them. They got all the cute girls and the favored jobs. My thinking was that I wanted to BE them. I never figured out and accepted that this meant I was ATTRACTED to them, in the way I see kids doing so casually on videos today, having seen their peers do so on social media. They have examples and role models and names for their orientation; we never did 50 years ago. That would have been taboo. Men didn't do that sort of thing. Men have to be with women, so I guessed that what I felt like about women was the way that other men felt about their women too, that we have to find one who likes us and wants to build family together, then marry them. So, I did. Now I am thinking about breaking this family apart and abandoning my wife to her own separate life, to take care of herself, while I go off with this younger man to live happily ever after, or as long as it, or I, last. Major guilt trip.

But, equally bad is the thought that I have been living a not very happy life for 26 years, with no prospect of it ever getting better, and then I die. One trip through life per person. No re-dos. For either one of us. She deserves someone who really cares for her mentally and physically too. What should I do? What should WE do? Here is what I did.

I took most of the money I had saved for retirement and bought my wife a house, free and clear, no mortgage, on a nice 2-acre lot, so she would have room for the garden she had always wanted but not had time or space to do while working. Signed over title to one of our two cars and her motorcycle to her sole name. Helped her move into the new house, along with all the furniture and "stuff" she wanted from our old one. Then agreed to give her some more emergency-use money when the house we had been living in jointly was sold in the next year. We were officially divorced in an uncontested manner in June. I continue to help to when she needs help with her house, and we all get together at times to do bike rides and other social events which include our mutual friends.

I am staying in the old house now with my "boyfriend" (now partner, I guess) while we fix it up for sale later in the year. He will be going to medical school next year using the GI bill to help cover our joint living expenses. We don't know exactly where that will be, so we are staying in the old house until we do know, while getting it primped up to put on the market. We might stay here, or might have to move to a different town; I accept that as a possibility, but since I am retired, I am free to move where we need to go. We continue to love each other and get along together fabulously sharing the work we need to do around the house, and enjoying each other's company, sense of humor, and peculiarities. I feel blessed.

If this doesn't work out long term, well, at 70, I don't have a long term left anyway. LOL But, every time we lay down together at night and snuggle up to each other, it feels really right, like it never did with my wife. I loved her as a person, and tried my best to be what she needed, but it was never quite what *I* needed, and I was never quite what she needed. Now it is. I hope it does last. I am in good health and expect to live at least another 20 years if I am lucky. We don't anticipate that that will be as long as he does, but we are both prepared to deal with the situation when it occurs. Maybe we will adopt or foster a child too; I can stay at home and care for a child now, he will live long enough to care for one long term. Who knows how this story will end. Not I, but I like the direction it is going for now. It seems right. Who really knows?