Hi,
It’s my first time posting here, but I’m a longtime lurker from my now-abandoned lemmy.world account. So, here’s goes…
I’ve been feeling kind of stuck in my life, and wanted to see if any comrades had experienced anything similar or know folks who have. My main difficulty is that I only realized and accepted that I’m bi after my wife was pregnant. This is a problem for me because my wife is strictly monogamous. When we last discussed things, she flat out said that she couldn’t accept me being with anyone else, even if the relationship was strictly sexual.
And I’m torn here. On the one hand, I love my wife very deeply and absolutely don’t want to lose her. We’ve been together more than ten years, and she’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met. On the other hand, I have this nagging feeling that a big part of me is going unexplored and undeveloped, to the point I find myself inexplicably mad at my wife sometimes - I guess because I blame her for not “letting” me explore this other side of me.
And about feeling stuck, I know I need to tell her how important this is to me, and to ask again if there’s any way at all we can deal with it together. But when we’ve discussed it previously, multiple times, I dealt with it poorly and hurt her very badly. I just don’t know if she can take another round of the same damn thing, and I’m very reluctant to try and have it turn out badly yet again.
Again, I’d especially appreciate hearing from folks who’ve been through similar situations, or at least know people who have.
When you entered a monogamous marriage, that didn’t mean “monogamous unless it’s same-sex”. It’s not fair to ask that of your wife over and over if she’s already given you an answer.
Before you came to this self-realization, how would you have felt if your wife kept asking you if she could have sex with some guy at work and ignoring your refusals? That’s what you’re doing to her.
I understand feeling like there’s a part of you that will just never be fully explored. But this is really about whether you are willing to be in a monogamous relationship, regardless of what gender the other potential partners are.
Yeah, I remember thinking when we got married that I wouldn’t ever want anyone else. And I know she felt the same. So I have a lot of guilt over this that I haven’t known what to do about either.