I think....no person can ever be exactly the same as  another.

"more bisexual" must be a purely personal reckoning, from the particular moment
in one's journey, combined with history, personality and intimate knowledge of the
bisexual one perhaps....
I know my points of view about this subject aren't the same as they were 2 years ago, 
so I know for a fact this is a constantly changing, not a stagnant beast.

I know what you mean about the "anything goes mentality"....because 10 years ago I had the same, convinced by the safety and trust in my r'ship that nothing could hurt us. It was exciting, I felt adventurous...but I look back now and tho 
I can't pinpoint the exact moment it happened at some point...the way we both viewed our r'ship changed, and while I "put the brakes on" he seemed to possess an entitlement for "everything and full-steam ahead"

Little did I know.....I actually didn't know him at all

lily wrote:

"put kicking the brakes on" - my guess is that is your wish for a monogamous relationship kicking in 
Yes...and kicking in too late..


No I didn't know him at all either.  It was a rapid education, and years later I am still unpacking it.
Enjoy the peace and quiet though. I can imagine the Peace and Quiet but can't quite visualise it 
as being real or even possible yet. 

 

  As you all know, bisexuality was not the issue with my then-husband-now-ex.  But OnMyOwnTwoFeet, much of what you are saying about your "parsing out" what he meant, and your husband's responses to you as well as his actions toward you, fit exactly with my situation. 

 Although my now-ex declared himself to be trans, not bisexual, I spent hours and hours--the entire summer of 2015, in fact--trying to figure out what, exactly, "trans" was, reading the work of both consulting and academic psychologists, online activist groups, gender critical feminists, etc etc ad nauseum.  (Over at Chump Lady, they call this "untangling the skein" (focusing on HIM, not YOU), but I hadn't then discovered Chump Lady.)  I have often said I gave myself a graduate degree in Trans Studies.

    I would often ask my then-husband questions, based on what I was reading, to see his reaction.  And here, yet again, OnMyOwnTwoFeet, what I experienced was a lot like what you have.  He would answer, sort of; sort of, I say, because is answers about what he was thinking and feeling, how he experienced and defined himself, were "ever-changing." 

     He wanted to stay married to me, he said, but his actions didn't match his words, at least not in my judgment, from my perspective.  If I were going to stay married to a person who called himself trans, and refused to take any future feminizing action off the table, which meant, as far as I was concerned, that our entire future was contingent on what he might do, I needed openness and transparency, a willingness to engage, to provide me with the information I needed to make an informed decision about whether I needed to exit the marriage.  He wouldn't give this.
  
Instead I got a lot of obfuscatory talk (verbal gymnastics, I called it once here; Chump Lady calls it "word salad"), some acknowledgement he needed to change ("I know I need to communicate more" he said, at least three times, but never followed through), and blame-shifting ("I know I need to communicate more" morphed into "I don't feel I can talk to you").  I, too, heard a version of "it's more complicated than that," which in my now-ex's case also meant "I'm just more evolved than you are." 

  I also got manipulated; he once actually admitted to manipulating me to get me to accept his pushing the boundaries.  I was perfectly willing to deal with him up front, two people in a committed marriage negotiating a compromise of what they each needed, but instead of honest conversation he opted to manipulate me to get me to do what he wanted. You say your husband is like a "shape-shifter"; I say mine was a fog machine; he was creating a fog around me so that I would lose my way and be unable to see the twists and turns and alternative routes available to me.  

   The bottom line was exactly what you see it to be, OnMyOwnTwo Feet.  There was always a reason I was not doing enough to accommodate what he wanted.  I figured out eventually that I would never be able to do enough, and he would never consider me an equal partner whose rights were equal to his, and who was due equal consideration and respect.  And like your husband, mine would never "own what his actions should be telling him."  Instead, my now-ex, too, "continue[d] to obfuscate," and he left it up to me to act to end the marriage.  
 
 I spent some time trying to figure that out, too, before I decided that it wasn't worth my while figuring it out, that it distracted from the work I had to do for myself, caring for myself, and healing from what was a very damaging experience.  All I have to know is that he is very troubled person who was willing to sacrifice me to fulfilling his newly declared desire, and that I am better off away from him.

OMOTF,

    I got my diploma from the court in the form of my divorce decree .  I should hang it up alongside my BA, my two MAs, and my PhD.  It was without a doubt the most difficult of all for me to achieve.

     Funny, I have never read Bancroft but when I was in the "can I stay?/what means I'll have to go?" stage in the first nine months after disclosure, a phase that also overlapped with my "pick me" dance, I told my now-ex that if he wasn't going to take any future feminizing act off the table I needed to know what he was thinking and planning--in other words, that he needed to be transparent (haha, inadvertent trans joke, referring to the tv show)--so I could decide--make an informed decision--what I needed to do for myself.  The thing was, he wasn't interested in my making any informed decisions, or in being transparent (except in that tv show way).  He was only interested in getting what he wanted. 
     At the time, I thought that what he wanted included me and staying married; after all, in a moment of sexual satisfaction when I had prostituted myself to his acting out his sexual fantasies/desires he had gushed "I want to live with you the rest of my life!"  I had yet to learn that consistency over time was not behavior to be expected from him, and that he had not committed to anything more than living with me on a contingent basis, which to him meant, "as long as is convenient and useful for me."  And that turned out to mean "as long as you service my sexual needs, validate me "as a woman," on top of the service I was already providing as the dutiful wife appliance taking care of everything around the house.  I kept thinking he just didn't understand what I was going through, and believed that if he did he'd change his behavior, so I kept tryng to tell him, but it wasn't that he didn't understand--he just didn't care.  There was no empathy either in intellectual or in emotional understanding.  There was only him and what he wanted.  Once I figured that out, I had the key to understanding him, and that allowed me to stop hoping "things" (oh so much contained in that "things"!) could be fixed.

 Your point about friendship struck home with me, because while we were in the thick of the divorce process, my now-ex wrote to say he "hoped" that "once we're through the hard part we can be friends."  My response was exactly yours: "Why would I want to be friends with someone who has treated me the way you have and said the things you have?"  I also know that his desire to be "friends" serves his narrative of "amicable divorce," which in turn serves his continued inhabitation of the closet and the deception he continues to perpetrate on our son, his own father, and everyone he works with.  Now that I'm no longer living with or married to him, he sometimes acts toward me--gaslights me--as if nothing that happened ever happened, as if I am a baby who has not yet acquired the capacity for object permanence.  I, however, have pictures and emails, printed out, and saved; when I occasionally need the reminder that yes, it happened, and yes, he was as off his rocker as I remember him then, I get them out to validate my sense of the way things were.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (June 10, 2019 8:16 am)