Oh, that's two half finished replies I have lost now.  Goodness.  anyway, so all I can think about now is how I would like some food before the day gets much older.  but I have not given up, I will be back, it's all your fault, you know that don't you Dutchman, your post is so long I run out of wind and then time to reply and then the bit I've done so far is gone when I come back to it - well that bit's my fault of course.

okay that's better, back with a coffee..

yes, no, my grandmother's church was not the one you talked about, it was in Hampstead Heath.  A lot about healing through prayer and being positive in hoping for peace (it was between the wars).  My mother joined up with her parents, she was 14.  It had a huge impact on our lives.  Well religion does that, doesn't it - it affects everything you think.  I lost my faith in religion altogether in my 40's.  It was unbelievably painful at the time but I think it helped me come to see I was in a MOM and being gaslighted.

I am still gay friendly, I have never viewed it as a sin.  It's just the way you're born.   I agree, your view of bringing it out into the open - the gay spouse who is within a marriage - is unusual, for everyone really but I am the same as are many here on this forum.

I do not believe being open about it will mean less MOMs though.  I have heard several young men and women say things along the line of 'if I admit I am gay then the straights won't want to date me'.  IMO the MOMs will only stop when there aren't any straights left to date.

But I still think it's better to have it out in the open - it was better for me once I knew.  I went into shock, for the first three weeks I had hour long showers and then one which lasted an hour and a half, and as I was drying off I felt like either I was going to start vomiting or I was going to start crying and it was touch and go but then I started crying and it was better from then on.


I am going to post this now so I don't make it three strikes.  I will continue to answer your post in a fresh box...

I'm sorry my posts were so long, it's hard to trim down for so much happens in fifteen years, I'll try to keep it in more manageable chunks... (if possible...)

I was brought up without religion, actually I was a somewhat activist atheist. So against all odds I started believing, just reading the bible. 
Loosing faith in "religion" I surely can imagine, loosing faith in God would be something very different to me. I'm critical towards tradition (like in "things people say/have said, faith should be"). Some of these traditional thoughts could be right and some may very well not be. But ah, if I went on writing about this, my posts would only get a lot longer...

Religion can do harm, like the blunt "homosexuality is a sin" statement. But faith can be a strong and liberating force in life, as in a strive to do good, not because of imposed rules, but something that's freely from the heart and mind. When this applies to both spouses, it really can make a difference in the way you handle a MOM. Not only concerning the "sin" aspect of homosexuality, but broader how one makes decisions in life. Still it's an enormous challenge to deal with, with the same emotions, feelings and troubles as anybody has.

I do not believe being open about it will mean less MOMs though.  I have heard several young men and women say things along the line of 'if I admit I am gay then the straights won't want to date me'.  IMO the MOMs will only stop when there aren't any straights left to date.

Recently my wife and I evaluated our life's history. We love each other, would surely choose each other as a person, but 20 years into marriage TGT happened to us. It's like unfair this should blow up our love and intentions. I thought... as a theory... lets suppose we started dating 15 years ago (but than with she and I knowing she was lesbian). Would we still marry than?
 
At first we would say NO! But still... there is much that draws us together, so suppose we got engaged and tried to work things out before marriage. If we would have taken the time to work it out (and did't broke up this attempt because it just seemed to hard), and reached the point we got to a few years ago in our life, there is a good chance we would marry. 
For then it definitely would be for the right reasons. Like I tried to sum up in my previous post, my attempt to describe the bottom line when a MOM can potentially work out.
Some have the luxury to known and find out before they marry and some have to struggle through it when suddenly confronted with the fact like my wife and I had to. 

A MOM isn't the problem, the wrong reasons to enter (or be in) one is.

But I still think it's better to have it out in the open - it was better for me once I knew.  I went into shock, for the first three weeks I had hour long showers and then one which lasted an hour and a half, and as I was drying off I felt like either I was going to start vomiting or I was going to start crying and it was touch and go but then I started crying and it was better from then on.

I do understand how hard this has been for you. All the thoughts and feelings that rush through you, being confronted with this and trying to process it. It's a very dark page in my life also, and few who haven't gone through this, understand the devastating impact it really has. Fifteen years later, I'm still cleaning up some of the negative remnants of this period. Your situation was different and more difficult then ours, as you write that your ex was gaslighting you. So you were confronted with (years of) dishonest intentions, no real love, even manipulation. It must have been awful to realize this. This is one of the most cruel things that can happen upon someone and very hard to accept.

But not all homosexual spouses in a MOM are the same. There is good and there is evil, and it's not just TGT, but the actual (and complete) person that makes the difference.

okay so sexual orientation.  yes I do see it as being simple, as black and white as magnetic poles.  There it is, at the heart of mating behaviour.  Imagine if you were switched to same sex attraction - it's going to be profoundly different isn't it.  The conclusion I have reached is that for many people with that physical same sex attraction, they still have the emotionality to form a bond with a member of the opposite sex - and this is how they have a family.

To me the term bisexual is a misnomer because it implies physical attraction to both sexes.  there is a saying - bi now gay later.  Lots of stories of bi going gay not one of bi going straight.  Just like it does with the rest of us, the physical orientation remains stable.  It is the emotionality that shifts.

My wife being lesbian, will be much more attracted to women physically. I don't assume this will change. But that just isn't as all important as it's supposed to be.
It is very much more important that she wants to make love with me! Because she loves me, and she likes it, it makes her feel good and it makes me feel good. We connect emotionally and both feel completely loved by each other. She doesn't replace me in fantasy with a woman, because I am (the man) whom she loves. She is not "lesbian no 6", like she is repulsed by a mans body. She likes to give me what I enjoy, and that is enjoyment to herself. Well, from me to her, is of course not different from what a hetero man enjoys about a woman. So all ingredients for a good sexual relation are present. So emotional attraction bridges the physical attraction. Missing is that her enjoyment is not focussed on my manly physical aspects. Yes thats a pity, but it's not that important that I percieve this as problematic. 

I think in a hetero man-lesbian sexual relationship there is a different dynamic then gay-hetero woman sexual relationship:
Being a man I don't care that much about how I'm visually perceived (of course, I don't want to feel rejected also!). But for me (man) it's much more important to be appreciated for what I do, and who I am as a person to my wife (being loved and respected). So the physical attraction part doesn't count that strongly towards me. For my wife however it's much more important to feel desired and admired for her beauty (and of course also being loved for who she is as person). 
I assume physical sexuallity, when the man is gay, is more complicated because of these differences. (ie. harder for the emotional attraction to bridge the lack in physical attraction)

But even than the emotional shift can make all the difference. The physical attraction part may well be only truly decisive when one is at/near the extreme end of the spectrum.
Even if I shifted emotionally for miles, I would never want to be with a man. Thats because I'm at the extreme hetero side. I assume the same goes for 100% lesbians/gays. 

do you think of sexual orientation as being on a spectrum with gay at one end and straight at the other?  what's in the middle, someone who is equally attracted both ways? 

It's just not like that, is it.  All us straights say we're only attracted to the opposite sex.  Then you get the gay people who see themselves as being on a spectrum and that's fine by me but it is not about being physically attracted to the opposite sex it seems to me to be more about emotional compatibility.

check out Alfred Kinsey who invented that spectrum.  He was gay and married, ie bisexual.  He sought out treatment for his homosexual urges.

I think straight and (100%) gay are the extremes of the spectrum (I don't think a 100% gay person finds himself in a spectrum). So at these extreme ends there is no experience of spectrum, it's black and white.
Most people are straight so don't have to deal with "a spectrum", it's outside their experience. But everyone that falls in between, do experiences some kind of spectrum. That hasn't to be 50/50, its a blur moving from one side to the other side of the spectrum. 

The problem is, how to describe this "blur and spectrum", what does it accutally mean in practise? How do people handle it, and what are the driving factors? 
Is the term "sexual orientation" suitable? It's not at all clear to me what this term means or how to define it.
To some extend one can give a theoretical number value to "physical attraction". But how important is that exactly and to what extend? It's clear that the Kinsey scale is not adequate. 
It's like a weather report with only wind speeds, but without temperature or amount of rainfall.

You coin the term "emotional compatibility". And I agree with you to add more factors into the equation. What is your definition of this term? And would it be enough to explain most or everything? 

For me personally: fifteen years ago my wife came out lesbian. I'm still a man, she is still a woman, i'm still straight, she still labels herself lesbian. But our MOM is totally okay.
We don't care for what the Kinsey scale says. Our reality is made of so many more aspects, very different from just TGT. 

There is a profound difference between gay and straight.  Gay people like to say straight people don't know what it's like for them and fair enough but it goes both ways - they don't know what it's like for us.

Yes, it's an enigma that everbody experiences sexuallity, but at the same time it always creeps beyond our understanding.

The article series on this website might very well interest you:

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/part-one-sexual-orientation-sexuality-and-gender

'oh it's only sex'.  I won't accept that any more, but I did so for far too long.  That is what my ex would say, there's more important things than sex.  Eventually though, he ended up saying there's more important things than love.  well I knew he was wrong about that!  

Did he say that to avoid sex, or because he wanted to have sex outside the marriage? In both cases it would be wrong, but it's not clear to me what the situation was.

I have just read this article, thought it was quite interesting.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001669.htm

It is a description of intersex from a medical perspective.  I had no idea it was that complicated - I just thought it would be interesting to know if hermaphrodites have different chromosomes.  and yes they do.  It's just that there's several different types...


 

I do, increasingly I object to all these percentages scales and spectrums - they do not encompass the straight experience.

here's another interesting article on intersex.  It's rather sweet, a description of what it's like by a young person.

https://www.minus18.org.au/index.php/articles/item/2-847-im-intersex-heres-what-that-means

The thing that always strikes me with bisexuals is that they seem to think they know better than straights what is gender and sexuality.  Huh?  I want to say.  Fascinatingly the intersex person takes it even further, he thinks he knows a lot better than us straights.  we who only know one gender when they know both.

They do not know, Dutchman what it is to be straight.  But they know what they know, it is different to us, it has some great observations, I do not believe it is as relevant to the straight experience as they like to think it is. 

Yes of course people stay in MOMs  as well as divorce - I think this is the only site for the straight spouse though.  When I first came here it was quite permissible to talk about the ick factor.  That you felt sick.  Sleeping with a gay man made me feel physically sick, and I had buried that feeling for far too long, it was a lot to process when it came out.  Nowadays it's not pc.  We are being told to bury our visceral pain again.  not an option for me, and I don't regret that - my feeling is better out than in.

People have been saying sexual attraction is magnetic for centuries that we know of.  If it isn't attraction it is repulsion, that's the meaning of magnetic.  As the straight spouse I was attracted by my partner's body but there was this underlying current that wasn't right and eventually that turned out to be he was gay but until that time I just took it on and ended up feeling very sick.

I know numbers of people in MOM's some very close to me.  they are taking medications to keep the blood pressure down.  My blood pressure is back to normal, I am soul deep relieved to have had this time out of the MOM but I am struggling with being alone and they might yet make older bones than me.