Hello All,

I am a little over three years divorced from my wife of 23 years. We had one child together during that time. The marriage started out good but deteriorated to the point of being a toxic and hellish experience for all concerned.

When I married my wife, I was madly in love and I thought she was also. She was inexperienced sexually but seemed to learn fast and enjoy what we did together. I never for a moment thought what we felt together wasn't real.

About five years into our marriage, she confessed to me that she was bi-sexual and had always been attracted to women ever since the beginning. We flirted with the idea of finding a playmate for her but she backed down from the idea because she saw it as breaking our marriage vows bringing someone else into the picture. So, we settled for "girl watching" and she even had a mad crush on a co-worker that continues to this day, even though the other woman would not be receptive. (Truth be told, I think she was actually in honest to goodness love with this other woman, judging from certain reactions and things that were said.) 

Eight years in, we had our only child, and that was the final nail in an already dwindling sex life. Essentially we lived separate lives within our home, me at one end, her at the other. On rare occasion, we would have what we called "binge sex" where we would just finally work out months of frustration in one crazy session but then go back to normal afterwards until several more months went by.

Long story short, our marriage became intolerable and I finally left the marriage and divorced her. She did not take it well and continued to hound me to stop the divorce, then when it became final she stalked me relentlessly pleading with me to come back.

Then, one day, she did a total about face, told me she wanted only limited contact with me and to forget everything she had said about wanting me back. This coincided with a new therapist she was seeing that I suspect had urged her to take this course of action. It worked, because now it's over a year later we can be civil with the knowledge that there is no chance in the world of reconciliation.

Here's the messed up part;

We had a discussion a little while back where she admitted to me that she knew she was gay even when we started dating and when we got married. When she came out as "bisexual" earlier in the marriage that was not entirely accurate, apparently. Her small town upbringing caused her to be ashamed of being gay and she even struggled with it while she was married to me even when she was thought to be bisexual and not fully "gay". She tried praying it away, denying it, immersing herself in all sorts of crazy heterosexual activity with me, but it never went away. She also had a really screwed up home life growing up AND it was discovered during her sessions with this new therapist that she was on the autism spectrum and is considered an "aspie", which is short for Aspberger's syndrome. One of our many previous marriage counselors told me in private she suspected my wife had Narcissistic Personality Disorder and that recent studies have found a connection between that and being on the autism spectrum.

My wife desperately wanted that "happy home" she never had as a child, and she told herself that if she had to marry a man, and be EVERYTHING a dutiful wife would be in order to have that, then so be it. She saw this as sacrificing herself and who she really was to have this vision of a happy home and happy family she never had growing up. That meant having to try as hard as she could to be a normal, heterosexual woman. She pulled it off for a long time, but eventually the red flags started to appear and things grew gradually worse.

She admitted there were parts of our sex life she did enjoy (mostly receiving oral) but others she did not but she had to comply anyway to keep up appearances. THAT was a very confusing thing to have to hear.

In plain English, my marriage was built on a lie. On top of that, I was made to feel like a failure over and over again for years because I could never seem to measure up to what she thought a spouse should be. Her idea of a spouse was more like a daddy that thought like a woman. The negativity, the walking on egg shells to avoid conflict, the endless arguments, the control freak crap, the dominance struggles, all the things she put me through and then to turn around and tell me it was all based on a lie? That you were trying to be straight because you were in love with an idea and you used me to try to make that real?

At this point, part of me is relieved that she has come to her senses because she did not take the divorce well at all and made my life hell for the first couple of years afterwards, but another part is angry as hell for having invested 23 years of my life over a lie! It's not something that I spend tons of time mulling over but it does tick me off when I stop to think about it. 

I think forums like this are great things, and I am happy to have stumbled onto this one. I have moved on and I am with a very wonderful and very straight lady now, so I did get the happy ending there. I just can't help feel resentful for the time I spent living someone else's lie and being abused on top of it.


 

Last edited by Zappafan (January 9, 2020 8:27 pm)