Hey all,

I’m brand new here. I found out about these forums from a counsellor that I’ve been seeing, and it’s been such a relief to read so many stories about people who are experiencing similar situations as I am. I’m more so looking for support and perspective on my situation, since my partner and I already decided to separate at the beginning of last month. For some context, I live in Alberta, Canada. My partner is 25 and male, I’m 26 and female.

Back in June of this year, he told me that most of his life he had wondered if he was gay before he met me since he’d had been attracted to guys throughout his teens. However, he’d also experienced some of these feelings towards a few girls in the past when he was in high school, and since we’d been together for the last 3.5 years, we both agreed he’s likely bisexual if he’s able to experience attraction and sexual experiences with me, as well as attraction towards guys. I asked him at that time if this changed anything about our relationship and what it all meant for us, and he reassured me he saw a future for us and still wanted to eventually get married one day.
However, towards the end of the summer, he’d been spending lots of time with my brother, and he realized that it was triggering desires to have sexual experiences with men again. He obviously wasn’t going to try and get with my brother, but he knew he had to address this with me. We talked about everything over the course of a couple days at the beginning of September. It was so hard. We were both extremely emotional and upset at what everything had come to. The hardest part for me was that his revelation of this came as a huge shock, there was never really any outward indications of his feelings shifting. I guess when you have to suppress certain desires for so long, you get really good at it. We were having good sex right up until we decided we had to separate, so there was never a big drop off in that, and we were still very affectionate with each other. We had always had great sexual chemistry throughout our relationship. There were never any dead giveaways that he might be gay or bi, besides him being into some anal play, but I never have really considered that to be the be all end all of confirming someone’s sexuality. I am more experienced than he is in that department, so I did end up having to teach him how to do certain things since he’d never been with a woman before, but he always seemed to thoroughly enjoy sex with me. He did tell me that he’d only ever had one encounter with a guy he had played football with in his early 20s, and that it hadn’t really satisfied him. He told me more about how his desires to experience sex with a guy had been surfacing more and more, to the point where he was having trouble being present with me in the relationship, and he grew worried that he’d act on it and end up cheating on me. I’m grateful that he never physically cheated on me, but it was still hard to hear how he had been feeling. At first neither of us wanted to acknowledge that we’d have to separate, since we’ve always had a very loving, conscious, healthy and supportive relationship. We are so compatible in so many ways with shared values, interests etc, and he is one of the most compassionate and emotionally intelligent men I have ever met... We talked about other options, but neither of us want to be in an open relationship, since we prefer monogamy. So we decided it’s best if we separate so he can explore and experiment to see if it’s something that he really wants. It’s been so heartbreaking to say the least, he’s not only my partner, but my best friend. I saw us growing old together. He’s my shoulder to cry on, but he can’t be that for me right now since I’ve had to take time away from talking to him or seeing him to process everything. It’s been over a month since I’ve seen him or communicated with him. I did make sure he understood why, so he didn’t think I was shutting him out entirely. We both acknowledged when we saw each other last that we may be able to try again in the future if things align in that way. He told me that I’m one of the only people he pictures himself being with if this path that he needs to go down doesn’t suit him, and that doing this has broken his heart too because he knows how deeply this has hurt me and he said it hurts him too knowing that we have to let our former relationship go in order for him to understand himself more. I’m not going to get my hopes up for us to get back together anytime soon, since there’s no telling how long this will take. I’m putting myself first and moving forward in other ways, however part of me still hopes that this is only temporary. I know I’m still young, but the thought of being with anyone else besides him is a very scary thing to think about, and part of me worries that I’ll never feel this way again about someone, I truly thought he was going to be my partner for the rest of our lives. 
Anyways, if you made it this far, thanks for reading! TLDR; my boyfriend came out to me as being bi, he feels the need to explore sex with guys, we decided to separate and it’s been heartbreaking for us both.