Well Still wondering I'm confused about why he says he needs to stay away from me too, he says he thinks of me when hes not with me, right up to the day he told me he was having sex with me so I knew of nothing that would suggest anything different as with a gay man who starts to distance himself from his wife...
Yes I guess he is trying to say hes being faithful to this other man lol funny isn't it, because I know he can't honnor being like that any more.... I also know this relationship isn't going to last and that my husband will now need a man in his life...
Yes I'm still his wife but I have taken another approach to it, that I'm no longer the wife that cares in that way...... Building a new relationship and getting along is important to me. 
I see my husband very depressed, he has gone into survival mode which suggests to me hes having problems dealing with being gay...... But that is his problem not mine...
He never had a good relationship with his parents especially his father, so that is why hes attracted to men that are of the older age.... 
I think he is Bisexual and he needs to make a decision to who he want to be with.... At the moment I'm just looking after me and everything we built together....
I'm not stupid and I see things clear now hes not living with me all the time...
I see a lost soul too... But then I know I should be careful not to get caught up in his stuff...
I guess I just want to ask questions still and you think about things..... Then I guess I have to accept it is what is and I should build a bridge and move on aye.....

I hear what your saying - Thank you
 

Last edited by Vee (August 8, 2017 10:00 pm)

Thanks Still wondering, He is only eating food, sleeping, going to work and with his boyfriend.
There is nothing that he's happy about when I talk to him, it is like a break down....Nothing in his life is good enough, he hates where we live and everything we have, he just walks away from it all..... But then that is his problem aye.
Its like a little boy not wanting to take responsibility for his actions.
I told him man up and say I have done this, I made all these decision to come to this point, I have messed my own life and mine, so now it is time to move on and deal with things........ 
Its him not accepting his gayness now, not me.... Accepting it hard but I am everyday get easier....

The things you see now when the person leaves are funny, we have grown apart without even seeing it, I have grown with my job where I was wanting to be someone and keep pushing myself.
Where he just wanted to fit in.....He knows how much he has hurt me and he should have told me years ago, as he just didn't know the person I had changed into and he was this naughty little boy who hid things from his wife....

Last night i didn't answer the phone, in 20 years together he would always call me... But I know that I'm on my own, I went to the pub on my own last night I called it a date night on my own lol...
I also had a cry of the loss of my marriage last night..... It is sad but it will be okay I keep telling myself.

Do these kinds of people actually want to help themselves?

Or do they enjoy the pitty party they have?

How about the drama they bring to the table, OMG I have never had so much drama in my life I'm over it!!!!

Maybe these lost souls of sexual cause should get new hobbies or something..........
I'm sorry I get so mad......... The hurting of partners and families should stop...

 

Last edited by Vee (August 9, 2017 1:42 pm)

From a post by Ellexoh. By way of background, her husband has just admitted to being bisexual and she's considering a mixed orientation marriage or MOM. She shared: "There is no history of cheating (I see cheating as face-to-face intimate contact) that I'm aware of....just porn, literotica, Craigslist chatting, and his internalised fantasies."

​As I've shared in previous posts, I don't believe that MOMs can work with purely gay/straight relationships. Perhaps they can work with bisexual husbands who are honestly attracted to women. But I know from experience that it's simply impossible for a gay man like me with zero attraction to women to stay with a "beard" because I was too scared to come out of the closet. I'll let bisexual men or their wives comment on whether MOMs have worked for them.

​What I wanted to comment on was this idea that Craigslist chatting is somehow harmless or "not cheating." This is just more unbelievable bullsh*t spin from gay-in-denial husbands. I too told my (then) wife that gay porn was harmless. Escorts? Harmless. Sexting? Harmless. A hook up? Just once and completely harmless. I know from experience that there is indeed a tipping point. If you are posting on this forum and your husband is chatting on CraigsList, your relationship is in serious trouble. There are countless stories from straight spouses who also heard from their "bi-curious" husbands that chatting on Craigslist with other "discreet" (read: closeted) men was harmless. One of them discovered she'd caught AIDS from her husband who was also just chatting online..."nothing more" he claimed while the bastard blithely gave his trusting wife a potentially life-threatening STD. In my opinion, CraigsList chatting and face-to-face hook ups go hand in hand. There is a even a post somewhere on this thread by a straight spouse who claimed that her husband often went to gay saunas, "but not to have sex with other men." The gay-sauna husband claimed he was roughly 20% gay in his estimation. Right then. I wrote something along the lines of, "He's not going to gay saunas for the conversation." There is definitely a bargaining stage in gay/straight relationships and it sounds something like this:

- He watches gay porn but he loves me.
- He cheated on me ONCE with a man but he loves me.
​- I found messages to his boyfriend but I still love him.
​- He wants to open up our marriage (read: openly cheat on me with men) but we still love each other.
​- He's attracted to men because he was molested as a child so clearly he needs me more than ever.  

Gay Craigslist ads, Grindr, Scruff, Hornet and the like have one purpose: men hooking up with other men. When a man posts that he's "discreet", this means one thing: I'm married and don't want my wife to find out. So let's cut the bullsh*t. When a man hasn't had sex with his wife for years, for years has masturbated to gay porn, and actively cruises on websites or applications like Craigslist, he's gay as a rainbow and ​doing a lot more than he's telling you. Having been through decades of denial myself, I too know how long and hard a process it can be to accept reality. So please don't think I'm criticizing straight spouses for having hope that their marriages will survive. If anything, I'm bashing gay-in-denial husbands who continue to lie about their true sexuality while cheating on their wives. So what's my point? If he's on Craigslist, assume he's cheating, has cheated, and will continue to do so. This puts you at risk if you're still having sex. You should therefore protect yourself by always using condoms when having sex with your gay-(or bi)-in-denial husband. Yes we always hope for the best, that's human nature. But where your health is concerned, I urge you to assume the worst to keep from being blindsided again and again by a black-belt liar and maniupulator. Ask yourself this question: did he just spontaneously tell you about his CraigsList chatting or did he reluctantly admit to it when you confronted him with overwhelming evidence?   

​I'm sorry of that stings a bit. But I do hope that helps some of you gain more clarity on this bumpy road to healing from toxic gay/straight relationships.  

Last edited by Sean (August 14, 2017 7:43 am)

Thank you for responding and please accept my apologies if I hurt your feelings or offended you. I have a few questions if you don't mind:

1. If I'm reading your post correctly, did you both agree to have an open marriage?
2. Has your husband confessed to cheating with other men or does he still maintain the contact was "virtual" or via internet, chat, or text?
​3. If he hasn't yet had sex with another man, how then does he know he might be bisexual?

Thanks in advance for your answers my friend. I hope you, your husband, and family aren't suffering too much as you navigate these troubled waters. Please keep sharing as all posts/opinions help.  

Last edited by Sean (August 14, 2017 5:00 am)

Ellexoh,
   This might be hard for you to read and may even seem cruel or hostile, but I think your saying that because you have a history of an open relationship this means that you have a different perspective and therefore can't see what Sean details (Craiglist, etc) as signaling that your husband is gay is some world class "bargaining" you're dong with yourself.  I also think you may at some level know that you are bargaining, because after all you've chosen to come onto this forum.  I think you're stuck in a "I need to do something/I can't do something" phase. It's a phase, and I'm not condemning or criticizing you--dog knows I was a world class bargainer and denier of myself!  
    Right after my husband declared to me that he was trans, I became an active audience participant in my husband's own individual immersive sexual theatre, not just the action onstage, but helping out as a techie behind the scenes, helping with costumes, prop acquisition and management, and script.  
    So I get it: you're saying, "well, this stuff doesn't matter because our situation is different; I benefitted, too.  I can't cast stones. It means something different in my case than in most."  Sorry to say, to me it looks like maybe what you're doing is giving yourself ammunition to help yourself continue to deny and bargain. I "benefitted" too, if you count the number and quality of the orgasms I was having when accepting the invitation to play wife to trans woman. But even after a session (see, I don't even call it a lovemaking session, because it wasn't that--it was me trying to make it lovemaking to my husband, when my husband was not making love to me, but making love to himself as a woman and imagining I was making love to him as woman) I would long for my husband to want to make love to me as he used to do and be sad knowing he never would again, sad realizing that he would never again do that for me, despite what I was doing for him.  Once, after a session in which for once he didn't wear women's clothes, but still, lying on his back and raising his legs, cried out in his woman persona "I need for you to fuck me" (meaning "use the dildo on me"), he asked me "Was that hetero enough for you?"  
    Eventually, I realized that these sessions didn't signal what I thought they did and wanted them to, and I began to feel guilty for "leading him on" to believe I could accommodate myself to a sexuality that was really fundamentally at odds with and even hostile to my heterosexuality.  How could I leave him when I'd been so eager a participant?  Bargaining on my part, pure and simple; I didn't want to break the marriage, didn't want to lose the future I thought we could have, was afraid of a financially less generous retirement, thought I wasn't lovable on my own, etc. etc.
    Then I came around to thinking I did what I did then with the knowledge I had then; the more I found out about the way he thought of himself, the more I saw his behavior change outside the bedroom, the more his own idea of himself changed or solidfied, the more distorted his reality and reason became, the more I realized things were not what I thought when I'd participated in my desperate attempt to reassure myself that my husband still loved me and that I could "save" my marriage (and that I wasn't "transphobic"--I had a huge assortment of mental tools to help me construct my "house of bargaining"). 
   So my experience makes me say this: don't think that just because you had an open relationship before that it means his desire for one now, with male partners, doesn't signal either cheating or that he isn't gay (or that his claim to bisexuality isn't a cover for his being gay). I wonder: who suggested that first open relationship?  Was is it you?  If so, what were your reasons?  If it was him, what were the reasons you agreed?  What difference would it have made then and what difference does it make now that If you had known then when you first went along with it that what your husband really wanted was a way to have sexual contact with men without saying that?  Threesomes, couples, open relationships: all can be a cover, cast as benefitting you.  Someone once wrote on this forum that her husband took her to a male strip clube as a "present" to her--when he was the one who wanted the experience.  What difference does it make now that he has started it up again after you asked for it to stop (I may be confusing your story with someone else's and you didn't)?  
   So to me it's not about the fact that you had such a relationship once so you therefore can't complain about its starting up again or reinterpret the reasons for it then or now.  It's not about the fact that your having been sexually adventurous and open protects you from the reality of your husband's being gay. On this forum I have noticed that you like to refer to your husband as "my man"; as the wife of someone who declared himself transgender, this phrase struck me powerfully, as "my man" is exactly what I've lost and would like back, and I've often wondered whether this use on your part wasn't some powerful unconscious expression on your part, wishful thinking, as it were, as if calling him that would "ward off the gay."
  
   

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (August 14, 2017 8:43 am)