These mixed marriages are hard..  The truth of the matter is that it's typically only possible for one of the two people to be happy.  The only way both can be happy is if the str8 spouse is ok with the gay spouse having sex with someone else.  Are you one of these people?

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Last edited by Duped (November 11, 2019 3:20 pm)

Ellexoh wrote:

I'm wondering if counsel from a sex-therapist would be better for us.
 

Possibly... if you feel the counselor you have now doesn't have a good grip on the sexual aspect of your relationship problem.

I think you need your counselor to nail your spouse to the wall and say "Listen here buddy... she's having none of this 'sex on the side' thing. Are you prepared to be faithful to her? Can you do that? Because if not you need to say so NOW!"

If he insists he can be faithful... that he wants to be faithful then it's over to you. Can you trust him? That answer will probably come mostly from your gut. You know him. You might already know how strong (or not) his attraction to men is. If he has a history of cheating you might already have your answer.

Ellexoh,
    I think you just made a giant leap:  all the time spent "trying to understand it all" in the end turns out to be wasted effort on your part.  I have just this month made a similar realization.   In the end, whatever caused my husband's dysmorphia/dysphoria, whether it could be treated, whether transness is something real or imagined, whether transactivism is actively misogynistic....all of these, on which I spent countless hours, ended up being nothing but part of my process of bargaining and denial, on the road to accepting the truth.  He wants to feminize himself.  He doesn't see anything wrong with that.  He's not interested in how that affects our marriage, and he's not interested in considering what he wants within the context of being married.  I can't change any of that.  I can only decide what I will do in the face of it.  So yes, the sooner we get to "acceptance" the better off we are, because the sooner we can do the things we have to do to uncouple, and the sooner we can begin to rebuild our lives.  

No one's trying to convince you of anything, Ellexoh.  We have no reason to - what you do doesn't affect our lives one bit.  We're here to tell you OUR viewpoint on how WE feel about a situation such as yours.  Because we've been through it - lived through it, learned from it, have come out the other side.  Or we've at least been in your stage and now are at a different place based on similar desires in the beginning to support/stay with our spouse.  We're trying to let you benefit from our experience and learning.  But you are upset with us for giving you our opinion on your situation, even though we are survivors of the same tragedy.  You don't have to agree with us.  There is room for debate and challenging, so long as it's done with kindness.

It's almost like you're a first-time pregnant mother, going on a "Birth" board, asking other mothers for feedback on how to give birth naturally but reduce pain.  Many of us would have the opinion that you should just get the epidural and be pain-free.  But if you came here saying you wanted to be medication free but were looking for pain relief ideas, and you found that no women here had successfully had a medication-free childbirth, then it stands to reason that you'd hear a lot of, "Just get the epidural.", or "I was you - and now I'm pro epidural.  At least consider why you're wanting to go natural."  If you will ONLY accept pain relief suggestions that are medication free, then go find a medication-free childbirth board.  That's ALL they discuss.

We have no good ideas here on how to make it all work out in the end with a MOM, because that didn't work out for us when we tried it.  There are a few people here who are attempting to be in a successful MOM, but I'd doubt any of them would tell you that they have successfully arrived at such a sustained place of happiness.  There ARE, however, a LOT of us who have tried to keep our MOM intact in some way - through compromise, understanding and acceptance.  Only to have our faces blown off.  So yeah - we have an opinion on it.  Mostly because we now realize that while we were in that stage, we were bargaining out of fear.  And we wouldn't go back to that place if you paid us.  And we're hoping to save others from that pain, if we can.  To do otherwise would be like telling you that you don't NEED pain relief in labor - because there IS no pain.  What a lie and disservice it'd be for us to have said that since we don't believe it's true.

We're not here to convince you that you're wrong.  Feel free to take everything we say with a grain of salt.  But please don't act like we're negative, oppressive people for having the opinions we do.  We've lived through this nightmare already.  We have opinions born out of experience.  That doesn't mean they're more "right" than your own opinions.  But neither does it make them invalid.

Kel