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October 4, 2017 7:50 am  #1


My story

I’m a straight man in a long-term-marriage (30+) with a woman who came out to me and to herself as a lesbian in May 2013. I was unready to go on with a low-sex marriage, and it was my shaking of the tree that brought her to come out. So we now have a no-sex marriage. After all, how can she have any desire for me, I am the wrong sex? But she now feels that her many, many years of struggles against her same-sex attractions have made her asexual. So our marriage vows have explicitly changed, to ‘until death do us part, or until one of us meets the new love of our lives, but neither of us is looking’. She's now over 70 and I get there in 2018; no children.

I feel that I’ve been amputated of an important part of me. My sexuality. And I have been. That’s the reality. That’s what it costs to make our Mixed Orientation Marriage ‘work’. I’ve had two and a half years of therapy, and we’ve had months of therapy together. On the one hand, nothing has changed. There’s no more intimacy, and I’ve given up all hope that there ever will be. I strongly suspect that what passed for passion at the start of our relationship was a desperate hope that hetero sex would take away her desires for sex with other women (albeit, unconscious). So there’s no compromise, and I’m having to accept what I swore I would not and could not accept: a sexless marriage. So part of me is furious that all this time, trauma, therapy, investment of self and money has been to absolutely no avail. Furious with God who led me, who led us both, to this terrible place. Furious with the years and years of unanswered prayers. Prayers that she could change; prayers that I could change, and lose all my natural desires. And the other part of me has to recognise a new strength in the midst of fragility, a resilience, a slightly amazed understanding that I’ve never been seriously tempted to infidelity. My deepest longing is not for sex, but for intimacy, and perhaps we have at least something of that.

There are endless ironies. There’s so much on the Web about reviving flagging libido, and I’ve been searching - with absolutely no success at all - for ways of reducing my libido. Life would be so much easier if I was as asexual as my wife! Then there's the new female viagra - but it's out of the question for post-menopausal women, like my wife, and even more so for those who have had breast cancer...

So I still hope and search and pray that each one of us may find some peace. If not peace in its fullness, enough peace to keep on living. It’s hard when there’s no hope of change, and seemingly nothing to look forward to.
I’m in a minority of a minority. A straight man staying married to a lesbian. We are so few. I’ve found absolutely no people like us to meet with face-to-face. The only support and fellowship is via the Internet. There seem to be next to no resources for straight men staying married to lesbians, and no safe ways of reducing male libido

 

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