You know what's clear to me in everything everyone's said?  That self care is (partly, at the very least) about self respect and self esteem.  To be in a MOM with someone who devalues you undermines both.  When we practice self care we assert that we matter and are worth caring for.  I'm sure, Jen, that your husband's concluding you were having an affair was a direct result of his seeing that you were treating yourself as if you mattered, and since he treats/treated you sexually as if you don't/didn't matter, and communicates/d that quite clearly, he could only imagine you'd imagine you mattered if someone else were treating you sexually in a way that communicated to you that you mattered.  
  My heart goes out to you, Jen, for all the painful years he has treated you in such a fashion: refusing your mouth, communicating his dislike for the breasts that say you're a female, needing to watch gay porn in order to have sex with you.  One wonders why he even thought he needed to bother!  I'm sure he forces/d himself to perform not out of any love or feeling of obligation to your sexual satisfaction, but because he has convinced himself either that if he can/could have sex with you he isn't gay or that because he needs/ed to maintain for himself the cover of his straight life, and to do that requires/d sex with his wife.  
   I'm not giving any of our partners a pass because of homo/trans phobia, either.  One, because there have always been those who are courageous enough to live their truth, and in times far less accepting than the past five decades (post-Stonewall, 1969).  Two, because as soon as they knew, or suspected, or decided to "experiment" or "test," they should have been honest enough to free us by walking away from the marriage/relationship.  Instead they lie, cheat, dissemble, gaslight, blame shift, feel entitled, and otherwise grind us, their partners, to whom they have professed or pledged love, loyalty, and loving duty, down. In the process, they deceive and devalue us, all the while making us feel at fault and obligated to accept their lies and their version of our shared life.  They treat us as if we don' t matter.  Only when we find the courage in ourselves to say, "Enough.  I matter!  I have value, I have worth, I have self-respect," and begin acting on behalf of our value, worth, and self respect, can we begin to see our way around, past, through, and over a life that stretches out before us with more of the same pain. 

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (May 14, 2018 12:45 pm)

OutofHisCloset wrote:

     Greyhound Gal, thanks for starting this thread, and Abby, thanks again for bringing up the body and sexuality. 
     Greyhound Gal, I know what you mean about wanting not just sex but intimacy.  Throughout the ordeal with my stbx, who rejected his maleness and always wanted to act out or feel sexually in what he (mistakenly) thought was the way a woman does/feels (but was really taken straight out of the way porn meant for heterosexual males represents women, either sexually submissive to the point of masochism or a caricature of lesbian sex--in that it is meant for a male gaze), I missed our two bodies talking together in the intimate way that happens in penis-in-vagina sex.  Because he denied me this act, and rejected it, I always felt a profound rejection. 
       I don't mean to be pornographic here, but it was a devastating blow that my husband repudiated and hated his maleness, and not only refused me penis-in-vagina sex, but was offended and insulted and angered and hurt by any expression of mine of a desire for it.   I wasn't lacking a means of orgasm, either; I had plenty of those, by plenty of other means/methods.  
     But what was missing was the intimate talk two bodies engage in when our two organs--his penis, my vagina--would move in their ways and then respond to each other.  You feel one another there, inside, and that intimacy is expressed and matched outside: we cry out, sigh, moan, gasp, laugh because of what's being "said" inside.  I couldn't just cut out this part of our sex life, or replace it with sex toys (a sex toy can't talk to another's body in this way). I think one of the wonders of a woman's anatomy is that we are shaped to make possible this intimate, inner communication, hidden from view, felt only by the two people engaged in the act/talk (matched by the male's anatomy--not trying to discount your role/bodies, men!). I wanted that connection desperately, and he not only rejected it, but ridiculed it, as if were a laughable throwback to less enlightened times and modes of sexual expression.  In so doing, he devalued me, denied me the opportunity to express my own (hetero)sexuality, and turned me into an instrument for his sexual pleasure, which dehumanized me.  
   Well, after reading this thread yesterday, I went to sleep last night and had an erotic dream, one in which I had exactly the kind of sex my stbx refused to engage in any longer.  It feels to me like I have taken back, or have given myself back, my sexuality and my validity as a heterosexual person.  
   Sorry if I've offended anyone, but this was a deep hurt dealt to me by my stbx, and as Leah says, it feels healing to write these things out.
  

Thank you for this. Totally amazing. I am envious of your dream though, lol.

This post made me smile
Today I smiled
Tomorrow I hope for more
Thanks for this!