Pieces_of_Me wrote:

I first came to this page and browsed as a guest 7mos ago, shortly after my husband came out as bi.
Today I was feeling very overwhelmed and emotional, which again led me here.  I don't feel quite ready to type out my story, but decided as I sit here in the bathroom alone, crying that I would at least take the first step and finally register.
I guess what I really need to know right now is-
 how long everyone has been on this journey?   Is it "normal" (as if anything is really normal about this journey?)  to have these days, months later that make you feel like it is day one all over again?

 

Welcome Pieces  
I've been on this journey since October 2016, when my partner (of 32yrs) sent me an email (I was out of town) asking me for 1 day a month to satisfy his bisexual desires (and maybe one day be fucked by a man). 
I've done a lot of reading and the stats say that a certain % of people in a Mixed Orientation Marriage break up straightaway and a % stay together forever but another % last 3 yrs before they call it quits. I'm 2 1/2 years in. 
I demanded monogamy....he appears to give it but there's much strain in our r'ship now and I don't trust him or a lot of what he says any more. 
I have opinion from all corners  telling me to leave. None of them are living my life or walking in my shoes. First thing I did was find myself a counselor AND tell my partner that I was seeing one. 

And your question "...is it normal to feel like Day One keeps repeating".....for a while yes. And then you'll start to quiet the turbulence, and see amongst the chaos and disorder.....there are priorities (yours) that stand out as being more important than somebody else' sexuality

Have you read the First Aid Kit...on the first page of the General Discussion page?
 

Last edited by Ellexoh_nz (June 5, 2019 3:45 pm)

Welcome Pieces, sorry you are here.  My ex came out 5-1/2 years ago, the first few months were a daze, I felt like I got hit by a 2x4.  I’m glad she is no longer my partner and I found a straight partner (am recently remarried). But you asked how long does it last? I still have moments when I grieve the time my children lost, and the impact on my current life because she got financial benefits from the divorce that I don’t think she earned because of her denial.  So the initial shock passes as part of the grieving process, but depending on other circumstances residual effects can vary.

Your experience with the therapist is not atypical. Please get a therapist strictly for YOU.  The straight spouse is assumed to be ok because we know we’re straight and society accepts us. But the cornerstone of a healthy heterosexual relationship has just been ripped from the foundation our relationships.

We are here for you. Share your story as you are ready but it is helpful to have context. Length of marriage? Children, etc.

Wishing you strength and courage in this very difficult time. 

ADSJ

Hi Pieces, 

I'm glad you found this resource as it has been invaluable to me.  I'm now divorced 3 years after a 27 year long marriage where various signs and signals came up and were brushed aside by my GIDX.  And yes, somedays it does come back and knock me over.  Yesterday I was in the grocery store shopping for just me and I suddenly found myself near tears as this is not what I had planned for in my life.  I have shared on Medium and here as I find writing it out is cathartic and the comments and support here are helpful.  

https://medium.com/@plwsheffield/hiding-from-your-straight-spouse-b787f13f6ff

There is no way out but through sometimes... hold on and take care of your needs.  We're here for you...

Pieces:  I am sorry you find yourself in this situation.  I hope you can be kind to yourself.  Patient with yourself.  You are having a great shock to your system. You are like a deer in the headlights.  You are like a barely survivor of a bomb attack. 

I have to remind myself of all these things too—even a year past learning—in a traumatic way—that my husband was likely gay and was possibly having sex with other men.  He was at least seeking it.  I mean—it is traumatic no matter how you learn it. 

Then there is the follow up trauma of working through it all. 

It just takes time to process things, and we have to reprocess everything again and again, as each newly processed thing creates a new framework for processing everything else again, as we build a new sense of reality. There are triggers everywhere. And these also require processing.  So, lots of circling.  Like you, I wonder if I am making progress.  But I hope I am.  I understand things better, I know more, I am making decisions.  It is just hard and scary and grief all the way around. 

Ellexoh mentioned statistics.  We should probably look these up!  Because possibly Ellexoh and I just made them totally up.  What I remember is similar but a little different

I remember that after the revelation of the spouse being gay:

1/3 split immediately.  1/3 stay together for 1-3 years.  1/3 stay together longer, and of that remaining 1/3, only half of them make it long-term, whatever “long-term” means (so roughly 15%), and in that small 15% group, it is often older, longer-married  couples who have financial interests and/or children as reasons to stay together, and that many if not most of these “long-term” couples make significant concessions, like having an open marriage.

I want to echo other advice about how important it is for you to have your own therapist.  What do YOU want?

Really, it is not right  for the marriage therapist to make it all about you supporting your husband’s journey.  Because:  You matter!  You matter!  You matter!  You are a person too!  A healthy intimate relationship requires reciprocity.

A theme for my pain and anger lately is how twisted this messaging gets, I mean the message you were getting in therapy. 

When I finally saw the twisted and destructive nature of this in my own history—like a kind of grooming from my spouse within weeks of our marriage to lower my expectations of what is normal, and to suggest a backward logic that normal love was actually “not loving”—when I finally saw and verbalized this a few weeks ago, I cried from the understanding.  It filled me with a new grief, and also some horror.  After crying for a few weeks over it, now I am just really angry about it!  Because this pattern is showing up again and again in the pain I read in posts from new forum members like you:

It is like the straight spouse is being told, “you are not a loving person unless you can accept not being loved.  You are not a loving person unless you learn not to want to be loved.  You you are not a loving person unless you can stop showing love to the person you love.”

This is much worse than the more obvious therapy message that “it is all about the gay spouse.”  Because the real message here is just an absolutely and utterly destructive house of mirrors that kills our core:

We are badgered and pummeled emotionally, often early on by our gay spouses, often through direct words and often through withholding of affection and often by them recoiling from us, possibly in smaller ways at first growing to more and more, to internalize:
“I am not a loving person unless I am willing to not be loved and to not show love.  I will work harder and harder to show my love by not showing my love.  I will work harder and harder to show my love by not wanting love.  I will work harder and harder to earn the right to be loved by showing my love, which  love I can only show now by shutting down my loving instincts.”

This twists a person’s—the straight spouse’s—fundamental values and loving strengths and makes them weapons against him or her at the deepest level of being human. It weaponizes the straight spouse’s foundational sense of self against him/herself.  It demonizes the straight spouse’s deepest and warmest human desires—to give and receive love. 

So we face the loss of our spouse, who we have loved, and we face the loss of our sense of reality, the loss of our history and future.  We face the loss of financial stability and our dream of a happy intact family.  We face the loss of all we have worked to build as a couple, of “Home.”

And then! We ALSO!  We also lose our core: our fundamental strengths of honesty and love.  Our fundamental humanness of giving and receiving love.  These are taken away from us as they are twisted and used to “prove” our failure as loving human beings.  That is the devastation.  It is one thing to be rejected.  It is another thing thing to be told your very nature is “bad.”  And, it is so much worse and destructive to then be told that your “bad nature” (which is really your human loving nature) is why you do not deserve love.

I know that was repetitive.  It is just so twisted that I have to write it out in different ways every time to keep seeing the total destructive absurdity of it all.

I will no longer be told by anyone, in any context, that my very best qualities are bad, that my very normal desire to show warmth and be shown warmth are why I do not deserve warmth.  That my very qualities that would create joy in a healthy relationship—that these, in me, have destroyed my current relationship.  Nope.

Nope nope nope nope nope!

I am so so SO angry about this twist.  This continued blame shifting.  Watch for it.  It is everywhere.  Right now, it is in your marriage therapy sessions.

Last edited by OnMyOwnTwoFeet (June 6, 2019 5:49 pm)

Deleted.

Last edited by Lynne (October 3, 2020 5:50 pm)