Love, truth and honesty

Yesterday evening I did what I thought was unthinkable when I started this blog and gave the link to the blog to a couple of friends. Both are gay men who have been supportive of my journey. When I gave them the link, I immediately was sorry I did it because of the “expectations” post. I felt like it portrayed my wife in a very poor light, made her seem cold and unloving, which could not be further from the truth. How could I paint this picture to people when I know it to not be true?

When I said this to both of them, they both gave pretty much the same advice. This isn’t for her eyes, and I need to be me. I need to not worry about how others are portrayed when I’m writing my thoughts and feelings because the therapeutic process of writing is about untangling those thoughts and feelings. Sometimes they come out in unintended ways. Sometimes they’re inaccurate. And sometimes, they might even be hurtful. Such is the human experience, I think.

I guess what I’m saying is that things are not always as cut and dried as they might appear when I write them.  Life is complicated and messy and so are our relationships with other people. They defy basic description sometimes, especially in one as complicated as my marriage.  The thing is, I have made choices – no one ever held a gun to my head and forced me to make any decision in my life – and by and large, they have contributed to a very happy life, my tendency toward depression and anxiety notwithstanding. The choices I’ve made in my life are my own and there are reasons for all of them.

So when I write, I will endeavor to be truthful and honest, and always write from a place of love. Emotional vulnerability is tough, but it’s also so very essential.

Unknown prospects

questions.jpegSo about 6-8 months ago, I put a personal ad on Craigslist. I had never really done anything like that before and I’d heard so many horror stories about Craigslist that I wasn’t sure that I would even like any of the outcomes. The ad basically said that I was married, knew I liked guys, and was looking for other guys like that as well. I didn’t want to meet up right away – preferred talking via e-mail or other similarly anonymous fashion (I had set up an e-mail just for this purpose.)

I got lots of replies. I got the weird ones, the ones that were 22 year old guys that were nothing like I was looking for. I did get a handful of married local guys to respond, but for some reason or another ,they just never went anywhere. I got LOTS of guys emailing me from out of state. This was weird to me because my ad talked specifically about being interested in meeting eventually, but I had also mentioned the not meeting right away thing so perhaps that emboldened some non-local guys that were looking for specific things. Who knows.

Anyway, I got a reply from a guy in Florida who has connections to my area and we started talking. We hit it off pretty well, and we added each other on Snapchat.  My Snapchat is different from all of my other online identifiers because I want that to remain relatively anonymous as well.  We talked for a while and then it kind of dropped off. He would message me every now and then and we’d talk, but it never struck me as something that had the potential for anything other than talk and “picture trading” to come of it.

He was back in my area of the country in December and almost messaged me, but chickened out. He’s married, has a couple kids, is about my age, and is intensely curious about what it’d be like to be with a man. I’m not crazy about the married part – my wife has told me that I should never be “the other woman” no matter what they tell me. But he’s really into me and is determined to make me his first.

So much of this is just fantasy but there’s this part of me that wants it to be a reality. He’s cute and the fact that he’s into me really turns me on as I don’t consider myself cute or sexy or anything like that. He is not sexual with his wife at all – the relationship is just stale in a lot of ways and he is craving touch in much the same way that I am. His lack of experience is appealing as I don’t have tons of experience myself and we’d be kind of exploring at the same level.

He’s thinking of coming back to the area in June and wants to meet for a beer and supper. I know he’ll want to do more, but I can’t do anything without my wife’s permission and even by June, our life will not have settled down enough for me to talk about it with her. Maybe that’s for the best – get a chance to meet and see if we have any chemistry with no expectations about anything physical. He understands that I can’t do anything without her permission and respects that.

A part of me can’t help but think it’s a serial killer that I’m talking to, but that’s just me coming up with a worst case scenario.

So who knows? Maybe it’ll amount to something. Maybe it won’t. I will say that having someone think I’m sexy again makes me feel pretty damn good, even if it is a married man half way across the country.

Expectations

touching-1.jpgHere’s a dirty little secret – I’m in my mid 40s and I feel like I’m basically post-sexual. My wife is not really interested in sex any longer. Or rather, she’s not interested in initiating sex at all. Hell, she barely touches me these days. I don’t doubt for one hot second that she still loves me, but I just don’t think that sex even registers with her any longer. Granted, we have a lot of irons in the fire right now, so sex for both of us is kind of at the bottom of the list of priorities. But it’s been so long since she has touched me – sometimes even trying to get a hug out of her is hard.

I was talking with my therapist about this last week and what I really want to say to her is “I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you, but if you’re not interested in sex or touch any longer, I want to find someone who is interested in that to meet that need in me.” I’m not sure how that would go over. I mean, at least it would be honest. It’s not something I can say right now – the soonest I could do it is later this year when, at least theoretically, a lot of things in our life will have calmed down.

But the truth is I miss being touched. It’s not even about the sex. I get a lot more satisfaction from loving touch than I do from sex. And if she were ok with it and if I were to try to find that elsewhere, I would definitely look for a man to fulfill that. It would feel less likely being unfaithful to my marriage vows, even though it is JUST as unfaithful to my marriage vows as being with a woman. But the fact remains that crave a man’s touch like nothing else these days. It’s so bad that I went to a doctor’s appointment not terribly long ago and I liked it when the doctor touched me – not in a sexual, oh-I’m-hard-now type of way, but in the oh-look-someone’s-touching-me-and-that-feels-good kind of way.  It reminds me of how when I was in college and I would go touch the backs of the male mannequins in department stores, figuring that was as close to touching a man as I’d ever get.

I guess I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation to want to be touched. Maybe the unreasonable part is to want it from a man when you’re married to a woman. I don’t know. It’s not like I have any prospects or anything, so to bring this up with her now would just be angst producing in a household that has more than its share of angst and drama right now. I don’t want to add to it. The one thing I won’t do is cheat or go behind her back to get that touch. I’d rather not have it than do that to my family.

Verizon ad

If you’re wondering what my type is when it comes to men, you need look no further than this Verizon ad from a few year back. It played on Hulu before just about every show we watched and I never got tired of it.

I’m super fond of the “boy next door” type. Kind of like Hal Sparks in Queer As Folk (but not Hal Sparks in real life.) This guy (Sean Klitzner) is so damn cute I just want to cuddle in front of a fire with him – hopefully it would lead to more. Part of it is the way he brushes the snow off his head. Part of it is DEFINITELY the sideburns.

I am pretty sure that Klitzner is straight, but a guy can dream, right? This will be the first of many posts that feature men that I like. And I think there’s a post in the offing about a current crush I have.

seanklitznerheadshot_3.jpg

Sometimes a fantasy

I mentioned in my last post that even though I identify as bisexual, I probably lean more gay than straight. This presents problems in my heterosexual marriage because, as much as I love my wife, there are things that she just is incapable of giving me. I mean, she’s not a guy. And sometimes I really crave the touch of a man. I haven’t had the erotic touch of a man in a long long time (well before I was married) and I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll be able to have that again.

So I’m sustained by fantasy. At the end of last year, I actually bought a subscription to a gay porn web site. I know what you’re thinking “why pay for porn?” and it’s a legit questions. I guess it’s kind of how I feel about most things people pirate (music, movies, etc.) – if someone doesn’t pay for it, then nobody will be able to make it. It’s been worth it so far because when I go through my “gay phases” and the temptation to reinistall Grindr on my phone is overwhelming, I find that I can just watch some gay porn and that scratches that itch.

For the most part, I’m satisfied with that part of my life being confined to fantasy. Real sex is messy, involves other people and their feelings and has real world ramifications. I’m not one that can just meet up for random sex with strangers. I’ve always said that the best possible outcome for me would be to find a friend that I get to know and then it transforms into a “friends with benefits” type situation. Sometimes I think another married guy might be best for that but the wife knowing is essential. I met a guy for coffee once via Grindr and his wife didn’t know about his feelings. That was kind of a deal breaker. I refuse to be “the other woman” so-to-speak.

I did the one-night hookup thing in college (more about that in a later post), and I still have regrets about it. Some of the regrets involve wishing I would have done it sooner, but mostly, the regrets entail not really knowing the guys I was with (there were two.) Never mind the fact that one of them is a Facebook friend today, but we rarely interact as Facebook friends are wont to do.

I guess I’m living proof that Billy Joel is right “sometimes a fantasy is all you need.” Time will tell if that stays true.

 

My maiden posting

Door-ajar.jpegI’ve been meaning to start a blog like this for a while – an anonymous one that will allow me to talk about what it’s like being a man right at mid-life coming to terms with his sexuality.  Complicating all of this is that I am married to a woman and a father as well.  I have always known that I was not completely straight, but I never thought in a million years that I would want to come out. But the older I get, the less I seem to care what people think.

First things first – my wife knows that I am attracted to men. She supports me but we remain monogamous. We feel like while the day may come that I can explore the gay side of me, that time is not now, not while we’re actively raising kids. That said, while she knows that I am to the gay side of bi on the Kinsey scale, there’s stuff she doesn’t know too. I’m hoping that here I can write out some of that to help me process it.

This isn’t a kiss and tell blog – I will not be recounting sexual exploits here mostly because I’m not having any right now. And I’m really not that type of guy anyway. I don’t go in for random sex – nothing against those that do, how I wish I could just have anonymous sex! – and I am not one to talk about the sex I do have.

So far, besides my wife, I’ve told a handful of friends, mostly gay men that I know on the Internet. They have been supportive and I was more than a little nervous when I told them because I came out as bisexual to them. When it comes right down to it, that’s probably what I am, and I know that to a lot of gay men, bi men are not to be trusted and are, at best, just trying to have the best of both worlds or, at worst, gay men hiding behind the safety of a scrap of heterosexuality. I’ve also told a couple of straight friends, and the first time I did that I was terrified even though I knew I had nothing to worry about. The night of the election last year, I came out rather unexpectedly to my sister.

I’m gonna see how I like this. I have a long history of blogging but I wanted to do this anonymously so that I might be forced to really examine this for what it is without the stress of knowing that people in my real life (or my mom) is reading. We’ll see how I do. This could be my only post, but I doubt that it will be.