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

So 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

Here’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.