u/LivingThisCrazyLife

If this gets long, I apologize. I tend to be wordy. I see a lot of partner appreciation posts about the straight partners. This one is opposite.

Husband and I have been together since our late teens. We are in our early 50’s now.

We’ve had a fantastic relationship since the beginning. It’s always been easy. We’ve had an active sex life too, but there’s always been a bit of a disconnect there. I always felt like if anything ever broke us it would be sex. I’ve always struggled.

The quickest way to describe this would be to say that I felt broken. I never really turned down sex when he asked and I enjoyed it when we did it but that was it. I didn’t think about sex. I didn’t ‘want’ sex. It was something I did because he wanted to. I never felt the need. I imagined I could live just fine without it. I started to wonder if I was just asexual.

Early this year my husband came to me with something he had been holding on to for a while. Given the subreddit this is in, I’m sure you know what he told me. It was very brave of him. He had held a lot of fear about what my reaction would be. He was afraid I would find him sick or disgusting or that I would leave him. Him holding on to his feelings had started to hurt his mental health and was also affecting our sex life which bled into the rest of the relationship. I knew something was going on with him. I was relieved that this was all it was.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not minimizing the situation. It was hard on him to discover this in himself and it was hard on him to tell me. It was hard for me to hear as well. Internally, briefly, I made it about me. “You’re not enough. See, you’re broken. He’s going to leave you. That’s why he’s been distant” Thankfully he told me in a way that gave me a little time to process and my external response to him was much better.

Obviously him coming out made us have to address the elephant in the room and have some conversations about sex. For people who had sex a few times a week, we sure hadn’t talked about sex in a while, really talked that is. He, the high drive spouse, thought about it a lot but didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. And me, I’ve already mentioned I didn’t think about it. I’ll go further to say that I would quite literally forget it existed until I’d notice he was grumpy and mentally calculate how long it had been since we had done it. Suddenly we were having the conversations and starting with a hard one made the ones that followed easier.

I’ll admit, I felt a little left behind by his newly revealed discovery. In my mind sexuality and our sex life were one and the same and had always been ‘ours’. It felt like he was moving to a place without me. He wasn’t talking about opening our relationship but it still felt like he was moving on and I was stuck, broken.

I started to spend more time thinking about my own sexuality. What did I like? We always did what he likes to do. I used to joke that he was adventurous enough for the both of us. Why didn’t I think about sex ever? Why didn’t I ever want it even though I enjoyed it when we did it?

Meanwhile, we fell into what might have been hysterical bonding. We started having sex every day. After a few weeks in when we realized we’d done it every day we challenged ourselves to make it a month. Game on! I like a good challenge! I took it a bit further and challenged myself to be bold and try new things. Soon we were well past the month mark and still having a blast.

I need to wrap this up so let me cut it shorter without all the interesting details. Long story short, our adventures led me to some sort of awakening. It led to some adventures (like me getting a lap dance at a strip club and affirming that I’m not bi myself - I posted about that here) and some hard realizations. Then in the midst of this some old hurts popped back up causing my nervous system to go into shock.

In effort to regulate myself and get back to life, I started questioning myself. That led to me unpacking a LOT of old trauma wounds. I spent days typing in my Notes app. The note was so long that when I was proofreading it before I shared it with my husband it took me an hour to read back over it and I was reading fast because I knew what it said already. In other words… it was a lot. As I got everything down on paper (so to speak) I started to see themes emerge. I found patterns in things I had never connected before and things I had never understood started to make sense.

I fearfully shared all of my trauma and all of the connections I had found with my husband. I had to tell him some things that were hard to hear. I was afraid maybe he would be the one deciding to be done with me. He listened. He held me while I cried and he cried with me. He heard it all, good, bad, and extremely ugly, and he still loves me.

I sit here now lighter (emotionally) than I’ve ever been. It’s an amazing feeling.

I owe it all to my husband. He was brave. He took a chance on me and shared something with me that changed our marriage. It didn’t change how I feel about him or how I saw him as a person or as a man. It changed how we communicate. It changed how deep we are willing to dive together. And, it changed ME. I’m not broken. I’m not damaged. I am enough. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was hurt and I withdrew. I repressed the sexual side of myself entirely. My physical body was there but my soul was not. My soul is there now. I have a libido for the first time in my life. We are about six months into this adventure and still doing it pretty much every day (I think we missed one) and now it’s not because of hysterical bonding or because we challenged each other. It’s pure passion. I can’t keep my hands off of him and it is amazing.

I know it’s hard for someone to tell their partner about something so vulnerable. It doesn’t always go well. Sometimes it turns sour. Sometimes it gets swept under the rug. Sometimes it takes time for a person to sit with it. Every story will be different.

Some, like ours, will take this amazing, beautiful, wonderful twist all because he was brave and took a chance on telling me. I’ve never been more in love with my husband than I am now. I no longer feel like sex might be the thing that breaks us. We are rock solid. This is still a work in progress but we are in it and enjoying the journey.

This is a little silly, but after seeing a few posts here with people questioning themselves I thought I’d share something on the other side of the spectrum that gives a different perspective. For context, I’ve hung around here for a bit because husband is the bisexual/bi-curious spouse.

So… like many men, my husband has always enjoyed watching girl on girl action. He’s always wanted to see me with another girl. I’ve explained to him that I just had no desire for that and couldn’t even fathom it. Still, it’s been this fantasy for him.

Over the years my husband has also begged me to go to a strip club with him. I was way too insecure to do so in the past. I’ll clarify that I would tell him to go (and he did a few times) but I was too insecure in myself to step foot inside one. I don’t know why he wanted me to go so badly but for me the fear was really just the unknown.

Last month for his birthday, I finally agreed to go to a club with him. We (I, he was driving) had a few drinks and watched a few girls dance. Two of the girls sat down with us between sets and just talked. The club had a nice vibe. We left after an hour or so and he couldn’t stop smiling on the way home or the week that followed. He was so excited that I finally went.

Fast forward to this weekend. I wanted to do something fun for him and was running through a list of options while we were on our Friday night date. He had no real opinion. I had even shared the club as an option and he was pretty ‘eh’ about it. On Friday night he had a dream that we were at the club and I got a lap dance. He told me Saturday about his dream and said he couldn’t mind going back but he wouldn’t pressure me into a lap dance since he knows I wouldn’t be comfortable with it.

While we were out on Saturday night, I decided why not go to the club again? They had good drinks and a nice vibe and he could see some boobs besides mine. We went in and sat down. We got there really early so we just sat and talked until things started popping a little. The two girls who talked to us last time came over to say hello again. We chatted with one and then the other came over. My husband and I had been talking about how she owned the stage when she danced. We gave her a tip and she asked if she could sit and talk. She sat and spilled all sorts of stuff about her life to me. She probably talked for 20 minutes and it was kind of like talking to a friend. I decided to tell her my husband would love to see me get a lap dance. She was like “let’s do it” and the three of us headed to the VIP room.

So, I got my first lap dance (besides my husband’s attempts 😉). Her (or club?) rules was that women could touch and that women could have their boobs out while in the VIP room and be touched as well. I saw my husband’s face light up. I figured why not. I’ll only live once. Without going into too much detail, I touched her and she touched me (boobs and butt only) and she danced on me for 3 songs before moving to my husband for the last song (and ending by dancing on both of us at the same time).

My husband was grinning ear to ear. He thought this was the hottest thing he had seen. Boobs in my face, us touching each other, etc. He was in heaven.

This experience led me to discover something in myself though… I’m totally straight. ➡️ Not even a little curve. ⤴️ None of it did anything for me. I wasn’t the least bit turned on. It was actually a bummer for me. I was hoping maybe I’d enjoy it a little bit. Nope. It was one of the most neutral things I’ve ever done. No repulsion and no excitement. There’s no doubt about it, I’m not even a little bit bi.

So some of you all questioning yourself and your experiences, maybe consider mine. I’m not saying everyone should have the same neutral reaction to sexual contact with the same sex to consider themselves straight, but if you’re getting turned on thinking about it, talking about it, watching it, or doing it, then it’s safe to say you are highly likely to be bisexual (even if you’re hetero-romantic). And… there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT! The same as there is nothing wrong with me being straight as an arrow. We are as we were intended to be!

Overall, I learned more about myself and my husband got to add to his ‘spank bank’ as he calls it. We had a great night.