Hello everyone. I'm really glad I found this site, I've read quite a few of your stories now and I feel there is so much I can relate to. I have been with my boyfriend for 12 years and he is a terrific stepdad to our daughter who is 14. She loves him and can't remember a time when he wasn't in her life. We have had relationship problems for some time now. They have been improving from my point of view, I feel much closer to him than I used to, I value him much more as a friend and can appreciate the good things about him much more than I did. But this seems to only make it more obvious that I'm not into him physically. He is quite open and up front about wanting a physical element to our relationship and I feel bad that I can't live up to what he would like, he is not unreasonable at all. Last year I ended up in bed with a very close male friend who I thought I had a thing for. It was wonderful, close and affectionate in a way I didn't know I was capable of, but not at all sexy. When we talked about it afterwards he told me that even though he isn't interested in a relationship, I mean a lot to him and he values having me in his life a great deal. I feel like actually it turns out this is what I wanted from him all along and made me see that I might have a problem where I confuse closeness and affection with desire, or where I think I want sex but really I want some sort of validation that I'm important to that person. For many years including in my teens I had depression and medication side effects that meant I had no sex drive at all. I didn't ever fantasise or masturbate and all the relationships I had with men were about companionship and a need to feel loved and accepted rather than about attraction. Now that these health issues are much less I'm starting to feel like I want sex to be part of my life but I don't know where to start or what that means to me in the specific. Since I realised that I've found that I'm more attracted to women but find men easier to relate to and form a connection with. I've never had any relationships with women but can't shake a weird feeling of envy or jealousy towards the lesbian couples I know, even though I'm also happy for them and some are among my close friends. I've told my boyfriend some of this yesterday (that I'm not physically into him, that it isn't just him but may well be men generally or even everybody) and he's pretty unhappy but not surprised. I desperately wish I could turn back to when we used to be happy together - which we did! - and I don't understand why I can't seem to do that. His memory of that time is that we used to be a great deal more sexual than I remember and I don't trust my own memory any more. All this seems to have come to a boiling point at the worst possible time. I'm in the last few weeks of writing up my PhD thesis and I don't have time to be thinking about this stuff... I'm going abroad for a temporary postdoc job for a couple of months after I hand in and after that I will have to make some very difficult choices about jobs and location and family. I am extremely unlikely to find a relevant job if I stay where I am but my daughter loves her school and friends and is very reluctant to move. Boyfriend is also dead against it, he loves his job and our house. I've lived in the same university town for the last nearly twenty years and I've been a student on and off for a lot of that time... I make a new set of friends each time and then they move on and move away and I'm left behind. My best friend moved away last week for a good job and I feel like that's the last straw, that I badly need to make some significant changes in my life or everything will keep repeating itself. But! I'm terrified of throwing away a good thing with my boyfriend, of losing him as a good friend, of turning his and our daughter's lives upside down for my own selfish reasons, and of ending up alone because I can't be sexual with anybody or because my inexperience is offputting. There must be some way to rekindle attraction towards a good man for whom I feel a great deal of affection and respect. ...? Sorry for the wall of text, if anyone has made it through this far I salute you. It did help somewhat to write it all out, at least.
Welcome to EC, Glitterfish. Questioning, coming out, and accepting your sexuality is such an emotional process. It can be very overwhelming and really occupy so much of a person's thinking. If at all possible before moving forward, I would work on finishing that thesis. I'm in grad school right now and I failed a class because of my coming out process making it so hard to focus on anything. However, if this is already taking up that much of your thinking, it may be time to move forward on it. You mention having lesbian friends. That's great! I wish I had them through my self discovery. Talking to one of them might help quite a bit, if you can bring yourself to that. Nobody can tell you how to move forward in self discovery of your feelings, you kind of have to feel your way through that one. Just know you're not alone, and you have support here.
Thank you RosePetals, I think you are right and as always... 'I should be writing' It turns out my boyfriend was planning to wait until after I hand in to discuss breaking up anyway. He really doesn't want to but is frustrated by the lack of progress we're making. We're both finding it very confusing/frustrating because things genuinely used to be good between us. I never used to be super lustful for him or anything but we did have plenty of affectionate sex and I'm not sure why I can't manage that any more.
