Longish intro

Hi Folks -

A dear friend (and former wife) gave me the strong nudge I needed to start reaching out to others who might understand, so here I am.

I'm male, just past retirement age, and live in the Southeast US. For my adult life up until recent years, I would've insisted that I was straight, and I spent decades in the quiet desperation of trying to prove that to others. Intimacy with women - several girlfriends over the years and more than one wife - was this pattern of initial attraction and enjoyment which would turn into a sense of hesitancy and strangeness as things got close to actual intercourse. In earlier adulthood, I turned to alcohol and other substances to try to feel less sexually inhibited with women. That sort of worked for a while, but I became an alcoholic with all the misery for others (and myself) which results from active alcoholism. Entering recovery 30+ years ago helped that, but left me mostly stranded sexually, with nothing to help me through my feelings of awkwardness and of having a body which refused to cooperate. And an eventually-diagnosed neurological condition I have makes social interaction challenging as well.

Several years ago, my then-wife gently suggested that perhaps I was gay. That planted a seed which took months to germinate, and led to my reconnecting with a latent desire for some amount of sexual intimacy with men (and in contrast to sex with women, a sense of knowing what I was doing!) This led to my coming out as gay, both to my accepting family and to friends. It led to initial deer-in-the-headlights involvement with the local LGBT community, and in time it led to meeting, falling in love with, and recently marrying the wonderful, kind, caring man who is now my husband.

But in doing all this, I managed to see myself as being all the way at the other end of the Kinsey scale... and trying to be "100% gay" is no more authentic for me than trying to be "100% straight". I find myself desperately missing at least some experience of physical intimacy with women, but I've felt too unsure of myself to risk actively doing anything about it - even though my (100% gay) husband knows my feelings, and understands and supports my desire to. So I've been stuck for a good whle now, with a growing sense of unmet needs trying to crowd out the other parts of my life which are going much better. There's no risk of rejection with pictures and video clips, but they're no substitute for intimacy with a real person - and my former wife finally pointed out that I've been hugging her after our regular "coffee dates" as though I was a drowning man clutching a life preserver. It isn't fair to her, or useful to me, to send any of those energies in her direction.

From the outside I look as if I'm doing really well, and in many ways I am... except for this really unhappy part. The more I understand my own bisexuality, the more I see how hurtful the old stereotypes of it are. It looks damn hard to deal with, and from substance abuse recovery I understand how important support is, so that we can walk through things together instead of alone.

So that's what brings me here. I'll be heading to the "Later in Life" section, of course... thanks for being here, everyone!

 

Many thanks for your encouragement, and that of the other folks who've welcomed me. I have given a lot of thought to what kind of arrangement might best work, but these can be a lot easier to describe than to achieve ("Hey - let's put an astronaut on the Moon!") But being able to talk openly about it is surely the first step, and thanks again for being part of a place where I can finally do that...