Need Help and advice.

A

Amitola

New member
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read my thread. First let me give you a little history before I get to my problem.

My husband and I have been married for 15 years. Eight years into my marriage I realized I was bisexual/gay . My husband is 65 and I am 36. He understands he cannot take care of all my needs. It took me another 8 years to act on those feelings. I wanted a woman I could connect to before making the next step.

I’m January I met a beautiful woman whom I have fallen in love with. She is also married. Both of our husbands knows of our relationship.

When I first met her is was an instant connection. She is the second person whom I have brought to my bed. She is all I think about all day and night. I have never loved anyone like I do her. I have also finally realized after being with her is I am truly gay not bisexual. She has always known she was gay but married to please her family.

We both have never been in a non-monogamous relationship. We've never been in love with two people at the same time. Right now we cannot be together full time due to primary relationship commitment. I was told what I am going through is NRE.

My marriage right now is suffering. I am having problems balancing and grounding. With her always on my mind it is hard to give home the attention he needs and deserves. I am so confused and don’t know what to do. One of my friends suggested trying to find the spark back in my marriage. If that is the case how do I do that????

Please help I need some true guidance from this community.
 
Hi Amitola,

When you say you are gay and are not bisexual, it doesn't seem logical for you to remain married to your husband. I tend to think you and he should transition to a platonic relationship with each other. Is that something you'd be willing to consider? If not, I guess you have to figure out how to make it work with him, with all the NRE you are experiencing with the other woman. It will require some deliberate willpower on your part, it won't quite come naturally. You and your husband will need a long talk about what your marriage will look like going forward. Is it okay if he too has someone outside the marriage, if he can find someone?

These are some of my initial thoughts.
Sincerely,
Kevin T.
 
Hi Amitola,

Welcome to the forums. It seems you are on the brink of massive life decisions. What a difficult time this must be for you.

The forums are a good place for like-minded folk to give you support and share similar stories. A professional counsellor may be more appropriate in your situation. You have many tough choices to make and a lot of newly-found self-discovery to absorb. I will bet you are feeling like a different person now than you were a short while ago. Counsellors or psychologists can help you through this period and perhaps will understand you better than anyone here on the forums will.

If you feel you have had a change in your sexual identity, and you are confident that this has nothing to do with NRE, then kdt26417's advice above is good. The potential problem is that I feel it is difficult to know how much of this is NRE. Most people would advice not to make any permanent life decisions whilst wrapped up in NRE.

I will send you the remainder of my post in a private message. It contains things about myself I don't wish to publicise. Good luck Amitola.
 
While NRE lasts a different duration for different people, a good rule of thumb is 6 months. You're nowhere close to that. Can you find a routine to get into until then, and see how you feel when you're more clear headed.

I'm bi, but when I'm deep in love with a woman, I feel mostly gay. (Disclaimer-- I practiced poly for years, practice monogamy now, married to a woman.) But I just watched that Twilight sequel for the first time, and Jacob took off his shirt, and ok, I guess I'm a little bi still. (It was the highlight of an otherwise awful movie.)

Which is to say that my sexuality has been fluid. Be open to fluidity. It's exciting to find identity (I came out as 100% gay in high school, found bisexuality fit better in my 30s), but it's more important to know yourself, on as deep a level as you can.

And you're not going to look at yourself clearly for the first 6 months of an intense relationship. Or so. Try to ride it out.
 
I had not experienced overwhelming NRE in over two decades and was pretty much fine in my marraige until I met my SO. Then NRE waltzed in. I could barely get stuff done with spending every minute I could with him talking or texting. I would have trouble concentrating on driving I felt so blinded with the thought of him. At least once I found myself thinking seriously crazy thoughts about how to run off to be with my new love. But, I knew that I valued the life I had built with my husband and kept ahold of that as a concept even when the feeling was hard to access.Luckily both of my guys believed that I loved them, that I did not want to lose either of them and neither wanted to make me choose. For me the NRE lasted at least a year, heck, we are 3 years in and I am not sure it does not still color my perceptions.

So yeah, make no life altering decisions while in the throes of serious NRE.

Leetah
 
Apologize in advance if my thoughts are a bit random, a lot things going on and having trouble sorting them out.

We first started talking via the phone and messenger in Oct 2016 and did our first meet face to face in Jan 2017. Like I said in my previous post it was an instant connection for both of us. We were each other's first f/f relationship and the first non-monogamous. April 15th will be our fourth date together if you include our Jan meet.

I know it's early in the relationship, but I can see a long term future with her marriage, raising her son together, and being happy forever.

Right now my girlfriend and I have decided to take things one day at a time and not make any rash decisions. We are going to stay in our marriages and see where our relationship takes us. We still have a lot of growing to do together since things are very new for both of us. We have yet to discover each other quirks and demons. I know we both are experiencing some major NRE.

We have both been as open as possible with our SO. Mine is completely understanding while hers not so much. He is very jealous of me and very controlling of her. Yes he does allow us one day a month for us to meet, but that is the only time he allows us.

If she wishes to talk to me she has to do it while he is away at work, etc. If he is home and she wishes to tell me something she has to sneak away and she sends it to me is short messages. As one of his rules, we are not allowed to sleep together (ie: take a nap, etc.) or stay over night. The over night is not a problems since she has to be home by midnight anyway. After our dates he hounds her with questions about what we did and if she enjoyed our time together better than the times she is with him.

He has set some major ground rules for us and we have been trying to follow them. Is there a safe way she can suggest some of her own without pissing him off and him getting abusive?
 
Amitola said:
I have never loved anyone like I do her. I have also finally realized after being with her is I am truly gay not bisexual. ...We've never been in love with two people at the same time. .... One of my friends suggested trying to find the spark back in my marriage. If that is the case how do I do that????
Click to expand...

Did you ever have the spark in your marriage? Just going by what you write here, you are gay and you've fallen in love for real. I'm not getting a poly sense here so much as you've been married a long time and are terrified to consider that you don't want to be married to this man anymore, but instead have found a woman who fulfills you in ways that he never did. Quite a few people go through a "poly" phase when they are transitioning from a long term marriage to a new life because it's just too terrifying to think of giving up one life for the other. "Poly" is the new "I've met someone else."

Are you really poly or are you gay and just now realizing what deep, intimate love really is?
 
Amitola said:
He has set some major ground rules for us and we have been trying to follow them. Is there a safe way she can suggest some of her own without pissing him off and him getting abusive?
Click to expand...

I guarantee you that this is not the first time for each of you that you have quivered in fear of a male authority figure who has perceived power over your freedom and happiness. Do not focus on ways that you can squeeze out time to be together, but instead focus on how you (EACH of you) can get help with this kind of response, which is totally fear based. I know that I'm evangelical right now about co-dependency, but this is complete co-dependency. The way forward is never on efforts to avoid waking the dragon (in this case, her husband) but on examining your own responses to a situation in which you feel diminished and frightened. Your own growing self-awareness is what will see you through to this happy life that you envision, not stabs at appeasing others who lord their rules over you. Her husband cannot "get abusive" if each of you do not play your part in an abusive cycle. This is definitely not the first time that you've found yourself in a powerless place and this is much bigger for you than this one situation. Absolutely do not focus on appeasing her husband or on stealing moments of joy with your lover while the dragon sleeps. Take the reigns of your life and work on changing how you respond to authority and rules. You have lots of help and community available to you in this endeavor.
 
Amitola;35408 We have both been as open as possible with our SO. Mine is completely understanding while hers not so much. [/QUOTE said:
When you say as open as possible does that include identifying as gay now and thinking and discussing exit strategies with new lover ??? Completely understanding or doesn't want to die alone or doesn't have the relevant details ?
Click to expand...
 
Due to the fact that my gf and I have martial obligations and she has a child. We both still love our spouses. So right now we are not discussing any exit strategies. Even if that was possible we would not be able financial secure if we left our marriages. She currently is a full time student and full time mom. I want her to be able to finish her education. I have a job, but I do not make enough to support her the way I would want to. I would have no problems making the required sacrifices to take care of her and her son. There I nothing I would love more than to be strictly with her.

Also since we know we are still experiencing NRE we don't want to make any rash decisions based on those feelings. It would be a little different if we could date like normal couples but the LDR puts a stop to that. We haven't gone through the ups and downs in our relationship. We see each other once a month and I drive 6 hours round trip to spend time with her. To me it’s worth it.

Yes, with my husband being older than me his greatest gear is dying alone and I don't want to make him go through all that pain. I just figured that whenever he passed I would find a woman whom I could fall in love with and share my bed. I wasn't really looking for my gf at the time. I was looking for a like minded friend I could talk to. Instead I found the woman of my dreams.

She doesn’t want to put her husband through a divorce either. He has no family except hers. He has severe abandonment issues and comes from an abusive family.
So right now we are taking it one day at a time.
 
FallenAngelina said:
Did you ever have the spark in your marriage? Just going by what you write here, you are gay and you've fallen in love for real. I'm not getting a poly sense here so much as you've been married a long time and are terrified to consider that you don't want to be married to this man anymore, but instead have found a woman who fulfills you in ways that he never did. Quite a few people go through a "poly" phase when they are transitioning from a long term marriage to a new life because it's just too terrifying to think of giving up one life for the other. "Poly" is the new "I've met someone else."

Are you really poly or are you gay and just now realizing what deep, intimate love really is?
Click to expand...

Honestly, I am terrified of leaving the security of marriage. By doing so I would lose my entire family except maybe 2 people and she would lose all hers. Her family is homophobic and so she is not out of the closet except to her husband who just thinks she's bi. Just the short time together I feel like she completes me. When I kiss her it feels like true love's kiss. I don't have that feeling with my husband any more.

Whether I'm truly poly I don't know. If our relationship between me and my gf have to stay where we are until we have to make a decision then I maybe I am in more of a non-monogamous relationship.

This week I have been able to be a little more grounded with my husband. But it is still a daily struggle.

I am in a real difficult situation and my emotions are going crazy.
 
Hi Amitola,

It is good to hear from you again. Experienced polyamorists welcome NRE because it feeds excitement back into the original relationship. Experienced polyamorists are also able to overcompensate for NRE by deliberately putting more in their original relationship and making their original partner feel secure.

I understand that your female lover is the only other person whom you have shared a bed with apart from your husband. My wife and I are the same and when we tried to introduce a third person, my wife's NRE went through the roof and almost destroyed our relationship. Extremely powerful NRE is dangerous to a monogamous relationship and it sounds like despite your husband's acceptance of polyamory in principle, he may still be monogamous at heart. If that's the case, I feel really sorry for both you and him - sorry for you because of what an extremely difficult time this must be for you to have your heart and responsibilities and loyalties pulled in two directions, and for your husband because he must be seeing the love of his life moving emotionally away from him.

Given my wife and I are each other's first bed partners, we understood that she had never experienced these complex emotions with anyone else before. We classified her behaviour as an affair since it started without my knowledge whilst we were still monogamous. We then classified her feelings for him as fantasy and as limerence. Limerence.net had many similar stories that my wife could relate to and she realised that many of her thoughts about him were more about fantasy than reality. My wife sometimes spent 8 hours a day at work staring at a blank computer screen, with not one reply to an email and not one keystroke touched - just fantasising. Her fantasies also introduded into our bedroom.

The situation is of course different for you. You know and have dated your new partner. What you feel is more accurately described as NRE and not limerence. Yet, I get the feeling that part of you feels confused that this NRE is pulling you away from your husband and messing with your mind in an intrusive manner. It is the unwanted intrusiveness of these thoughts that made me wonder if you would find it helpful to see what limerence is like for other people. Limerence and NRE seem to be two sides of the same coin, with NRE being the emotion felt in a new relationship that is sanctioned by polyamory and thought to be a wonderful experience, whilst limerence is an intrusive lust or obsession with someone that brings great joy to an individual whilst negatively impacting on that individual's life and especially on that individual's existing (monogamous) relationship. Please don't get me wrong. What you're feeling is NRE, but I feel that you might find understanding limerence helpful in clarifying your confusion in your current situation.

Hope it helps Amitola. You're doing better than my wife and I. Good luck to you and your husband, as well as your lover.

EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that experienced polyamorists don't always welcome NRE. My statement was made due to some biased readings I've been looking into that try to teach me how to make use of NRE positively. I can see how it can be challenging to manage even for experienced polyamorists. Thank you.
 
Last edited:
Emm said:
Many experienced polyamorists would strongly disagree with this sweeping statement.
Click to expand...

NRE feels great, overwhelming, sexy, but it is held in suspicion by experienced polyamorists because you're thinking irrationally, often with your pussy, and not with your head. You brain is full of strong hormones that make you desire your SO, obsess about them all day long, make you create fantasies of a rose colored future, can make you neglect your long term partner(s), who now seem dull by comparison.

Never make decisions when in the rush of NRE. It commonly lasts 6-18 months.

And that's some bad shit going down with your new lover's husband! I'd be wary of having any contact at all until they sort our their boundaries. Sneaking around is yucky.
 
Amitola said:
Right now my girlfriend and I have decided to take things one day at a time and not make any rash decisions. We are going to stay in our marriages and see where our relationship takes us.
Click to expand...

To me this suggested at least some superficial discussion on leaving both your marriages. Or at the very least the reason why it can't happen right now.

You made the statement that you were both as open as possible and that your husband was completely understanding. But in fact that's not really true at all.
He doesn't really know the sticky details. The one about really considering yourself gay and that your gutting out this marriage until he dies and that you'd love nothing more to be strictly with her.

The same dishonesty is happening with the gf. She's gay. Been gay her entire life and yet she either suckered some poor slob into marrying her or allowed some poor slob to believe she was straight at the time and in love to move forward in a marriage because of her parents expectations. And then hypercompounds the problem with having a child. I'm no marriage counselor but I think we might have found the source of some of her husbands frustration/ hostility and anger. Bait and switch comes to mind. In terms of his setting rules and limitations is it possible his radar/ gut is working little better and he's not just a super insecure jerk with anger issues.?


To me this sounds like relationship cobbling because of limited/ bad options.
IMO this isn't really a Poly issue but rather a delivery system. As fallenAngelina as said here many times ... poly as the soft transition to divorce. ( sorry if I missed quoted that )

If you had the means and support would you still be interesting in having a poly dynamic. Would you want to share your new wife with another woman? Or would she be ok sharing you and another women ??


The question you have is how to handle you NRE better so as to not damage your faux marriage/ arrangement.
Under these circumstances I'm not sure you can and how much damage do you think the NRE will cause.

One of the big mantra's around her is communicate communicate communicate.
The thing that goes without saying and maybe it should be stressed more often is being brutally honest in those communications.


My advice is tell the true live as roommates or whatever and move toward your real goal. Life is too short to play around like this.

Good luck D
 
dingedheart said:
Been gay her entire life... allowed some poor slob to believe she was straight at the time and in love to move forward in a marriage ... I think we might have found the source of some of her husbands frustration/ hostility and anger.
Click to expand...

I feel that was really insightful Dingedheart. Whilst this is a thread started for Amitola to help her, the larger issue here might be the relationship between her girlfriend and her girlfriend's husband.

Amitola, the issues you and your husband are going through are difficult.

First issue: As you mentioned, there's the age gap which, by the way, congratulations on managing - it shows great love and excellent communication skills between the two of you with a healthy middle finger to society for thinking it's their business. :) Transitioning to polyamory will be just like sticking up the other middle finger. Good on you!

Second issue: Feeling you are now gay and not bisexual must be difficult for both you and your husband, but as Becca said in an earlier post,

Becca said:
when I'm deep in love with a woman, I feel mostly gay
Click to expand...

and Becca later says she considers her gender preference to be more fluid rather a hard definite. Perhaps its worth sharing this with your husband? Maybe this will help diffuse jealousy? I don't know enough about your situation to really make a meaningful suggestion here.

Third issue: Perhaps most importantly for you, your girlfriend and her husband need to sort things out. Seems strange to say that your most important issue is her issue, but if the two of you no longer have to sneak around in order to be with each other, polyamory is likely to go much smoother. I don't really know for sure, but it feels as if you are describing the illicit feeling of having to sneak messages to each other as making you feel at once alive with the excitement of contacting her and simultaneously uncertain about your current relationship. Polyamory shouldn't have to feel like that. As Dingedheart pointed out, if her gender preference is truly gay and not fluid or bisexual, then he has a real reason to be jealous. He may fear she will leave him for a romantic third (leave him for you!). If so, he will be despairing and fighting feelings of being abandoned. These feelings can cause him to act in a horrible manner. I've been there and done that myself.

Polyamory is meant to enrichen the lives of those involved. It's an alternative to monogamy that people practice in order to experience more joy and more love. The cost of polyamory usually involves a massive time sacrifice for communication, as well as struggles with jealousy, security, boundaries and possibly STIs. I hope that in the long run, polyamory will be a relationship model that serves you well, Amitola, and I hope your respective husbands find the help and support that they need as well.
 
Let me clarify that the only time we have to be sneaky is when she wants to talk to me when he is nearby. He is that way when she tried talking to a mutual friend she met through me. We don't have to be sneaky to meet because we schedule the date about a month in advance. He knows what are plans are and the hotel I stay at when I come up to visit.
 
dingedheart said:
poly as the soft transition to divorce. ( sorry if I missed quoted that )
Click to expand...

You got it right and this seems to be exactly what is happening here.

Amitola, you're not alone in turning to "poly" to help you fit all of this in your head, but it's pretty clear that you and your GF are gay, want very much to be together as a couple and are terrified to make that change. I would disagree with Dingedheart that you "suckered" your husbands, but rather you both did the best you could, given the social realities of your lives. The Western World is changing rapidly, though, and there are many people and places where you and your GF can find acceptance and celebration of your relationship.

The first step, though, is not to cower in fear from your husbands and to recognize the many ways that you both have internalized fear and disapproval of your sexuality. Efforts to convince your husbands into "allowing" each of you to have a "poly GF" are going to yield temporary satisfaction at best. The solution is for deep soul searching in both you and your GF - and embracing the coming out process. There is so very much in person and online support and guidance available to you. Many women have blazed this trail and many are upon it right now. You are in very good and plentiful company.
 
Amitola said:
I know it's early in the relationship, but I can see a long term future with her marriage, raising her son together, and being happy forever.

..... Is there a safe way she can suggest some of her own without pissing him off and him getting abusive?
Click to expand...

How old is her son? How does he feel about having his parents split up so his mother can move in with a woman he doesn't know? Please realize that he may well regard you as the cause of his family breaking up and you may not have the happy, idyllic family full of love you seem to be imagining.

Is her husband abusive? Has he ever hit her? Has he ever threatened her?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top