How I Got to Today (or, The Supreme Influence of Loveline, Dan Savage, and Reddit)

Here I am as I start this. Quick intro: I’m 30, a white male, and married. The wife and I have been together since early in college, and have been married now for five years.

We’re a great couple. Or, more accurately, we are great for each other. From the moment I met her, she has been unyieldingly caring, loving, alluring, sexy, giving, and kind. I don’t know how I ended up with someone like her, other than I took a shot and she somehow liked me too.

In our 11 years, we have had countless lifelong moments; the kind of events and memories that stay with you forever. We fell for each other, found love with each other, and then forged a life together. But while this was happening, we weren’t as unified as it seemed.

As it turns out, during the years we were engaged, I had emotionally and sexually withdrawn from her. In my mind, our relationship was cruising along, and an entire life laid ahead on the horizon for us. I thought we were a fortunate couple, that we found each other and had what we needed and could build the next 70 years together side by side.

Flash forward four years later, we’re married and in a new city. I was feeling horny but it didn’t seem like it was going to happen between us that night. So, while she was tired and turned in to bed, I went to the living room to masturbate and relieve the situation.

She came out, saw me, reacted, and things went from there. A long night followed, and what it all stemmed from was a lot deeper than what I was doing that night in the living room.

It turns out that I had not been sexually satisfying her for the past four years. Sex between us had been extremely limited, and when it happened, it was centered around my desires and intent. What had been a firy and fun sex life in the first three years died out when we had moved in together, and she had been silently suffering ever since, assuming she had done something horribly wrong to cause the turn of events.

In actuality though, I had been the one to change, but I didn’t know it at the time, and it was something that still took me years more to understand. I had drawn away and retreated within myself, and relied on porn and imagination and masturbation instead of connecting with the real, loving partner right there in front of me. I was still in love, we still shared so many moments, but in the bedroom I had left her.

Once she caught me and confronted me, things came to the fore. In the years since, we have gotten better, in fits and spurts. We communicate much more than we had, and I am entirely more aware of what is happening between us when it comes to sex than I had been in the worst times.

Things are still hard though, I still have regressions and roadblocks that keep me from being the husband to her that we both want me to be. But then there are times when everything clicks, when we’re entirely connected, and the sex blows us away, and we’re clutching to each other in the afterglow and grinning like damned fools, that we know that it’s still there between us.

I’ve made progress, and I’ve been seeing a therapist for several months now, and it really is helping me to have a space to talk through things and really sort myself out. There is no end game for the therapy, I went in with the intention of wanting to become a better partner for my wife, and to find the tools to handle myself better. These things are happening, but I will always have to be working at it to get to where I hope to be.

A large part of the reason I finally sought therapy was because in the weeks before my first session I finally admitted to myself that I was polyamorous.

It was something I had known for the past seven years, but had not been willing to admit to even myself. It is why I withdrew. It was why I locked myself into my own world of porn and denial. It was why I was selfish. I had started to find this about myself, but felt trapped and scared of it, by the strangeness of it, the OTHERNESS of it. I was a straight, educated white male from a good family and I had a long term, committed relationship with a perfect woman. There was nothing in my life that spoke to otherness. There was nothing about me that was subject to judgment or criticism by others. I was standard and average. I was happy.

So I briefly explored the most superficial aspects of what it meant to be poly, and then I locked it away. That wasn’t my life. That wouldn’t be my life. That isn’t who I am.

And I thought that it was done. We seemed happy. We got married. We started the rest of our life together. And then it fell apart that night. And then I woke up to who I really had been. And I cried when I realized what I had done to my wife. And I cried that she stood with me all this time, that she could love me that much, that she could be that patient and forgiving.

And so I tried to be better. And sometimes I was. Maybe most of the time I was. But we kept having setbacks, things still couldn’t come easy for us when we knew it just should. But not for us. And I had thought about therapy. I had put out a feeler and researched a few providers. But as soon as an obstacle came up, I shrunk back away.

Cut to this spring. Another setback. More pain. More failure. And I knew that it was now or never. I knew that I could never give all of myself to her, I could never be who I am, if I wasn’t entirely and openly honest right then. So I told her. My secret of seven years. My secret that terrified me. My secret that could cost me my marriage. But I had no more choices, no other way out.

There are no words for it all. Though she heard some of the most shocking news of her life, my wife didn’t make it about her. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t argumentative. She listened, she heard me, she asked me careful and measured questions. And she let me talk. She let me explain anything that I felt needed to be said. And then she let it all sink in.

And that was the moment it began, the moment that someone else knew my secret. And that was when I didn’t have to carry my secret every day, I didn’t have to internalize the shame and the longing. It was out into the world, it was known to the most important person in my life.

So that’s how it began. Nothing fun, nothing sexy, nothing scandalous. Just one man scared that the life he knew was ending and that there was no way forward but to confront his reality. And one woman that heard him, loved him, and stayed by his side that night.

This is the start of my journey, of figuring out who I really am. I needed a space to record my thoughts, to sort myself out. For those who wish to participate with me, you’re welcome to join in. Hopefully something I stumble across might help someone else too. And having a friend to lean on never hurt either.