My wife and I just celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary. I am 56 years old and identify as bi and demi. My wife identifies as straight. We are happy in our monogamous Mixed Orientation Marriage.
I grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth suburbs. By nature, I was an introverted STEM kid who was pretty terrible at sports, but I excelled at school. I was a teenager in the 1980’s in the height of the AIDS epidemic. I always dated girls, but I couldn’t understand why guys also caught my eye. I was stuck in a gay or straight paradigm. The summer after my freshman year of college, I participated in my university’s summer study in central France. On the flight there, I met this wonderful fellow student. She and I shared many common interests – culture, travel, and music. I was 19. I had no idea I was meeting my future wife. We started dating after we got back to the US and dated through college. I proposed to her before we headed to a different college for my graduate school. Six months into graduate school, we decided to set a wedding date. I was 23. Something nagged at me, however. While we were in Vichy, I had a hookup with a random French guy. I came out of that experience even more confused. I felt I needed to tell my future wife, and I did. She asked a lot of questions, if I loved her and could love only her. I said, “Yes.” We got married and I happily told myself I was straight.
After marriage and completion of graduate school, I dove into my career and we had two kids. Life was busy. I still noticed my periodic same-sex attractions, but I pushed them down. For 30 years. Over time, shame grew and started eating at me. Two years ago, summer of 2022, I was reading Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead for a workbook. I realized how much I was numbing. How much I was withdrawing. The dam burst. I redisclosed to my wife, restarting a deeper conversation that we should have had 30 years prior, but we did not have the vocabulary or the maturity to address. I needed to find the words to communicate the swirl of emotions in my head. I needed to find ways to express all of myself in healthy ways that didn’t rupture our marriage. I needed to learn to ask for things in bed that I had fantasized about, but never expressed. I needed to learn how to ride the swings in the bi-cycle as my attractions fluctuated over time across genders. I needed to learn how to communicate my story as I proceeded to disclose to our grown kids, family, and contacts at work that I am a bi man. It all took time. I had mess-ups along the way, some of them frustrated me and some of them upset my wife. Through it all, my wife and I did a ton of talking. We set boundaries that allowed me to stretch into my queerness within our monogamous marriage. I found spaces to learn how to step into queer culture. I found a local bi men's group for platonic discussions of relevant topics. My wife and I are hockey fans. We found and joined a Pride group of queer people where we meet in bars, many of them queer, to celebrate our local team.
After two years of hard discussions, therapy for me (to deal with my shame issues), and couples therapy, I can say that we’ve made it out the other side. It hasn’t always been easy. We’ve both felt fatigued at times, wondering if it would ever get better. I fought a bout of depression when I thought there was a part of me that caused my wife so much pain. She fought anxiety when she wanted absolute certainties to questions that I lacked answers. Now, I feel seen and loved for all of who I am. And I love my wife to the moon and back for seeing all of me and loving me. My wife had many concerns that I would leave her for another person who had different body parts from her. What we have both come to realize is that we love each other, inside and out, more than just body parts. We are both stronger people. And our marriage is stronger. Our sex life is better. Our relationship dynamics have shifted as I have slowly shed some more masculine behaviors that I thought I needed to perform to be the “man” in the marriage, but it feels okay. I think, through regular conversations, that my wife and I are moving toward a more balanced relationship. It all feels right and good.
Andy T.
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