Just throwing this out there so that I am no longer being kept silent by the thoughts in my head, and the way my brain runs away on me.
I’m Ruthie. This is an alias. Because I have a secret.
My husband is gay…. Or straight… Or Bi.
I don’t even know.
I’m not sure that he even knows. He has yet to be with a man, and yet, the thoughts of being with a man consume him. I can’t say it’s ruining our marriage, or the life that we are building together. In many ways it has brought us closer in that we have to communicate with each other in a way that neither of were expecting at the beginning of our relationship.
We started dating almost 12 years ago. Together we have 5 children, 4 boys, 1 girl. It was like many normal relationships… We met, we fell madly in love, and everything was absolutely beautiful. I was for certain that I had met my soul mate, like what they show in the movies.
But six years ago, that began to change.
Looking at our computer history to try and locate a cool product I had seen earlier, I came across my first look of shemale porn. I had never even known the terms transgender before that. The video (to my mind at the time) was disturbing. I couldn’t figure out if they were guys with boobs, or girls with dicks.
Looking back now, I realize it didn’t matter.
This was the beginning of our journey into a fluid marriage, although we didn’t know it at the time.
When I brought it up to my husband, he just said that someone at work had talked about it, and so he thought he would check it out. But it meant nothing. He said that he was uncomfortable watching it. That the thought of being with a man disgusted him. I left it at that.
And yet, my intuition would flare off every couple of weeks, and I became quite an avidinternet historian, tracing all of his whereabouts on the web. I would wake upin the early morning, when he was getting ready for work, and I would know whether or not he was looking at this porn that ‘disgusted’ him so much.
I would call him out on it. I would ask questions. He had no idea why he was watching it, and vowed that he couldn’t even get an erection while watching it. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was tired. There was no straight answer (no pun intended).
Inside, I was dying. I thought, am I not good enough for him? I have a vagina, is that enough? Does he even like girls? Is he gay? Is he bisexual? What does that even mean? I felt as though I couldn’t bring up to my friends, or to my family. What if I was wrong? What if they no longer accepted him? Could I continue to accept him? I love him. Was I ready for my marriage to be over? Did watching men and shemales ‘do it’ mean that he was gay? Or was it just a normal curiosity that would eventually settle down?
I searched high and low for the answers to these questions. I learned that ‘Is my husband gay?’ was one of the most questioned ‘is my husband’ questions on google. Apparently I was not alone. There were many quizzes that I could take to determine if my husband was gay (does he work out at the gym? Stay up late at night and answer hidden texts?) But no one, no matter where I looked offered support or understanding for what it was I was going through.
It’s been six years of ups and downs, fights, arguments, understanding, compassion, learning to play together, and learning to listen to the deeper meanings in our conversations to get to where we are today.
Whether you are a woman in a relationship with a man who has these bicurious thoughts, a woman in a relationship with a closeted gay man, or a man who is in a relationship with a woman who has been having feelings about being with a man, or you’ve already stepped out on your marriage, I invite you to take this journey with me.
I promise to not judge you, or where you’re at… And ask that you give me the same respect, as I explore our journey together in a public format. Sometimes the answer isn’t a simple yes or no. Sometimes love isn’t black and white. And sometimes, you’re not simply straight, or gay or bisexual.
The answer isn’t always simple, but I hope to enlighten you on my own experiences, on my husband’s experiences, and how we came to be a fluid couple with each other, in our words, our sexuality and our relationship.
xoRuthie
Fluid Couple Conundrum 