Reality arrives

Our time apart began with getting her moved, and a readjustment at home. It was hard. The next several months we saw her on weekends. The traveling was hard on her, and being apart was hard on me. I felt like a teenager again, my hormones, or my mind raging. About the time she had been gone 6 months, I discovered craigslist, in all its “glory.” (sarcasm intended) Guys who wanted guys, pictures of themselves. I wasn’t ready for it. I loved it. It became a nearly daily activity to check it out. It sometimes led to other porn, and of course, masturbation. Of course, the whole time I was coming to a stronger and stronger realization that I was absolutely bisexual or gay. It became an accepted identity in my mind.
Once you admit to yourself all of this, you can’t help but start wondering about the church’s views on homosexuality, etc. I read books about other religions, religious philosophies and watched you tube videos about homosexual latter-day saints. My mind was opening wide so to speak. I became friends with a gal who was a lesbian, and lived that lifestyle. She had been LDS, and told me about the details of her departure from the church. I have to admit it was fascinating. She was the first person I admitted being bisexual to. Kind of hard not to.
So, I guess you can see a few things were happening. My marriage was growing worse because of my wife’s absence, physically and emotionally from our marriage. I realized that she had no ability to express affection to me anymore. She never hugged me, kissing was very rare. She just didn’t want to be touched. I really had reached the point where I wondered if she would ever come home. She loved where she was, had made all sorts of friends for the first time in our marriage, and talked about it all endlessly.
I didn’t react well to all this. I resented her graduate studies, her new friends, and her grumping about traveling. The traveling started to become less frequent, for her benefit, and my detriment. I started spending weekend nights online chatting with guys like me, or watching gay movie productions. Thus began my own mental checkout. Her graduate degree program kept her away 3 months longer than I had planned, which just made me angry, because she had known it and never bothered to tell me.
A couple months before it ended, she came home for a week. One of the first things that happened during that was the complete breakdown of our sex life. I started the game, like always, and as I was about to go for it, she just shrank, so to speak from me. Talk about a quick end to a man’s desire. I gave up. That was rough, and it kind of took me over the edge. I emailed her and told her I wasn’t happy, and wanted her to get help to solve the problem. I had discovered you can be married and lonely. Very lonely. Her reaction was terrible. She literally flipped out for a few days, telling me it would have been better if she had never been born. It was a side of her I’d never seen, and didn’t want to see. But what was I supposed to do. A non-functional marriage is no celestial marriage.
A month later, she was home again, and something worse happened. Something I never wanted, but I guess was inevitable. For some reason she needed to use my computer, and to her horror, learned all about my addiction to internet porn, and worse, all about my attraction to men. She must have felt like her world was crashing down. My decade long deception came to an end. I admitted it and answered a few questions. The next day she left again to retrieve her things. I wasn’t sure that she would come back. Thus began a horrible week. Tense, worry filled. She told me she couldn’t be married to me (or any other guy with my problem). I could write a lot about that time period, but In the end I learned some lessons. Living a lie is a terrible mistake, and will come back to haunt you someday. I had a chance when we were dating to tell her the truth and I didn’t. There is a horrible, sinking feeling that comes to you when the truth comes to light. I also recognized at that point the harm that the porn was doing, and the fact that I hadn’t been thinking straight (no pun intended). Any addiction changes or alters your perceptions of reality. How much, I don’t know. Things weren’t probably as bad as I had thought they were.
Believe it or not, she did come back, and moved out of our bedroom. She took her marriage off Facebook, quit wearing her wedding rings. After a while, I asked her to go to counseling with me. She did agree. In the meantime I had gone and confessed my problems to the bishop, and he had talked to her separately. Talking to him was sort of surreal. I could hardly believe I was telling him I was bisexual. He is a fellow that talks a lot, and though I can’t remember a lot of it, he even mentioned his own homophobia once during the conversation. WHAT?? But his love was sincere, he gave me sincere counsel about the porn problem, and about seeing a marriage counselor. At the end he gave me a blessing. I think he was just grateful I hadn’t “broken my covenants” in mormon lingo.
But in my wife’s mind, I had. The trust was gone, I was the awful demon. Two friends of mine told me I had just given her the excuse she needed to leave. I can’t read her mind, but I’m pretty sure she was angrier about the lie than anything else. The porn was an act of mental betrayal.
So if there are young men out there who know they are attracted to men, and are trying to live the mormon ideal—my advice is simple: you better be 100% honest, and you better have some degree of real physical attraction for the woman. I had the latter (no lack of it) but without the former, it cannot work. I can’t change the past, and I’ve asked myself if I would do it all the same thing again. I can’t answer the question. She wouldn’t have married me, I wouldn’t have had a family or a lot of great experiences. But, it really should have been her choice. I’m sorry honey.