Venting / Oversharing Time
Ok, so I know it's not really fair to do this when I'm a very infrequent visitor to this community, but I've just got so much frustration building up that I'm going to pop if I don't share it somewhere. Y’all are a great community, but I’m not a very sociable person, so it’s hard for me to adapt enough to any new community enough to feel like I fit in here (through no fault of anyone here), or I’d have tried to come to y’all for support before now. I’m not sure if the purpose of this is just to get it off my chest, or if I’m asking for help too.
If you're willing to hang on for the ride, brace yourselves, it's going to be a bit of a long one, and by the end, you’ll probably have learned more about me than you probably want to know. :o
I've covered some of this in my few previous posts, but I'll go over it all again since most of those were months ago.
First, the labels: I consider myself a straight (about a 1 on the Kinsey scale), cis-gendered, cross-dressing male. My en femme name is Jamie. My wife has met Jamie, and is outwardly totally accepting of Jamie, although I can tell Jamie makes my wife a little uncomfortable to encounter in person.
Why do I CD? As far as I've been able to determine, there are three main contributing factors (aside from just "it's fun!"):
- 1) Physical insecurities. I'm not a bad-looking guy, but I'll never consider myself more than "average". With the right makeup and accessories though, I can make a damn fine-looking woman. It's a self-esteem boost to be able to look in the mirror and go, "Damn, I look hot!" now and then.
- 2) I don't have a masculine personality or appearance. Despite being straight, I've set off gaydar from miles away since high school. While I have zero problem with these traits in other men, I have yet to overcome societal conditioning with regards to my own self-image. If I can't be a "proper" man, maybe I can be a "proper" woman sometimes? Despite these feelings I have no desire to physically complete an MtF transition, nor do I have a desire to live my every-day life as Jamie, which is my where my logic in labeling myself as a cis-gendered man comes from.
- 3) Insecurities caused by a nonfunctioning sexual relationship with my wife. I'll expand on this later, as it's a huge reason behind needing to make this post to vent. TL;DR version: every time we have an unsuccessful sexual encounter lately, I'm exponentially more likely to break Jamie out of her box and give her a spin in the days after.
Now to the issues...
My wife is bisexual. This is not the least bit of an issue, in fact for the most part I love it. I've known this since before we even dated, as I met my wife when she was dating my good friend and landlady at the time. The part that becomes an issue is that about a year ago my wife came out to herself and not long after to me as being a very specific kind of polyamorous. She needs to have a romantic relationship with both a man and a woman to feel complete. She assures me that I am all she could ever want in a man... but she needs things out of a relationship (physically and to an extent emotionally) that only a woman can give. It sucks to find out that however satisfied that she may be with me as a man, that I’m still inadequate to give her everything she needs.
Now I know you’re thinking... if she’s OK with Jamie, what if she could get that from Jamie instead of another woman? Yeah we tried that. Not only did it not turn her on, it actively turned her off, while at the same time turning me on massively. The dissonance between the knowledge that it was her husband and the tactile/visual sensations just totally killed her “buzz” as it were. Oops. More on that part later.
So Jamie wasn’t going to magically fulfill my wife’s need for feminine romance. Ok. Time for the wife to find a girlfriend. I can’t lie, it wasn’t an easy pill to swallow, but I’ve mostly adjusted to it by now. She has a long-distance girlfriend that she’s very close to and has visited once. I’m about 90% ok with that. What I haven’t adjusted to is the imbalance that’s been created. She’s allowed a girlfriend because I as a man cannot provide the intimate feminine relationship she needs. However, I as her straight husband, cannot have a girlfriend because at that point there’s no getting around the implication that she was inadequate to fulfill my needs. Did I mention she’s also literally a textbook borderline personality disorder? The DSM-IV-TR requires a patient meet 5 out 9 criteria to be diagnosed as borderline. She’s a dead-ringer for 8 out of 9, lacking only the suicidal tendencies (thank heavens for small blessings). Again, more on the imbalance in our half-open marriage shortly... it all ties together I promise.
As if all that wasn’t enough, around New Year’s this year, my wife got lazy about renewing her thyroid medication and went without it for about two weeks. To avoid the graphic medical details, suffice to say this threw her hormones out of whack enough to eventually cause long-term (potentially permanent) nerve damage in her genitals. While she has recovered some since then, it’s still considerably more difficult for her to become physically aroused as well as much more difficult to achieve orgasm. As a man who needs sex to be a mutually enjoyable act, I find it very difficult to find satisfaction out of sex unless I know my partner is at least equally satisfied. This means we’ve gone from having great sex every couple weeks or so to one mutually unsuccessful attempt in the last two months.
My wife is keenly aware of the problems this is causing for both of us, as well as the fact that it’s pretty much her (admittedly accidental) fault. This makes it that much more impossible for me to even propose the idea of finding another partner, as it would pretty much destroy her if I admitted how much our lack of sex life is bothering me. Before this issue arose, I never would have had any serious desire to be with another woman than her outside of the occasional idle, “Hey she’s hot, I’d love to bone her” passing fantasy.
Which leads to one of the final reasons for my need to vent. I reconnected with my first high school girlfriend early last year (2011) some time. This wasn’t a problem until recently, in fact my wife has her friended on Facebook and thinks she’s pretty cool. The ex-gf is a psychological mess. Her numerous psychological disorders, not the least of which is disassociative identity disorder (multiple personalities), were well earned by a history of emotional abuse from her family and a string of abusive romantic relationships - one of which almost ended in her untimely death. I’m pretty much the only person in her life who hasn’t let her down at some point. Since we reconnected, I’ve pretty much been someone for her to talk to, and tried to help boost her shattered self-image as much as I can via text messages and instant messaging.
Our relationship was perfectly innocent on my part until I trusted her enough to show her some pictures of Jamie in April of this year (starting with the ones I shared on here when my wife and I went to the Gender Bender Ball fund raiser at our one and only local GLBTQ-friendly club). I expected acceptance (or at worst slight discomfort), and I was hoping for someone I could share that part of my life with. While my wife doesn’t mind Jamie, neither of us is entirely comfortable yet with Jamie being around in front of my wife, so I pretty much feel like I don’t have anyone to share Jamie with. I did not expect to find out when I shared the pics with my ex-gf (nor did she) that she would love the thought of doing girly things with me like helping me learn about makeup, shopping, stuff like that. And not only did the ex think innocent girl-time would be a blast, apparently she is also hugely turned on by the idea of not-so-innocent girl-time with Jamie. Oops number 2.
So now here I sit in the corner I’ve painted myself into. My sex life with my wife is somewhere between non-existant and hair-pullingly frustrating through little fault of my own (I realize I could put more effort into fixing it, but that’s where the hair-pulling part comes in). The very thing which turns her off, turns on both me and the only person other than my wife that I can share Jamie with. This other person is off-limits physically because of my wife’s insecurities, yet due to my openness, my wife is allowed to have a great relationship with her long-distance lover. I have no idea if she would be open to the idea of my having a boyfriend if our situations were similar and I were bi, but I’m not, so it’s really academic.
FML
