I matter.
That’s what I thought as we became closer. And I guess I do. As a good friend. I think her vulnerability has no limits and she pressures herself to please others. Was I one of them? Did what we have really matter at all or was it just a side effect of our friendship and her need to please?
I don’t want to be undeservedly given something. I don’t want something that isn’t really mine. Like hearts or sex. My mind cannot grasp at false love or sex that isn’t passionate. I cannot give myself to someone without it being very real. I’m so fucking slow. I don’t want to hand over my heart. Sex isn’t as hard but my heart is attached weather I like it or not. Now I am heart broken or at least wounded. Is this what it feels like? I didn’t know this feeling existed.
The stupid thing is, she didn’t “cheat” on me. Hell, she has a boyfriend that she’s breaking up with (I think.) But she has been hanging out with another guy “friend” who has been saying all the right things. She finally caved to his advances last night. She called me to tell me today. I had a feeling it was gonna happen eventually. They had been talking for a while and he had been saying all the right things. Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt, had she gotten rid of guy number one and slowly made her way to guy number two. She doesn’t know how to go slow I guess.
It’s so fucking ironic that I finally write something so sweet and and wishful only to be struck down less than 24 hours later by reality. I honestly started looking at her like a potential partner. Like I could have been the girl to turn her and she was already turning me. One fucking bubble bath and I’m a goner. I’m really just mad at myself. Why did I start dreaming like that? Why does it depend on someone else to become a reality? It shouldn’t. Who the fuck am I? What do I want?
I need to do something. Change my perspective… something. I’m not in a good place right now.
honey I'm a lesbian 
my heart aches for you…you are not alone
Thank you. Im not sure what to do now
Maybe you aren’t cut out for a polyamorous life or that there wasn’t clear boundaries for your relationship.
I understand your married with kids and love your husband atleast as a best friend (maybe more) and your trying to have sex with women or relationships with women on the side….but did you really expect for her to not be with others as well?
Also on a completely different note, I’m sorry. That really sucks. I should’ve started with this first. Trusting and loving can be hard because you can never completely know what the other person is really thinking, doing, feeling, or meaning….
I think she really does care for me she just has no boundries and no idea how to say no to people.
I think i could be but i would like someone who can remain in a somewhat stable relationship. She also kept giving me mixed signals which is NOT a poly thing to do. I was trying to stay in a very swizerland kinda place but she already treated me like i was more… Then my feelings further blurred the lines… Argh
Sounds to me like a bit of karmic retribution for what you’ve been putting your husband through.
Funny, i think hes probably my biggest supporter… So no, I’m pretty sure karma has little to do with it. I think its my inability to understand or accept who I am or what I want because I DON’T want to upset our life. I think you wish it was that. Sorry to dissappoint. Oh, by the way, we made amends and will still be good friends. Thanks Karma!
Hugs. I’m sorry I’m late in reading this.l Hope you are doing better.
Thanks, I am. Hope all is well where you are!
I hope you can recover from this — if you can.
I’m a guy who, 25 years ago, lost my girlfriend to her first boyfriend. (She is now married to anothr guy.) Why can’t I let go of her? One reason is that the loss has paralyzed me. I had another relationship from 2002 to 2008 (the 12-year wait should tell you something). We weren’t suited to ech other and the relationshp slowly but surely went downhill, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Finally, after six years, she opened up on me and screamed me out of the house, fleeing into the night, and that’s not an exaggeration. The relationship could have ended four years earlier (at least) and probably should have, since she was fanatically jealous and made lots of crude remarks.
I didn’t have a chance for the first relationship to go bad. In the last two or three years, I’ve chatted a lot with a lesbian friend whose marriage went slowly downhill. Her lesbianism was a major factor but not the only one. She suffered deply from depression and anxiety disorder, and physical problems directly related to sex with her husband. He knew about most of the problems and did everything he could to help her. But it wasn’t something he coul dsolve. She thinks he had an affair on the side, so secretive that she can’t confirm it. They talked for over a year before they agreed to divorce.
I was desperate to hear that he was a good man and didn’t hurt her physically (sex issues) or emotionally (the affair). She convinced me hat he didn’t, and she was honest and straightforward to him. He did fall in love with another woman, and so did she. Both of them are remarried to spouses they dearly love, and share four-way Thanksgiving dinners each year (sometimes with their son and his stepson).
The point was that I was deathly afraid that someone falling in love again (like my first girlfriend) would dump me like a rock as soon as her first love showed interest in me again. It sounds like you have hit the same wall and been hurt just as badly. I’m so glad your husband has been as supportive as he has been (I haven’t read all your blogs, but I know there is tension in the marriage). But he can’t help you as much as you need. I would take back that ex-girlfriend in a heartbeat, although reality — she’s married for over two decades, has two kids –and, from the little I know about her husband, I’d like him greatly) and I’m suspecting you would take “Pearl” back just as fast. It would be wonderful if she would come back, but could you trust her? Could you go a day without worrying about her hurting you again? I don’t know.
Bless you and I hope things work out for you. I can only hope your husband is as good a freind — well out ofarm’s reaach — as mine is.
Oh Peter, How did I miss this post!? I am doing ok now. My husband and I opened our relationship up and it really helped move us forward. Pearl has gotten married, to a decent guy. I don’t think I ever could take her back because I know I can’t offer her what she needs. That’s ok. We are still the very best of friends. I think I like it better that way anyway. I hope you find a new love that you can call all your own. They are out there. I promise.
Gosh, Honey! I didn’t know you had replied to this, and in fact I had forgotten I left the post. Thank you!
God bless you for your encouragement. For reasons I’ll discuss in the next paragraph, I have terrible trouble believing what you (and my first girlfriend as she dumped me) said about finding love again. As I write this, I’m afraid that a woman I was dating is no longer comfortable dating me after I held her hand.
I think I have Asperger’s syndrome. A high-functioning autistic person who takes change in my life and routine very hard and am hypersensitive to being touched, to being rejected, and especially to being lectured at. I don’t know yet if I have it. A supervisor at work was the first one to ask me if I had it, based on my skill at remembering dates (what day of the week a certain event happened, for example). People also remark on how much I try to impress people with my knowledge and how suddenly I change topics to make points. I’ll talk to my doctor tomorrow (May 2, 2016) to see about getting tested for it.
The same-sex marriage debate was especially harrowing to me. To a major extent, it was because the spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would lost his/her wife/husband forever and indeed never had him/her. I would read coming-out stories and collapse (figuratively) in agony because at least one party and usually both were hurting so much. I could not beat to see such pain, even when it was fictitious.
Sometimes (often?), the stories would provide an “easy out” by revealing the husband of a lesbian was engaged in an affair with a woman on the side. Almost all of the stories seemed to have an “Ah Ha” moment when a wife realized she was really lesbian, causing me to feel that a female partner “turned” a wife. I took it personally. I really did. As a former stage and TV actor, I’m one of those people who know stories and films are put together piece by piece by people playing roles, and yet they strike me personally.
To see people who agitated for the status quo portrayed as hypocrites or beneath that (in profile stories) hurt me deeply. So did my seeing fanatics rage against homosexuality in general — I saw that in one church I attended, the LAST time I attended it.
I don’t know how many people sincerely believe in the idea that one man and one woman produce the greatest love of all. The divorce rate shows how many people have that belief shattered. I tend to blame the man for being less than perfect to the woman. That’s unfair to the man a lot of the time. More to the point, I blame myself for not being the man my girlfriends wanted me to be.
You are very brave to put your struggles out on your blog like this. My heart still aches when I read an entry and see how much you appear to hurt. I can’t do more for you than offer you my support from afar.
As for me, I kept the news stories and fiction stories and blog entries on other sites because I was using them to torture myself. (Need to work on that too.) I’m no less a man because I believe in my heart that a man and a woman can have the greatest love of all if their hearts are open. I shouldn’t be any less a man because I take things seriously and open my heart to people who hurt. But I shouldn’t be any less a man because I can’t do everything in the world for them.
Your husband sounds like a “real” man for taking you to his heart.. You are a “Real” woman who has taken him and your girlfriends to your heart, each of you caring deeply for each other even though your true love is with someone else. Someday. You deserve to love someone who meets your heart.
The rambling is probably a sure sign of Asperger’s. Would you keep me in my thoughts as I try to treat it?
Smiles.
Hi Peter,
Love is a curious thing. Most pretend it’s some expensive treasure, like a gold chalice to be discovered and then put on some high shelf, instantly invaluable. Really, love is lumber, blood sweat and tears, days of hard work, bad weather and moments of despair, but after time it becomes a home, a shelter built with determined hands. You cannot build it alone. You can only stand there and wait for someone to work with you. A good partner will know when to take the lead and when to step back. A good partner will know when to encourage and when to sit on the ground with you to hold you when you feel like giving up. We cannot choose people who need to be fixed to build shelter together, because they first need to fix themselves. We can be friends. We can love them, but they are not ready for the arduous task of working together to create something more than themselves.
Find out what you want out of love and from a partner and then become that person. Only then will you find someone who will meet you halfway.
We are all worthy of love. YOU are worthy of love. Aspergers or not, you clearly are a bright person. Do not blame yourself too harshly for people who didn’t see your worth, instead become the person you want to have. Become the partner who loves unconditionally. Who may be afraid to fail, but tries anyway. You are that person. We all have past relationships that helped us learn who we really are and what we want. Use that to find your person who you can build your future with.
Big Hugs.
Honey
Honey, I get the impression that you want to find a woman with whom you want to fall in love. Nothing short of that will do. I also get the impression that you love, or at the very least are tremendously fond of, your husband. Both of those are awesome.
I have stuck up for the straight/hetero spouse all the time I’ve thought about it, which isn’t very long. It’s tough to fall in love with someone who can’t fall in love with you back, says the guy who did it. It can hurt worse than anything, says the guy who hurt so badly. And yet I don’t get that vibe from you. You care for him more now, I think, than you did when you married him. Each of you has earned that caring from the other.
You have done two very kind things to me by responding so caringly to my messages. It is my pleasure to care deeply for you in return.
The haters seem to want to shame you into a hetero (and joyless) marriage at best, and let’s not talk about the worst. You have my word I won’t use their language. No person deserves that kind of abuse.
For a while, I was as angry as any of the haters — as frustrated and sad as could be that (usually) a man was losing the love of his life. (These were almost all reactions to fiction stories; the one exception came when a woman played an incredibly cruel practical joke on another woman — who came out as a result.) None of these writers ever did anything to hurt me, and as far as I know, they were all expressing the conflict a gay person feels when a hetero person loves him/her. It wasn’t my place to add to their hurt and to my own, which I sure was doing.
Take care, dear lady. You deserve someone you truly love. I hope she’s out there.
Fondly,
Peter
P.S. I did talk to the woman I mentioned. She had been VERY angry at me for a while, then she figured out something about me that I believe is true — that I care for people and try to be nice to them, but fail spectacularly sometimes. With that settled, we figured out that we like each other and enjoy waving hello through the windows, and occasionally going to movies together. That suits me fine. Glad that you and Pearl have come to a friendship that is somewhat similar and I’m especially glad you aren’t hurting because of her.
Fondly,
Peter