I have discovered this site a while ago and have been reading the various posts and comments. I would like to thank David very very much, for this site has been of huge help to me!

I am going to speak of an experience of coming to terms with male bisexuality that is very different from what all the commentators under this post have spoken of so far…

I am a 22 y.o. bi guy that leans more towards men and that is mainly interested in bi guys.

About 15 months ago, I met a guy that literally took my breath away. He immediately captured my full attention because he embodied all the physical and behavioral traits that I have always been looking for in a guy.

I was plainly sure that the guy was not straight, although I mean, both he and I could easily go “unspotted” by the gaydar. Furthermore, we live in the Middle-East, which doesn’t make things easier I mean…

I have noticed that my presence around him did not go unnoticed, and that whenever he saw me he looked suddenly agitated and worried, and no longer knew how to talk or walk, and that he kept on throwing discreet glances towards me while at the same time keeping a distance. I must say that I did not make it easy for him, due to my rather strong personality and my tendency to leave a strong impression in any entourage I am, by displaying too much knowledge in some subjects, and by showing too much intellectual tendencies, and by speaking in a sonorous, well-pitched deep voice (I’m a classical singer with a bass-baritone voice).

Anyway, after having taken my time to observe him well for a while, and send all the right silent signals, I have decided to finally come-up to him and simply tell him that I am interested.

And in under a minute, I had told him that I was interested, and he had replied that he wasn’t into guys, but that he is not bothered by the fact that I am interested in him. We couldn’t stretch the conversation much longer due to our presence at the café where he worked as a waiter, but the main reason why I have directly drawn back was that I was taken aback by his reply. To me, it meant that I had just collided into a guy that is a closet bisexual, even closeted from himself and attempting to “shake the idea off his head”. I had crushed on a guy who believed that he could turn himself straight, while it was quite obvious that meeting me had left him uneasy, worried and questioning.

I kept on going to the café as if nothing had happened, till he resigned from his work and I lost track of him… but deep inside of me, this guy was the enigma of my life. I am not the type to easily get emotionally attached to people, I am rather very tough on my feelings… and while I kept on showing him my tough and firm face, deep inside, I had no clue what was going on inside of me… And I still feel this way now, even after not having seen him or heard from him in months.

There surely was a huge lack of communication between us, and this has caused me to feel very insecure while at the same time never showing it, especially to him. In front of him, I remained the proud and infallible guy that dominates every situation… To be honest, I don’t know why I have gotten so much attached to this guy, or the thought of him, despite everything, while I should have moved on by now and left the issue behind…

I still fantasize about meeting him some day by chance in the street, and getting him to talk about this subject over a cup of coffee… I want to get to terms with him in my life, and I want him to get to terms with his repressed bisexuality!

You’re right having your cake and eating it is usually an impossibility, but so is repressing your feelings and denying who you are.

There’s no easy answers.

My experience is that women primarily fear abandonment, they think that if you say you are bisexual it means that you are half way (or one good male-on-male shag away) to deciding you are gay. Once you declare yourself to be gay you are going to leave them.

Diffusing that fear is central to coming out to your wife. You need to have an excellent relationship which is communicative and trusting to the point where she can catch with your pants around your ankles in front of another woman and your “my belt just broke” excuse is accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow.

OK – I exaggerate a little but you get my drift. This is not a topic to broach if you have any unresolved trust issues, or if either of you are suffering from low self-esteem, stress or a general lack of confidence. You have to be totally in tune with each other, almost to the point that your revelation comes as no surprise and that it comes out in a way that doesn’t threaten your relationship.

If you want to test the water, hypotheticals involving 3rd parties are a good place to start. For example ask an open ended question like “What do you think of Swingers?” This is a good way of identifying your wife’s feeling about consensual extra-marital relations. Obviously you can’t just ask this question out of the blue, its either got to come up in conversation, on TV or some other media.

If you are smart you can come up with all kinds of ways to ask probing questions without leaving the hypothetical. I make a point of asking all sorts of these questions just for the fun of it. Even when they don’t relate to my relationships in any way. It then becomes like a game so I can ask really important questions with impunity.

I don’t know if that helps any, but hopefully it makes sense.

David

I DO NOT want to harm my wife and kids, but I guess I’m just bothered by the thoughts I’m having. I’ve been repressing them for so long, I’m just afraid of what will happen.

As far as relationships go, I’m just looking for someone to understand. Thanks for letting me just “say” the b-word.

I don’t think there is an easy answer here. Without understanding what the nature of your girlfriends objection to being married to a bisexual is its difficult to offer any advice on how to talk to her about it.

But being able to express your feelings to your wife is one thing, the other question is what do you want to do about your bisexual feelings?

Do you want to explore male/male relationships? (And by ‘relationship’ do you mean ‘relationship’ or just sex?) Or are just wanting to feel less guilty about your fantasies by being able to talk about them more openly?

Obviously whatever your desired outcome, these could have costs for your marriage and your kids. Remember that in many relationships there is such a thing as “thought crime”.

I generally encourage openness, because a) its liberating and b) its honest.

However, I can probably make an exception for those from deeply conservative religious backgrounds. If coming out is going to alienate you from your family, then you need to have the supports of friends or your spouse to fall back on. If you can’t bank on that then coming out could destroy your world and your social support network.

Still, it remains a social crime that other people’s intolerance force you to hide who you really are.

I personally took the risk of alienating my family rather than tolerating their bigotry and it worked out OK (though I live in liberal secular Europe and not in Bible Belt USA.)

That kinda deals with your parents. As for your wife. Well here’s my advice. If you want to have sex with guys, then if you try and do it behind her back you are not respecting her and some day you are probably going to be found out and it will destroy your relationship.

So if you intend to see other people. Be honest. Yes she might still leave you but that’s the price you pay. At least you haven’t deceived anyone.

If you decide you are happy with just having sex with her and the occasional toy party, then you might think its not worth risking what you have over being open about something that is effectively an irrelevance.

any suggestions?

I think you guys need to have a chat about what’s changed for her. Find out why was she initially up for it and why she has since gone cold.

Insecurity tends to be a bigger factor than jealousy and they tend to be easily confused.

At risk of a sweeping generalisation. Women seem to like to set their men little “tests”. They give you their blessing to go and do something they really don’t want you to do, just to see if you will do it.

EG: When she is feeling sick and saying she’ll be no fun tonight so go and see your boyfriend.

This is a test to see if you’ll go or stay with her and comfort her when she is feeling unwell.

In these situations, always put her first. It’ll boost her self-esteem.

Relationships are built on a lot more than sex, but it sounds like from what you are saying that you have a decision to make. If you are worried that your wife will go ballistic if you come-out as bisexual. Then you have to assume that she will not tolerate you starting a parallel relationship with a man. Work on the basis that it is either her or him.

Your wife must love you otherwise she would have left you already, lets face it 11 years no-sex – there must be something else holding you together. Do you still love her? I ask because the only reason you gave for not leaving her is that you “made a commitment to her”.

Duty – that’s a pretty piss-poor reason to stay in a relationship. If you love her stay, if you are unhappy or indifferent towards her, leave. Its that simple.

As for the guy you have fallen in love with, how does he feel about you? If he loves you back then it sounds great.

Finally you have nothing to feel guilty about. Religion has been queer bashing for 3,000 years. For my part I’m a non-believer, but if you were to ask me to believe in all-powerful, all-knowing deity. I’m pretty sure that a being with that kind of power would not be concerned with trivial matters like where we stick our dicks. It would be like taking Stephen Hawkins and asking him to apply his intellect to colour coding M&Ms.

There is no evidence god exists full stop, but if you choose to believe god exists as a matter of faith, then you have to look to the fact that there is no evidence that god takes any interest in how we live our lives. Statistically speaking prayers are not answered, those that are answered are happy co-incidences, Amputees for example are never healed, no matter how hard they pray. If God is there, then he doesn’t care.

The people who care are the bible-bashing bigots running around dishing out guilt in his name, usually because they have unresolved sexual angst of their own. Ignore these people, you have a right to be yourself.

I was in a similar situation. I am a closeted bisexual man. And, I have been married for 16 years. My attraction to males started at an early age. So, when I was molested for 5 years, it sort of came natural to me. I didnt see anything wrong with it because my interest was there before the molestation.

My wife does know I was molested. However, she does not know I still have feelings for guys. The truth is I have fallen in love with another guy. But, I will not leave her because I made a committment to her. I have a feeling once I tell her, she is going to go balistic on me.

I need to find the courage to tell her. I need to find the words to tell her.

The signs are there. I havent had sex with my wife in 11 years. But, I have not been with a guy either. The sex is not important to me. It is the companionship I crave.

I struggled for years and couldnt decide if I was gay, straight, or bi. Depending on who I was talking to, I was either straight or gay. But, I have recently come to the realization that I am a bisexual. I was raised in a Christian home and still feel the guilt because I didnt feel God approved of this lifestyle. Recently, I have been asking myself why was I made this way by God? The molestastion didnt have anything to do with it. I had the feelings before that even started. I have went to counceling and even prayed for God to take these feelings away from me. Yet, they still remain.

Right now, I am so tore up inside. I found it easy until I fell in love with this awesome guy. And, it isnt based on sex since we have never had sex. It is purely on him as a person. I am so confused. I know I am bisexual (With a leaning more toward the gay end). But, I just don’t know how to handle it.

Can anyone give advise that has went through this? I have a wife who has a temper and is very volatile. I dont see a calm way to get around this. The best option is to not tell her. However, I am not being true to me or her if I dont. I just dont know how and to keep her calm

We have commited to a monogamous relationship made even more difficult by the time spans when we can physically be together. I trust him not to cheat on me and he trusts me not to cheat on him, yet he gave me permission to cheat so if I did it wouldn’t hurt him. Those kind of mixed signals make me wonder if he is truly ready for the relationship he says he is commited to.

But there was something and it is a big something that I haven’t seen mention of in any of the posts. While there are certainly some men who are physically attracted to and who have romantic feelings for both men and women. It seems that bisexuality is as much a part of who they are as height or eye color. That was not the case for my boyfriend. He did not feel physically attracted to men. He never watched gay porn nor did he ever fantasize about having sex with men. Because I read all of his e-mails, I noticed that he never hooked up with the same person twice. The correspondence was always brief and impersonal. He said that there was little or no conversation during any of the encounters he had. That only confused me more.

And then he revealed the secret that he had been hiding since he was ten years old. He had been molested by a priest repeatedly for about a year. The experience was both terrifying and thrilling at the same time. He did not consider himself a victim because he participated willingly. He felt enormous shame and guilt that the encounters were actually extremely pleasurable for him. And so, for years and years, he remained silent and never sought help. As a result, he began acting out later in life trying re-enact the trauma but with a different ending. He wasn’t doing it to hurt me. Suddenly, I no longer saw him as a lying, cheating bastard. He was a poor little boy who was a victim of the most sinister crime a person could commit. We are working through it together.

Please consider the possibility that there may be more to the story. Sexual abuse is more common than you might think….roughly 1 in 5 boys are abused studies show.

For a start the location and setting tends not to be in the comfort of a bedroom. The sex itself generally centres around getting each other off as quickly as possible, and there is no affection, kissing or cuddling involved.

So next time you are making love with him, you can be pretty confident that this is NOT how he is when he is with a man.

David

Sorry to hear you found out like this. Its a really tough thing to discover, but remember its also a tough thing to share. Many men are ashamed of their bisexuality or at least fear being ridiculed or judged for being “gay”.

Most bisexual men will insist they are not Gay, and this is true, we aren’t gay we are Bi, but we tend to emphasise this to not to highlight and independent identity, but because we fear the “gay” label.

To answer your questions:

Q. Can he ever really commit to you?
A. Yes, your boyfriend is almost certainly telling you the truth when he says he could not have any romantic feelings towards a man, (this is a fairly common trait of bisexual men). He will only ever love you, even if he shags a few blokes on the side. That might not be your idea of love and commitment, but *he* will be emotionally committed to you and you alone.

Q. Is it even possible for him to be in love with you?
A. Yes absolutely! See above, but also consider that sex and love making are two different things. You have sex for fun and you make love because you share a deep intimate bond with someone. He might have sex with men, but he makes love to you.

Advice:

You won’t change him, if he has urges to have sex with men then to make him deny it is going to be counter-productive, he’ll just lie and hide it from you. You need to decide whether or not you can handle an unorthodox relationship where you allow your boyfriend to go out and occasionally meet men for sex.

If you can accept such a relationship, then feel free to set ground rules like he doesn’t bring his “boyfriends” home, that he always uses protection and that he tells you (or doesn’t tell you) when he’s going to meet them.

If you can’t accept such a relationship, then generally its best to part company now before anyone gets even more hurt.

Hope that helps

David

I’ve often wondered if she’s changed her views by now. Haven’t seen or heard from her in years.

Many times I’ve found that if they don’t think you’re talking about yourself, they’re more apt to give their true feelings.

It also makes a big difference on how she’ll take the news depending on her personality. If she is straight, she is less apt to accept your lifestyle for several reasons. One reason is, she’s likely not to be able to relate, as the case was with my ex-wife. When I was married I had not yet discovered that I liked sex with men but we would have discussions about other bisexual men and women that we knew and she would make it clear that she couldn’t understand it because she was in no way interested in being bisexual.

If she is bi, she is more apt to understand and accept your lifestyle, but then you have to consider if she has a selfish personality or not. If she’s the type of bisexual female who is bisexual mainly for the attention aspect, it’s likely she’ll be upset because it’s not just about her anymore.

If she is a jealous person, bi or straight, she’s going to see your interest in other men as cheating no matter what.

I dated one bisexual woman who was fine with my being bisexual, she just couldn’t handle the thoughts of me having sex with anyone else, male or female, other than her. We were swingers but it had to be all about her.

It’s been my experience that the type of woman who most readily accepts her man’s bisexuality is a woman with a dominant personality. If you are submissive to her then she feels in control and doesn’t feel threatened by your lifestyle. And by submissive, I don’t necessarily mean in a sexual way; I mean submissive in your relationship. In other words, if she’s the boss.

I know my experiences are not the experiences of everyone, but I observe these things in the relationships my friends who are both openly bi as well as those who are in a relationship with a closet bi male.