Apr 08 2009
What do I want from my male friends?
Marston, our newest contributor, opens with an piece which I think many Bi-guys can relate to, the conflict of realising you’ve fallen for a guy yet at the same time are happily married to your wife.
This question has been much on my mind lately. I’m a 39 year old bi guy, I am very happily married to a wife who loves me far more than I deserve, and I have no desire to have an affair. However, I have recently been shocked by the sudden realisation that I had fallen in love with a male friend.
The shock wasn’t that my eye had been caught by a cute guy: I’ve known that I’m bi since my teens, though the process of accepting that was slow and difficult. And despite being very happy in my marriage, I have never stopped noticing good looking guys in the street.
The shock was the fact that I had actually fallen for this guy: feeling churned up and excited every time I saw him, and finding myself looking forward to seeing him again just a bit too eagerly. He’s quite tactile, and will often greet me with a pat on the shoulder, which sends me into a complete spin. I haven’t said or done anything to indicate how I feel about him – he’s happily married and wouldn’t welcome me propositioning him. But I have caught myself feeling jealous of his wife when he goes home early from the bar to be with her. The fact that I have felt all of this has made me feel intensely guilty – I feel as if I have been unfaithful to my wife even though I haven’t actually done anything. And I am struggling to figure out why it happened: why, when there is nothing lacking in my marriage, did I feel the need to love a guy too?
It isn’t that I’m particularly after sex with a guy. I’ve certainly had some fun with guys in the past, but actually straight sex is the thing that really thrills and satisfies me. The fact that I’ll never suck another cock doesn’t bother me. But although I don’t want to go to bed with my mate, I do feel an intense urge to throw my arms round him and hold him really, really tight. Whilst I love the smoothness and softness of women, there is something about the strength and muscularity of men that is particularly good to hold, and I have in the past loved being able to hug a guy with a roughness that would provoke protests from a woman. With my last boyfriend, it was the hugging and passionate, intense kissing that mattered to me more than the sex. Up to a point, the sort of physical affection I want from a guy is not that much different from the kind of back-slapping, buddy-buddy affection that a straight guy might get from his mates.
But there’s more to it than that. There is something about the sort of emotional affection that you get from guys that’s just different. And this is the thing I can’t quite describe or define. I think it’s got something to do with the way guys understand one another: it isn’t that my wife doesn’t understand me – she does, all too well! But there is something in the easy rapport between two guys that just feels different. Most of the time, that rapport can take place in uncomplicated friendship, but there is a part of me that longs for it in a more intense form, and having found a guy that I can really relate to in that way, I’ve fallen for him. I’m now trying to ensure that that relationship develops as an affectionate friendship: I don’t want to lose his friendship, but nor do I want the friendship to develop into something that would threaten my marriage. It will take time to see how that friendship develops. And at the same time, I need to reassure my wife that my feeling affection towards another guy is not an indication of something lacking in her. Part of me just craves something different, even if I can’t quite define what it is.
