glantern954
Mar 22, 2006, 7:59 PM
The following is an article about a woman's confusion over her
potential husband's interest in sex with men. Some interesting comments and debate are also provided at the link to the site below. Several of them don't even consider the idea of bisexuality.
(Sorry for the long post, I was afraid to just link to it. Sometimes these sites only let you read a story for a few days)
Source: London Times
Date: March 13th 2006
Author: Iris Scott
Title: Should I stay or should I go?
Days before her wedding, our correspondent was shocked to learn that
her fiancé frequented gay saunas. So how did she react?
Read the comments of other Times readers and then send us your own
I never thought that I'd have much in common with a Liberal Democrat
MP or his wife. But when Mark Oaten was forced to resign from the
party leadership race in January this year after a scandal about gay
prostitutes, I found myself in the surprising position of feeling a
huge amount of sympathy, especially for his wife.
Nobody knows how many British men in heterosexual relationships are
actually gay or bisexual, but it's likely to be significant. And if
we did know, it might well rock our heterosexual, marriage-centred
society to the core.
I was due to get married recently. I thought that I'd finally found
the right man. One of the best things about him was that he seemed
really happy with his life: he loved his job, had normal hobbies
that he was passionate about, had a normal family, was solvent, had
never married so had no baggage. He was even tall and handsome. So
what was the catch? For there was one. And it was a big one.
Six short days before 50 friends and I were due to fly to France for
the wedding, I found out what that catch was. You have to imagine
how ordinary this scene was and so how surreal what happened
was . . .
It's Friday night, we've just finished dinner in a restaurant and
are about to ramble smugly home for our last weekend as boyfriend
and girlfriend. Mr Normal stood up and said he was running to the
loo before we left. As he got up and walked away from the table, he
dropped a business card on the floor. I reached under the table to
pick it up and noticed something scrawled across the back the name
of a sauna parlour and a telephone number.
It's odd how your brain works in these situations you think of
everything except the obvious answer. I picked up his mobile, which
was lying on the table, and scanned through the list of dialled
calls and there it was . . . at half past six yesterday morning.
He came back to the table. I asked him what the number was. He said
he didn't know. I knew then that it was serious but I still didn't
realise how serious. I began to think about pre-wedding hookers
(worse than pre-wedding jitters). But after a long and painful
argument outside on the street he suddenly stopped, became dead
calm, said he was going to tell me and that it was bad. And it
was. "It's a gay sauna I visited when I went to Liverpool," he said.
Liverpool was yesterday, so eight days before our wedding he'd got
up at 6am to go to have sex with faceless men? I couldn't feel
anything. I was freefalling, beyond shock, but before I could get my
head around that bombshell he lobbed another: "And for the past two
years I've been going to a place near the office called Pink
Fountain." Pink Fountain? How could you go anywhere called Pink
Fountain? "Where is it?" I asked pointlessly.
"In one of the old market towns, one stop down the motorway." He
loves history.
"When do you go?" "Lunchtimes." It's funny how you never think that
people will cheat on you during their lunchbreak.
Several desperate hours later I sat alone in my bed and began the
task of texting everyone due to fly to France, telling them that the
wedding was cancelled. It was nearly 5am on Saturday by the time I'd
finished, but even so calls started coming in.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I'm exhausted exhausted with
explaining, and answering prurient questions (not that I blame
people for their curiosity). Most of all, I'm exhausted trying to
understand what he's trying to tell me. We've fitted three years of
talking into these short foggy weeks, but I don't understand any
better than I did on that Friday night. After a year and a half
together I feel I hardly know this man at all. He is adamant that
he's not gay, concedes that he might be bisexual but says that he
doesn't need it in his life and wants only me. He has just started
seeing a therapist, who thinks that it's probably not a matter of
homosexuality, but a sexual compulsion motivated by a fear of
intimacy and women.
He has a whole list of bad experiences, starting with a bullying
mother who made him withdraw into himself as a child and ending with
his last big relationship, in which his girlfriend manipulated his
kindness and kept control of the relationship by using sex as a
weapon.
These experiences, he insists, have increased his fear of women and
sent him running into the arms of strange blokes. It started about
three years ago when, he says, his previous girlfriend started
withholding sex: he'd begun looking at straight internet porn, then
gay, then chat rooms, then female prostitutes and, finally, about
two years ago, a gay sauna. When I asked "Why a gay sauna, why not
prostitutes?" he said: "Because you have to be civilised with a
prostitute, say hello and stuff. In a gay sauna you pay your money
at the door, it's anonymous and you don't have to speak to anyone.
It's sex without emotion."
He has tried so hard to help me to recover from the blinding blow he
struck me. He has taken a serious amount of verbal abuse from me,
copious amounts of crying and wailing, says that he has no urge to
go back to the sauna and wants to get us back on track. But has he
really changed, was it all just a big bad mid-life experiment, is it
something that he has any option to change? When you find yourself
in such a situation you have to ask yourself some big questions:
what is love, what is sex, what is important to you in a
relationship? It's then that you realise how little we really think
for ourselves, how much we allow our expectations of life to be fed
to us. Something like this challenges everything that you believe
about yourself, about other people and about what is truly valuable
in life.
Inevitably, one of the things you think about a lot is sex, the
meaning of sex, your expectations of sex, what's normal, and is
there such a thing as normal? And, of course, what defines a person
as homosexual? The confusing thing about Mr Normal was that he
seemed very interested in women we'd had rows in the past about e-
mail and text relationships that he had maintained with other women
but I'd never suspected that there were other men, too.
Perhaps I should have listened to my favourite Bing Crosby CD more
carefully and not messed with Mr In-between. Was it all, me
included, just a cover for a gay man struggling to be straight? He
wouldn't be the first: a survey in the US in 1990 found that 4 per
cent of married men have had a homosexual relationship within the
past five years and I don't imagine the figure would be any lower
here.
When I went to inquire about an HIV test I asked the doctor whether
he met many women in my position. "Oh yes," he said, trying to be
sympathetic. "People like you are ten a penny. In fact, a lot of
women forgive it, live with it and I see them only if the condom
breaks when they're having sex with their husbands."
But even if Mr Normal decides that he is bisexual or even
straight could I ever forgive his betrayal? A close male friend of
mine said I was looking at it wrongly, that it wasn't about betrayal
and forgiveness. "The trouble with women is that they think
everything is about them. They love martyring themselves. If their
boyfriends cheat on them, they think `What's wrong with me?' But it
has nothing to do with them. Most blokes need a lot of sex, and want
a wide variety of sex. When they cheat it's about them and their
weakness, it's not about you."
I don't agree. It is about you, it's about the fact that your
partner goes ahead and does something that he doesn't need, but
wants, knowing full well that if you find out you'll be devastated.
In other words, he doesn't care about you enough to forgo something
for your sake. Regardless of where you fall within the straight-
bisexual-gay continuum, I would have said that betrayal is betrayal.
But having talked night and day with this man, I have come to the
conclusion that there might be an exception to this rule: the person
who is truly in denial. A person in denial can't betray you, because
he doesn't know what the truth is himself. If he betrays anyone, he
betrays himself, and by comparison you're a minor casualty. Unless
you know someone in denial, you probably have no idea of the power
it can hold over a person. An alcoholic who is truly in denial does
not lie to you when he tells you he does not have a problem with
booze, he really believes he hasn't got one. He's running away from
what he sees as the awful truth of himself so fast that it has
become a blur.
And, clearly, a 40-year-old man who suddenly takes up gay sex but
maintains that he is heterosexual is not facing up to something in
himself. It doesn't necessarily mean that he is gay; people use sex
for all kinds of purposes other than sexual gratification: power,
money, self-loathing, self-esteem, inclusion, fear of love, fear of
not being loved. But can I, should I, forgive him and wait for him
to figure out why he was doing it? We live in selfish times, and
forgiveness, it seems, is often equated with weakness. I have felt
the caustic judgment of friends who have no experience of a
situation like this one, but who have confidently dismissed us
both: "He's obviously gay, and you're both in denial." Others take
the position that love, sex and sense of self are far more
complicated than allowed for in the "three-boxes-fits-all" view of
life. They say that if I love him and I 'm able, I should help him
through this crisis, regardless of the outcome.
What I do know is that I care deeply for this person: he's a
brilliant, fantastic, special man. I respect enormously his efforts
to work his way through this; it's not an easy path for either of
us. But, ultimately, I can't be with him if he's gay, and figuring
out whether he is could take a very long time. And if, as his shrink
says, he is a sex addict, there's no quick-fix for that either.
Sometimes I think that he must be gay to have done what he's done;
other days I would stake my life on him being straight. But I never
doubt his love for me or mine for him. And that's the dilemma: if I
walk away now, I will be walking away from the deepest love I have
ever had or ever given but if I stay, what price will I pay if he
is not who he says he is?
The author has used a pseudonym.
Gay sex: the facts
About two million gay men and lesbian women are married to straight
partners in the UK, according to the Straight Spouse Network
Fifteen per cent of people have engaged in some form of same-sex
experience.
Debate over this article can be found here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,564-2079826,00.html
The article originally posted here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-2080393,00.html
potential husband's interest in sex with men. Some interesting comments and debate are also provided at the link to the site below. Several of them don't even consider the idea of bisexuality.
(Sorry for the long post, I was afraid to just link to it. Sometimes these sites only let you read a story for a few days)
Source: London Times
Date: March 13th 2006
Author: Iris Scott
Title: Should I stay or should I go?
Days before her wedding, our correspondent was shocked to learn that
her fiancé frequented gay saunas. So how did she react?
Read the comments of other Times readers and then send us your own
I never thought that I'd have much in common with a Liberal Democrat
MP or his wife. But when Mark Oaten was forced to resign from the
party leadership race in January this year after a scandal about gay
prostitutes, I found myself in the surprising position of feeling a
huge amount of sympathy, especially for his wife.
Nobody knows how many British men in heterosexual relationships are
actually gay or bisexual, but it's likely to be significant. And if
we did know, it might well rock our heterosexual, marriage-centred
society to the core.
I was due to get married recently. I thought that I'd finally found
the right man. One of the best things about him was that he seemed
really happy with his life: he loved his job, had normal hobbies
that he was passionate about, had a normal family, was solvent, had
never married so had no baggage. He was even tall and handsome. So
what was the catch? For there was one. And it was a big one.
Six short days before 50 friends and I were due to fly to France for
the wedding, I found out what that catch was. You have to imagine
how ordinary this scene was and so how surreal what happened
was . . .
It's Friday night, we've just finished dinner in a restaurant and
are about to ramble smugly home for our last weekend as boyfriend
and girlfriend. Mr Normal stood up and said he was running to the
loo before we left. As he got up and walked away from the table, he
dropped a business card on the floor. I reached under the table to
pick it up and noticed something scrawled across the back the name
of a sauna parlour and a telephone number.
It's odd how your brain works in these situations you think of
everything except the obvious answer. I picked up his mobile, which
was lying on the table, and scanned through the list of dialled
calls and there it was . . . at half past six yesterday morning.
He came back to the table. I asked him what the number was. He said
he didn't know. I knew then that it was serious but I still didn't
realise how serious. I began to think about pre-wedding hookers
(worse than pre-wedding jitters). But after a long and painful
argument outside on the street he suddenly stopped, became dead
calm, said he was going to tell me and that it was bad. And it
was. "It's a gay sauna I visited when I went to Liverpool," he said.
Liverpool was yesterday, so eight days before our wedding he'd got
up at 6am to go to have sex with faceless men? I couldn't feel
anything. I was freefalling, beyond shock, but before I could get my
head around that bombshell he lobbed another: "And for the past two
years I've been going to a place near the office called Pink
Fountain." Pink Fountain? How could you go anywhere called Pink
Fountain? "Where is it?" I asked pointlessly.
"In one of the old market towns, one stop down the motorway." He
loves history.
"When do you go?" "Lunchtimes." It's funny how you never think that
people will cheat on you during their lunchbreak.
Several desperate hours later I sat alone in my bed and began the
task of texting everyone due to fly to France, telling them that the
wedding was cancelled. It was nearly 5am on Saturday by the time I'd
finished, but even so calls started coming in.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I'm exhausted exhausted with
explaining, and answering prurient questions (not that I blame
people for their curiosity). Most of all, I'm exhausted trying to
understand what he's trying to tell me. We've fitted three years of
talking into these short foggy weeks, but I don't understand any
better than I did on that Friday night. After a year and a half
together I feel I hardly know this man at all. He is adamant that
he's not gay, concedes that he might be bisexual but says that he
doesn't need it in his life and wants only me. He has just started
seeing a therapist, who thinks that it's probably not a matter of
homosexuality, but a sexual compulsion motivated by a fear of
intimacy and women.
He has a whole list of bad experiences, starting with a bullying
mother who made him withdraw into himself as a child and ending with
his last big relationship, in which his girlfriend manipulated his
kindness and kept control of the relationship by using sex as a
weapon.
These experiences, he insists, have increased his fear of women and
sent him running into the arms of strange blokes. It started about
three years ago when, he says, his previous girlfriend started
withholding sex: he'd begun looking at straight internet porn, then
gay, then chat rooms, then female prostitutes and, finally, about
two years ago, a gay sauna. When I asked "Why a gay sauna, why not
prostitutes?" he said: "Because you have to be civilised with a
prostitute, say hello and stuff. In a gay sauna you pay your money
at the door, it's anonymous and you don't have to speak to anyone.
It's sex without emotion."
He has tried so hard to help me to recover from the blinding blow he
struck me. He has taken a serious amount of verbal abuse from me,
copious amounts of crying and wailing, says that he has no urge to
go back to the sauna and wants to get us back on track. But has he
really changed, was it all just a big bad mid-life experiment, is it
something that he has any option to change? When you find yourself
in such a situation you have to ask yourself some big questions:
what is love, what is sex, what is important to you in a
relationship? It's then that you realise how little we really think
for ourselves, how much we allow our expectations of life to be fed
to us. Something like this challenges everything that you believe
about yourself, about other people and about what is truly valuable
in life.
Inevitably, one of the things you think about a lot is sex, the
meaning of sex, your expectations of sex, what's normal, and is
there such a thing as normal? And, of course, what defines a person
as homosexual? The confusing thing about Mr Normal was that he
seemed very interested in women we'd had rows in the past about e-
mail and text relationships that he had maintained with other women
but I'd never suspected that there were other men, too.
Perhaps I should have listened to my favourite Bing Crosby CD more
carefully and not messed with Mr In-between. Was it all, me
included, just a cover for a gay man struggling to be straight? He
wouldn't be the first: a survey in the US in 1990 found that 4 per
cent of married men have had a homosexual relationship within the
past five years and I don't imagine the figure would be any lower
here.
When I went to inquire about an HIV test I asked the doctor whether
he met many women in my position. "Oh yes," he said, trying to be
sympathetic. "People like you are ten a penny. In fact, a lot of
women forgive it, live with it and I see them only if the condom
breaks when they're having sex with their husbands."
But even if Mr Normal decides that he is bisexual or even
straight could I ever forgive his betrayal? A close male friend of
mine said I was looking at it wrongly, that it wasn't about betrayal
and forgiveness. "The trouble with women is that they think
everything is about them. They love martyring themselves. If their
boyfriends cheat on them, they think `What's wrong with me?' But it
has nothing to do with them. Most blokes need a lot of sex, and want
a wide variety of sex. When they cheat it's about them and their
weakness, it's not about you."
I don't agree. It is about you, it's about the fact that your
partner goes ahead and does something that he doesn't need, but
wants, knowing full well that if you find out you'll be devastated.
In other words, he doesn't care about you enough to forgo something
for your sake. Regardless of where you fall within the straight-
bisexual-gay continuum, I would have said that betrayal is betrayal.
But having talked night and day with this man, I have come to the
conclusion that there might be an exception to this rule: the person
who is truly in denial. A person in denial can't betray you, because
he doesn't know what the truth is himself. If he betrays anyone, he
betrays himself, and by comparison you're a minor casualty. Unless
you know someone in denial, you probably have no idea of the power
it can hold over a person. An alcoholic who is truly in denial does
not lie to you when he tells you he does not have a problem with
booze, he really believes he hasn't got one. He's running away from
what he sees as the awful truth of himself so fast that it has
become a blur.
And, clearly, a 40-year-old man who suddenly takes up gay sex but
maintains that he is heterosexual is not facing up to something in
himself. It doesn't necessarily mean that he is gay; people use sex
for all kinds of purposes other than sexual gratification: power,
money, self-loathing, self-esteem, inclusion, fear of love, fear of
not being loved. But can I, should I, forgive him and wait for him
to figure out why he was doing it? We live in selfish times, and
forgiveness, it seems, is often equated with weakness. I have felt
the caustic judgment of friends who have no experience of a
situation like this one, but who have confidently dismissed us
both: "He's obviously gay, and you're both in denial." Others take
the position that love, sex and sense of self are far more
complicated than allowed for in the "three-boxes-fits-all" view of
life. They say that if I love him and I 'm able, I should help him
through this crisis, regardless of the outcome.
What I do know is that I care deeply for this person: he's a
brilliant, fantastic, special man. I respect enormously his efforts
to work his way through this; it's not an easy path for either of
us. But, ultimately, I can't be with him if he's gay, and figuring
out whether he is could take a very long time. And if, as his shrink
says, he is a sex addict, there's no quick-fix for that either.
Sometimes I think that he must be gay to have done what he's done;
other days I would stake my life on him being straight. But I never
doubt his love for me or mine for him. And that's the dilemma: if I
walk away now, I will be walking away from the deepest love I have
ever had or ever given but if I stay, what price will I pay if he
is not who he says he is?
The author has used a pseudonym.
Gay sex: the facts
About two million gay men and lesbian women are married to straight
partners in the UK, according to the Straight Spouse Network
Fifteen per cent of people have engaged in some form of same-sex
experience.
Debate over this article can be found here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,564-2079826,00.html
The article originally posted here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-2080393,00.html