Positive Thinking and Success

One of the challenges couples face is identifying why and how some marriages proceed through the initial crises after discovery or disclosure of their mixed-orientation marriage and emerge with a joyous attitude about what their marriages have become, whereas others do not.

When we love someone, we want that person to have a happy life, and there is no reason why this can’t be so for both the husband and wife no matter what the dynamics of the sexual orientation. It is all in our thinking. We can have fun in our mixed-orientation marriages. We can learn to laugh and make them amazing relationships full of mutual respect and joy, or we can wallow in our misery. Compersion, the state of being happy when our partner is happy, appears to be something that a relationship has to evolve into, and it is an ideal that I am glad we found. I hope you can too. It’s not easy in the beginning, but I know what goal I chose and you can too. It requires positive thinking, communication, and trust both in ourselves to do the right thing and in our spouses that they will do the right thing.

My wife and I love each other more than ever, even as I lead my life as openly bisexual. How do we get our heads and hearts into this magical place where we experience mutual happiness for each other as we each pursue some of our own interests? Why does my wife feel genuine joy for my happiness as a bisexual when other wives struggle and weep in agony? Same event, different reaction. If we have a positive attitude and a belief that events are a good thing, then we have pleasant reactions to those events.

Several years ago as we were working out mutually acceptable ways to celebrate my bisexuality I went  away on a five-day vacation to a tropical paradise in Florida. Nothing so unusual about that, except I went away by myself, and that tropical paradise was a men’s gay clothing-optional guest house. It was an amazing few days of “I understands,” simply enjoying sharing stories with others like me. Some might say, ”Who would let their husband do that?” and, “Wasn’t your wife a wreck with worry?” No, she wasn’t; my wife was genuinely happy that I was having fun and getting some time to celebrate my bisexuality by sharing stories and lives with men who understood what living with same sex attraction is about. Clothing optional resorts mean some of us were nude, but social nudity is not sex, and this was a harmless way in my wife’s eyes for me to celebrate my bisexuality.

When  I return home from my trips like that I repay the gift my wife gave me of a few days being me, by being an amazing husband, cooking dinner every night, shopping, and making sure the honey-do list gets done after only being asked once. This has the effect of creating an “aha” moment. The connection is not lost: let a husband live life as the person he was born as, and an amazing, wonderful husband is the result.

So what kind of marriage lets a spouse go away for a five-day vacation by themselves? It surprised me to find out that a study by the travel site TripAdvisor in July of 2012 showed that 59% of married couples have taken separate vacations. Subsequent articles have expressed support for the concept. If a husband loves golf and the wife does not. it does not make sense to me that they should go on a golfing vacation together. A wife who is fascinated by genealogy will have a lot more fun if she doesn’t have to worry about her husband’s being bored. And so it is with the opportunity to make a trip to Provincetown or a conference on sexual orientation or just laying out in the sun around a pool with other gay and bisexual men. At the end of the day, my spending time with my bisexual and gay friends is just another special interest not shared by my straight wife. When I return, our relationship has a richness that the synergy of outside interests can bring to any couple’s life.

As our mixed-orientation marriage has evolved we have added other mutually acceptable more sexual ways to celebrate my bi side  but these trips to bi/gay clothing optional resorts continue to be an  important part of my  journey. If the couple has trust about respecting boundaries, then it should be a happy moment, one where we are grateful for the opportunity. It is especially important that the straight spouse also find something fun and rewarding to do; this is no time to scrub the kitchen floor.

I am not sure how to help readers reach the same magical place we have except to keep trying, keep tweaking, and keep talking with the right amount of laughter and a we-can-do-this attitude.

What If We Could Do it Over?

A common question among those of us who have gone through the coming-out process after twenty, thirty, or more years of marriage is, knowing what we know now, would we still have gotten married, and what would we have done differently? The various answers to this question may be helpful to the many young people who have a chance to enter into a mixed-orientation marriage with better understanding of what is involved. Too often, I hear the advice to simply run in the opposite direction as fast as your feet will carry you. The true answer is not so simple. Although many existing mixed-orientation marriages end in divorce, it is important to remember that a significant number of them are wonderful, thriving relationships.

About six months before I was married, I sat my wife-to-be down at the kitchen table, and we had the talk, a review of the whole laundry list of our mutual hopes and dreams. Where do you want to live? Near the coast. How many kids do you want? Two. I’m bisexual and have had sex with just as many men as woman, but I am choosing you! Without missing a beat, she said, “That’s nice, so long as you are choosing me, doesn’t matter to me, we will just put that part of your life behind us now won’t we.”

As those who have read my story know, not so fast, it was not that simple. My bisexuality was not a choice, and it was not up to me to choose any one gender. That’s not who I am. That said, I had found my soul mate and my best friend.

What I would have done differently knowing what I know now is, instead of the mistaken choice of one or the other, I would have said, “I am a bisexual, and we need to figure out a way to celebrate that part of me within our marriage because I can’t choose, it’s not a choice, a bisexual is who I am.” In the throes of love, I probably still would have promised the world, but again, hindsight is terrific. Doing it over, I would say we need to be prepared for a marriage that doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Together, we will need to work out what it means to be married to a bisexual. We will work it out together so it’s a solution we can both be happy with, but I know that there will need to be some way for me to celebrate who I am. I need to live my life, not repress and stifle who I am. That is the key difference. I might not have known exactly what my needs were, but I needed to be prepared that I might not fit in the nice, neat box of what most believe a marriage should look like. My wife-to-be would at least need to be aware that openness to an alternative way of living would probably be essential to our future success.

The difficulty, of course, is that often a mixed-orientation marriage needs to go through a process involving several years of learning and adjustments of core belief systems. I have already written at length about the need for a meeting of the minds and about needs for acceptance and a way to satisfy our diverse sexual needs. When the gap between the two partners is huge, one needs to consider the reality of this meeting of the minds. It requires a lot of work and a couple in a marriage of twenty years may find a greater incentive to make it work than a couple just starting out. However, sometimes a couple is meant to be together, and walking away from a relationship because of a mismatch in sexual orientation may be mistakenly abandoning an otherwise amazing lifetime of happiness. So a hard discussion about a meeting of the minds is necessary. Without it, the decision to simply marry or run in the other direction is simply repeating the mistakes of those of us who came before us.

Of course, this wasn’t just a decision for me, and a more open discussion would have also given my wife a chance to review the real consequences of marrying me and make a more informed decision about making that commitment. Recently, I heard a discussion about our partners’ being the sum of many aspects, some we adore and some we could do without. We all have our idiosyncrasies, yet when the good outweighs our quirks, a successful relationship is made. When I thank my wife for accepting me as a bisexual, she replies, “Thank you for accepting me.” She is not bisexual, but her reply simply acknowledges her differences and the fact I love her anyway.

In answer to the opening question, we would do it over in a heartbeat. I married my best friend, and I am still married to my best friend, and even after 41 years of being together, there is no one I would rather spend my days with. What a tragedy if my wife had decided to run in the other direction.

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