Owning my own cruelty

It had been a week of migraines and anxiety. However there were things that I wanted to talk about that came up in our counselling on Wednesday and I could not put them off – after all, the real work in therapy happens between the sessions.

I started by talking about things I’d said was, way back about sex. The reasons why I said them, well there are reasons but they don’t make what I said right. What had I said? Things like “your libido is abnormal” and “you only feel love through sex because of what happened to you”. These words were not at all kind – they were cruel.

Maybe there does need to be some explanation: I was still a kid at my twenty-three. I love being fucked, but back in the day I didn’t know about douching, so it was sometimes messy, and always becomes uncomfortable after too long – my husband has incredible sexual stamina, which sometimes means that he struggles to reach climax.

Even when there wasn’t penetration, which he says didn’t happen that often, I became anxious during sex at night because I had to get up in the morning (he didn’t). Sometimes he’d notice that is wasn’t fully present, or that it seemed rushed. I’m a conflict – and criticism – averse person, so when criticised I’ll modify behaviour to avoid the criticism – which meant the end of nighttime sex.

The nasty things I said were because I felt pressure. A grown up would have managed to say why they felt the way they did and discussed it. I lashed out and hurt the one I loved to avoid my own discomfort.

That’s pretty nasty, isn’t it?

Hiding polyamory

The husband remains angry that I hid his I felt about relationships; that I don’t really believe in monogamy.

Although I have lived monogamously with my husband, it wasn’t really a conscious choice, it was more a lack of imagination, an all excess of fear, and a lack of courage.

As a gay man (as I saw myself back then), I’d been terrorised by the AIDS crisis and felt that monogamy was the the only way to survive. I’d also been brought up with religious views on marriage, which I tried to live, even though I wasn’t religious myself.

I had therefore got it into my head that monogamy was the only way a relationship could work.

Finally, I had a lack of imagination and courage. Being gay immediately means that standard gendered roles in a relationship are out the window – we get to divvy up tasks as we see fit. Modern straight couples are also more creative than their older counterparts, increasingly divvying up the tasks in the relationship based on discussion rather than assumption. These days, one of the ways that gay relationships are more imaginative is in how they sometimes reimagine what fidelity means stop that it means honesty rather than resentfully not sleeping around. I lacked the courage to even discuss that with my husband when we first started our together in the late 1990s.

Our discussion about honesty in relationships naturally led us to another difficult topic: intimacy.

Initiating sex

As conversations will, it drifted into other areas.

My husband asked why haven’t I initiated sex with him. He said that he’d tried flirting with me via pictures and videos. I’d rather be led with sex because there feels like there’s too much anger towards me for me to feel safe and welcome to initiate sex with him.

He questioned whether I have a libido, since I am on quite a low dose of testosterone. I do have a libido (I masturbate several times a week).

I said that I communicated with hugs and cuddles, which communicate reassurance – sometimes these are the only things I can did – especially when words are just not working. It’s funny, because he says they don’t mean anything to him, yet he misses them if I don’t do them.

They also work two ways, not only do I use them to give me reassurance, but they also do reassure me.

Owing

He asked “What’s the point? Maybe we are finished.” He didn’t stop long enough to explore that. I know that this is much on his mind, it is in my mind too.

I’m tried to explain what I’d said in counselling about “owing him”. It means that whether we decide to separate or not, that I know that he needs time to say the things that I have never given him the space to say. It could heal us, him speaking his truth to me and me actually hearing it – or it could break us, but I believe that I need to do this for him.

It hurts, it’s painful, and it often leaves me feeling like shit.

I was hurt when he asked “What’s changed?” And said that everything was still on my terms. The only difference is that I know say that it’s ASD and accept that I have rules and limits rather than denying them. That feels like a bloody big change to me!

Anyway, I’m too tired and my brain is full of glue.

I gave him a hug and said that I was giving him something that didn’t mean anything to him. He said that I am was feeling sorry for myself. I denied it at the time, but he’s probably right. I don’t know how I’m expected to feel after the kind of conversation we’ve just had.