This is Joe.
I’m being a bit raw and open here. Meaning that I’m admitting things that I don’t think are flattering of me. As I age, I’m trying/wanting to be more genuine. As the facade of the old LDS me drops away, I’m trying to discover who I really am and who I want to be as a person. I rarely like the real me that it’s in the mirror. My wife tells me that she wants the truth, but I don’t know if I want the truth.
The truth is that she fulfills the majority of my desires from any one person, but she doesn’t fulfill all. No one person possible could. However she was raised to (falsely) believe that a wife should be EVERYTHING to her husband and that he should want for nothing from anyone else. She now rationally knows that this is not possible and is a burden that she should have never believed in, but she’s having a hard time breaking herself of that notion, and when she falls back into old ways of thinking she resumes feeling like a failure if I want to have sex with other women. And I do want to have sex with other women. In the last few months, she’s let me have sex with three different women without her being present. And we’re all doing great! (One was with the woman’s husband present.) Christy has told me that I can go have sex with that woman again. That woman invited me to have sex with her next week without her husband present. I checked with her husband and he’s great with it.
The other challenge is that Christy has a minor disability that occasionally keeps her from being as physically active as she wants to be. It can interfere at unpredictable times. In the past, I felt like she was sometimes using it as an excuse to avoid uncomfortable situations, and I feel bad for thinking that. (I can’t think of any examples of that happening so it’s probably not true, just my perception.) We were supposed to do something sexy last weekend, but her health got in the way. My challenge has been/is that I not be a mopey sack when that happens. I need to believe that she’s really trying to do her best and that she’s not using it as an excuse. When I mope, she then quietly gets mad and is less willing to accommodate me. We then get into a viscous cycle of digging in. I need to assume she’s doing her best, and I need to accept what she does.
