My Polyamorous Marriage (To A Man) Helped Me Accept Being A Lesbian

I am definitely a lesbian. I have definitely been a lesbian my whole life, but I didn’t know it until quite recently.

I officially “came out” to myself after months of depression I hadn’t seen the likes of in over a decade.

I was distancing myself from my girlfriend Gabriel. I was floundering to save my marriage, which I feared was unsalvageable. I'd spent months internalizing, trying to figure out what, exactly, was wrong with me.

Why wasn’t I having sex with my husband? More importantly, why didn’t I miss it?

Any attempts to rekindle the passion in our relationship died before the embers could even catch. I even gave him the task of learning how to get me off without using his penis — something which could have been a fun and experimental a way for him to learn new things. But he neglected the prompt, finally trying once half-heartedly, and went right back to expecting sex to be the same old routine it had been before.

I didn’t want to admit it, but the nagging thought kept returning to me: it isn’t the sex I was missing, but the closeness.

I still wanted to be close to Ark (my husband), but I just wasn't interested in his genitals — at all. Sex fizzles out in a lot of marriages (so I’m told by television and magazines), but this didn’t feel like the “normal” decline in sexual activity. I was still a highly sexual being. I was just a highly sexual being who was no longer turned on by the prospect of heterosexual sex.

Sex with Gabriel was a different story. Sex with a woman is something entirely different in general. ​

With a woman, my sex drive kicks into seventh gear. Was it just because my relationship with Gabriel was newer? Was it because the sex was explosive, unpredictable, experimental?

It soon came to me that a large part of my unhappiness was being caused by Gabriel’s dependence on me.

I needed her to back off. In short, I realized that I could not give her everything she needed in a relationship and have everything I needed to be a happy person. I had to end it. She could not grow while clinging to me, and I could not breathe.

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With my sexual outlet gone, my lack of sex with Ark became even more obvious to me.

I wondered why I didn’t miss it. I still loved every other aspect of our relationship. The illusion of our marriage crumbling proved to be false — a phantom land mine planted by my own thoughts during my depression.

Ark loved me just as much as ever and was continuing to evolve in our polyamorous relationship in ways I was still apparently too wounded to see. He had opened up and was finally willing to embrace our relationship as it was, but I was too busy looking at the pieces from the past and trying to fit them all together. I love my husband, but I still needed further introspection.

I guess I realized it slowly. The puzzle of my sexuality came together in achingly tiny bits. The first time I thought to myself, “Maybe I’m a lesbian,” I thought it jokingly. But the more I thought about it, the clearer it became, and the more sense my life made up to that point.

I was never interested in sex. The way other girls looked at boys and would fawn over them — “Ooh, Johnny is so cute! Look at that ass!” — didn’t make any sense to me. I dated boys who I came to love, but my love had nothing to do with sex.

The first time I saw a penis, I was repulsed by it.

My experiences with oral sex were awkward and uncomfortable. When I finally lost my virginity at eighteen, the part I enjoyed was the closeness to the person I loved. It was a special moment, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I figured maybe sex and penises and ejaculate were things I’d just get used to.

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I figured everyone felt the same way at first — totally grossed out by the idea of putting a penis in your mouth. Only, I never really got used to it. I just accepted it as part of a normal life.

I think that’s basically the root of everything here: I grew up assuming I was heterosexual. I mean, everyone else I knew was straight, or at the very least bi-curious, so why wouldn’t I be straight?

I later admitted to my sister that I liked girls. My first long-term crush was on a female friend of mine from elementary school.

Then, later, in high school, I harbored a crush on a girl from England. Aging into adulthood, I began to amass a collection of Penthouse and Playboy, and probably hundreds of pictures of sexy girls of all sorts on my computer.

Girls were a mystery to me. My relationships were years-long and with men, one basically starting right after the other (even overlapping in one instance).

I didn’t grow up in the kind of household where you’d be afraid to be gay. ​

I always knew that if I brought home a girlfriend, Mom would be happy because I was happy. My sister didn’t care what I did, either. I just never even considered it. Then at 26 I was and married to a man I wasn’t willing to lose, suddenly started considering it. I was terrified.

One of the good “rules of poly” I’ve seen is that if you’re afraid to tell your partner something, you need to tell them. I’d been brutally honest and open with Ark up to this point, and now was not a time to start changing that. I'd discussed my fears and feelings with him thoroughly, probably too thoroughly, so when I finally did say, “I think I’m a lesbian,” his reaction was something like, “Well, yeah, I kinda figured.”

We have the kind of relationship and understanding of each other where he realizes that my sexuality isn't related to any fault or shortcoming of his own. It isn’t his fault he’s a man, and I love him no less for it.

There are a lot of resources out there for the straight spouse, and a lot of them say that “it’s hard to get support during this time.” What I didn’t find was a lot of information on couples where one of them comes out gay — but they stay together.

This view is usually speculated upon as something that’s difficult and unfair.

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It’s said that the gay partner usually was cheating with someone of the same sex or hiding their sexuality. This wasn’t true in my case and I refuse to believe I’m the only one out there who’s been honest the whole time. My sexuality wasn’t just a self-discovery, it was a discovery for both of us. The decisions we made, we made together as a couple for the well-being of our relationship both as a couple and as individuals.

In some relationships, it seems this is an unavoidable end.

For me and Ark, it was the beginning of a stronger, unique relationship. Sure, folks look askance at us. They ask probing questions. They don’t believe us when we say, yes, we’re okay.

Nobody has to take sides, though. He and I are in this together. ‘Till death do we part.