To want to marry a man even though I am gay

[strawberryplants]

I just want to be normal so much.

I don't think it's sexism, I think this threads been overlooked for what is actually is - a person who is desperately lonely and looking for love and intimacy. She's just sharing her feelings, I don't think it's in any way an actual option for OP - she just seems frustrated that it seems easier to create a heterosexual relationship and would kill for that kind of easy life. I could be wrong though.

Mathanxiety I was recently catapulted into your boat out of the blue and I'm not coping. Reading your post that it's still negatively affecting your life after all this time just fills me with horror. I too feel like he has stolen my life from me and I'm just kidding myself that I can survive this and salvage my life, aren't I? I have so little hope for the future.

Please, please, I beg you OP don't willingly do this to a human being

Yes, math you have. It went a bit like this. You and I think other women with similar awful experiences were explaining why you would not consider a bisexual man, and bi women pointed out they'd never cheated. You thought this wasn't as relevant as they thought it was.

FWIW, I thought you had a point at the time about bisexual women rushing in to say that they'd never cheated, and therefore that invalidated yours and others' observations about a subgroup of bisexual men. But equally, I think you needn't extrapolate those men's behaviour on to this woman's. There are lots of men, straight and bisexual, who think women in their lives are mere adjuncts. I'm not convinced there are anywhere as near as many women seeing men as mere foils.

The OP asked very bluntly 'AIBU To marry a man even though I am gay'.

Er, nope. Look up. Hell, read my post. I used italics an' everyfink.

Whatever she originally posted, she has clarified more than once now. Misreading it initially? Fine. Continuing to lambast the OP in a very personal manner more than 24 hours later? Not so fine.

This all reminds me of the time a friend of mine got to the end of her tether during her degree and announced she was going to drop out of uni and start a llama farm. She knows next to nothing about llamas, of course, and hadn't even found out what they ate.

Now I could infer that that means she doesn't place any value on animal welfare, and judge her accordingly. But no. She was just very, very frustrated and feeling convinced she couldn't complete her degree and thinking she wanted a completely different life just then. The llama thing was making a point.

If she had seriously been contemplating a llama farm, she would then have considered whether it was fair on the llamas to have such an unexperienced owner and concluded the answer was 'absobloominglutely not fair on the poor things'. However, as they were hypothetical llamas, she focused her emotional energy on her needs going forward. As did we.

Good thing too; to this day, she has no llama farm. In fact, I'll bet you a fiver she's never even seen one in real life.

OP I think a lot of gay people have been where you are right now. I know I certainly wanted to be normal and like everybody else.

Easier said than done but you need to learn to like yourself. PPs have suggested counselling which probably would be really helpful.

I'd suggest getting involved in the LGBT community as much as you can. Is your local Pride event coming up? In my area there are loads of events in the run up to pride as well as the parade. Making gay friends who are married and have kids but have been who you are can be really helpful. I didn't have much luck with OLD either I met DW at a lesbian group meet up.

It might be a cliché but I promise... it gets better. Much better.

To PPs with gay ex husbands attacking the OP. I understand that your situation was horrendously hurtful but you aren't helping.

When I was in OP's shoes I already felt overwhelmed by guilt and shame that I wasn't like everyone else.

I think by this point in the thread she's understood your points. Stop heaping guilt onto someone who already feels shit about themselves.

Sort of agree with math
We can use any hypothetical situation to avoid dealing with our own true self, but that can also severely fuck others up.
Men who don’t really want children but go along with it and vice versa. People who aren’t true to themselves and in the process of not being true to themselves let others believe that they’re “together” in whatever choices they jointly made in life.
And then when the truth comes out that the other person never really wanted what they went along with, it’s utterly devastating for the one who’s been decieved.
So actually op. You have to be true to yourself, not just for yourself, but for everyone else too.

We can use any hypothetical situation to avoid dealing with our own true self, but that can also severely fuck others up.

Do you mean that the post title was triggering for people?

Because there's stuff I don't want to read about that other people are discussing on MN, but I just won't click on those posts.

@LonginesPrime
Not particularly, but I think a lot of people hide their true self. And it damages a lot of people in the process.

You could not like eggs. But then you know that everyone likes eggs and you should like eggs, but you think you’ll be normal if you like eggs. Then you meet someone and they like eggs so you say you like eggs and they think YAY I’ve found someone who likes eggs and it’s all perfect for them and you all eat a lot of eggs!! And then you turn around and say years later, sorry I just don’t like eggs, I’ve never liked eggs, I just wanted to like eggs because I wanted to feel like everyone else that likes eggs, so all our egg liking wasn’t really egg liking, it was me trying to like eggs when I don’t like them at all.

Might trivialise it slightly, but hopefully it gets my point across

Yes, I understand what you're saying about invalidating someone else's experiences and what they perceived as a shared experience that actually wasn't.

I still fail to see how discussing a hypothetical situation hurts anyone.

Plus, setting aside the imaginary husband debate for a moment, if someone wants to hide their true self for whatever reason, that's their prerogative. How can anyone else judge better than them what that person's true self is anyway?

P.S. The word 'eggs' looks really weird to me now.

Also, in your egg scenario, is not liking eggs something that used to be illegal and is only just now becoming socially acceptable in the mainstream?

Do people who don't like eggs experience internal struggles and have people historically tried to force people who don't like eggs into eating eggs?

Do people who don't like eating eggs live in fear of strangers following them home once they find out?

Are there male egg-eaters who get off on seeing female people who don't like eggs going about their business not liking eggs together and make lewd comments to them as they're trying not to eat eggs?

Are there lots of insults in general usage derived from the hatred for people who don't eat eggs?

Do the rare people who don't eat eggs only really want to date other people who don't eat eggs?

Can you not see why someone might get to the point where occasionally they say 'FFS, wouldn't it just be so much easier to eat a fucking egg?'

@LonginesPrime
Haha! Sorry I’ve ruined eggs for you now!

I think it’s fine to discuss a hypothetical situation, but the op must understand that others will then give their hypothetical answers to any hypothetical outcome!!!

Ergo. It could happen. It has happened to others it might be hypothetical now, but that could change. And the op needs to take all of that on board

And yes I totally see your point!
I agree, but I also understand that other people who have been badly hurt would be upset with her potentially cavalier thoughts on egg eating!!

Ha, that's ok - I don't like eggs anyway!!

I'm gay. And yes you'd be unreasonable. However I've suffered a lot of prejudice too and I understand.

Of course you can't marry a man if you're a lesbian woman. you would both be living a lie. That's not fair on him but you know that.

anyway you can't just 'find' a man to marry you... that would entail entering onto a relationship, carrying it on for a few years until he felt it was at the point he wanted to propose. Would you carry on that charade really?

Being unreasonable or not is neither here nor there. That's totally besides the point
A marriage to a man would never work.
You're gay. That's it. You have no choice but to embrace it and find the women you love and that you will be happy with, because She's out there, somewhere.

OP you need to decideif if you are gay bi or hetosexual
Do you know you can fall in love, get married and have a family no matter which?
I don't quite understand where you are coming from.

No, I know you don’t and I know some others don’t and I think the problem is I’m not entirely sure either

I know a lot of people think (and possibly for some this is true) that meeting a woman is going to be exactly the same as meeting a man - bars, online dating and so on.

For me, it isn’t. I tend to fall for women slowly. The physical attraction is secondary to the emotional. So I don’t ‘fancy’ people. Objectively, I see women and men I think are very attractive but perversely a lot of the time the women I think are beautiful I wouldn’t want to be intimate with, just not my type I suppose.

Online as far as I can see is primarily very young women between 19and 22. It just isn’t very well populated. And this is all very new for me. It’s something I’ve repressed for a long, long time. With the disclaimer that no men have been harmed in the repression of my feelings

If - if - I met a woman and we wanted to have a family together there would still need to be discussions around who carried the child and so on. I want a child but I want to experience pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding. It’s all confusing, there is a lot to take in. And I don’t know where to start. If I was straight, it would be simpler. And perhaps if I was straight I’d have met someone ten, twenty years ago and be happily married with a couple of kids by now.

LonginesPrime
Are there lots of insults in general usage derived from the hatred for people who don't eat eggs?

You haven't spent much time on forums where gay married men discuss their wives, have you?

Maybe you are not familiar with the term 'fish and chips' referring to wives and children? 'Fish' of course comes from a misogynistic perception of women's natural vaginal odour.

You might get to the point where you might say life would be easier if only you liked eggs.

But someone who has rejected out of hand the suggestions of how to meet others who don't like eggs, says she hates the fact that she doesn't like eggs and posts of her problem with eggs in the context of the question (direct quote btw, JamieVardys - and dropping the egg terminology) AIBU To want to marry a man even though I am gay^ seems more than a little determined to do this actual deed.

She has not clarified 'more then once', Jamie, that all of this is pie in the sky. She has never definitively stated that she has reconsidered this option she has reserved for herself.

In fact, when pressed on the topic she was clear that it's possible and workable, in her head:

Allegorical Tue 26-Jun-18 20:45:34
It’s not really fair on the man though
Is it? Don’t they deserve someone that genuinely loves them and isn’t lying to them. It would be a very
Selfish thing to do.

strawberryplants Tue 26-Jun-18 20:46:04
I think you can love someone still

(Note that there there are no angry remarks here about the man being hypothetical. She has every good intention, so it's ok to speculate. Point out the real horror of what this marriage would do to a man and suddenly he is hypothetical.)

I think you needn't extrapolate those men's behaviour on to this woman's. There are lots of men, straight and bisexual, who think women in their lives are mere adjuncts. I'm not convinced there are anywhere as near as many women seeing men as mere foils.

So this is payback? Men have oppressed women, men hurt and abuse women so it doesn't matter if a man is collateral damage?

And numbers matter? How? Are you suggesting that the pain of those men who become foils is not something to worry about since there are probably not that many out there?

Deceit and using people are the same, and equally unacceptable, whether men do it or whether women do it. The fact of being part of an oppressed minority that is reviled in some quarters even today does not give someone carte blanche to treat others badly.

The end doesn't justify the means.

How many times are we going to have this exchange math

This is not about your ex husband

I know no women who met their husbands via bars or online dating. They met them at work or in volunteering groups or in classes they went to, either third level or classes while working. They met them through friends of friends.

I know plenty of single women who have never married - women I went to school with and several cousins of mine who never met Mr Right. I know one woman who married three years ago at the ripe old age of 50, having met a man who lived less than ten miles from her when she was in her twenties. I know one who was strung along and strung along and ended up wasting her best years on a man who dumped her and married his secretary. I know women who have struggled with infertility, and women who found they were disqualified from adoption for various reasons - finances, home, age difference of the partners..

And of course I know women who are divorced and women who are miserable but nowhere near divorce yet.

There are no guarantees even for straight women.

You seem to have some fixed ideas about straight romance and relationships that are not necessarily accurate.

Wrt the prospect of discussing pregnancy, your desire to breastfeed, and division of parenting roles in a lesbian relationship - relationships involve negotiation no matter who is involved.

I am going to keep on posting about the pain suffered by spouses who have been deceived and used, strawberryplants. I am not only talking about myself here. I am posting about an experience that has affected thousands. You don't want to consider other people, and I am here to remind you they are real.

Yes, I know that you are. It isn’t helping me, it isn’t helping anything, but you carry on. Because after all, no one else ever has been deceived in a relationship. Ever!