Husband came out as bisexual

[TARDISmum]

Been with DH 12 years and married for 6.5 years and recently told me he is bisexual.

It's just so odd.

I know it doesn't change who he is. It doesn't change what it was about him that I fell in love with but it feels like the landscape of our marriage has changed.

I want to be supportive but just don't know where to start. Where would you start with that.

I don't think that you understand what sexual orientation is.

If a straIght woman looks at a strange man and finds him arousing, she doesn't know whether he is gay, straight, or bi but she still finds him arousing because she is straight and he's her type.

Not telling a partner you’re raging biphobe isn’t lying by omission though, funny that.

The biphobia on MN is worse than the racism, which is pretty impressive considering how many posters are proudly and aggressively racist.

@Simonjt LOL 👏

Are you always this obtuse. Obviously I am referring to situations where the person already knows the other person’s sexual orientation. Let’s compare it to, say, finding someone attractive then finding out that they’re a meat eater when you’re vegan, or vote Conservative when you’re a Labour voter, I’m pretty sure you might not find them quite so attractive. Sexual attraction is so much more than what someone looks like - that’s just shallow!

I don’t agree with this post at all.
If dh had no intention to act on it, he would retain this information as fantasy and not run the risk of losing his wife and marriage. No one in their right mind is going to come out years later that they find men sexy and tell their wife if they have no intention whatsoever of acting on it. It would be pointless sabotage.

He is laying the groundwork before he introduces his real intentions. That he wants to have sex with men, and he might already be doing so. Op needs yo wake up and be aware of her own health risks, the emotional harm and fall out and ultimately the end of her marriage.

@Simonjt Agreed, I hope MN isn't representative of how most British women think. What a grim little country if so.

Why are you wasting your time at 6am on here then if it’s such a nest of vipers?

@Soontobe60 Because we're part of the conversation, too, and it's important to add our voices to a conversation where bigotry is evident. If nothing else, it's nice for other bi people to see that not everyone is fucking awful.

Eh? Maybe he just trusts that his wife isn't a raging homophobe. No one married to a decent human being would think they were risking their marriage by sharing this with their partner.

I believe the same argument was used to try to hound black women off mumsnet, thankfully it didn’t work.

7 where I am :)

Perhaps he has not felt able to be honest with his wife throughout their marriage for whatever reason. It doesn’t mean he’s got nefarious intentions now. I think I’d be pretty sad for my DH if he hadn’t felt able to tell me something so important about who he is. I wouldn’t automatically assume he wants to be unfaithful to me.

I did. Because I know my husband is not biphobic, because I know he'll trust me not to cheat on women just as he trusts me not to cheat on men, because it's part of me and I didn't want to hide it once I accepted it. Realizing and accepting was an important thing for me and it would be odd to hide something like that in our relationship. All still great here.

It's very very obvious that what @TealSapphire means is that heterosexuality is the default decent "normal" setting for husbands and can just be presumed, whilst bisexuality is the aberrant perverted "other" setting that must be disclosed before the wedding otherwise said husband is a liar.

This is textbook biphobia.

As the banner on the wall of my college's SU LGB Office said: "heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common".

Words fail me 😳

You were clear and honest from the start, and your husband had the choice knowing the full facts. That is very different to this situation.

Amazing that sone are posting and gas lighting that it’s perfectly fine for your husband to suddenly announce out of the blue, after years of being in a heterosexual and happy marriage, thar he might fancy having sex with men after all - Jesus wept

@Attryn "I'm 50 and it just wasn't a thing when I was young. There were gay men talked about a bit in hushed tones regarding AIDS but I never heard of lesbians let alone bi people."

Gosh. You must have led a very, very sheltered life.....

Nope. I told him 7 years into our marriage, 14 years total into our relationship. (Edit: I did tell him within weeks of realizing/accepting though)

Well then you lied to him. For years. I wouldn’t trust you ever again if you were my partner. That is a huge lie to not share with another person. I feel sorry for your dh, how shit for him.

He's not gay. They are still in a hetero marriage, what with him being a man and the OP being a woman, and he didn't say he wants to have sex with men. Do you always catastrophise like this? I'm surprised you haven't told the OP that their children probably have HIV now.@Severalwhippets

I think the responses on Mumsnet to this type of topic are always really odd.
No it does not mean he will cheat, no it does not mean he is gay.

I had a boyfriend who came out as bi over a year into our relationship. It wasn't that he was deliberately hiding it or being secretive. He simply took some time within himself to accept that he was bi. He'd only ever been with women.
He didn't tell me because he wanted to experiment with men or cheat. He told me as it was a part of his identity which he wanted the person he loved and planned to be with to know about.
We broke up a couple of years later for a totally unrelated reason.

Mumsnet is really weird about this topic and it screams of some level of bigotry. The assumption that he would only tell you because he wants to experiment or that this must mean he will come out as gay later down the line is absolutely absurd. It's entirely possible to be attracted to two different genders and still have a healthy monogamous relationship.

I would be getting us all tested.

I have watched two families go through this at close quarters and it was horrific. Both started exactly like this. The fallout is horrendous and the kids took the brunt of it.

Biphobic nonsense! You don't know this at all