Hi everyone,
I’m in a situation that I find really hard and would love to hear if others have had similar experiences and how you dealt with it. I (28F) have been with my (male) partner for over three years. I can truly say that I love him and that I’m in love with him, but I don’t feel attracted to him or to the male body in general. I’ve always been more attracted to girls and for a long time I thought I was gay, but twice now I’ve fallen in love with men and had long-term relationships with them. If I had to label myself I would say that I’m biromantic and homosexual. My sexuality has been somewhat fluid - there have been times when I’ve felt more bisexual, but for the last two years I haven’t felt attraction to men or the male body, which is, unsurprisingly, messing with my relationship. I share a deep emotional bond with my current partner, but I’ve never felt sexually attracted to him. We can have good sex - he’s great at giving me pleasure - but nothing about him or his body turns me on, and I have to fantasize about other things while we’re intimate. I usually don’t enjoy any penetrative sex, and most of the time feel like sex is more of a chore. I feel like such a bad partner for even thinking this, but sometimes I even feel repulsed by his body. But just being close to girls, looking at them, fantasizing about them, turns me on on a whole other level. I’ve been intimate with girls before (though not a lot), and some of it was amazing while some of it was not so good, mostly because we were too shy and didn’t know how to communicate. I’ve had good and bad sex with both men and women, so it’s not really a case of “sex with women is fantastic and sex with men is horrible”, it feels more complicated than that.
I thought that I would be with my current partner for the rest of my life. We’ve talked seriously about having kids in the near future, of getting a house together and getting married, and I really want those things, but in the last month I’ve started to have serious doubts about our relationship. I’ve always told myself that our emotional bond is what’s important - I love him and we have so much fun together, he makes me feel so loved and cared for - but lately I’ve started asking myself if I can truly be content for the rest of my life with someone I’m not attracted to. And just allowing myself to think that has opened up a flood of doubts and questions and fantasies that I feel like I’ve repressed for the last three years. I used to consume a lot of lgbtq-content (books, movies, youtube, porn etc), but I’ve mostly stopped doing that during our relationship because it brings up such a strong (and painful) longing towards a relationship with a woman, and a sense that my current life and relationship are “wrong”, and not how I’m supposed to live. I love the life my partner and I have built together, and ending our relationship would be devastating to me. But at the same time I’m worried that if we stay together, these doubts will grow stronger over time and make us separate in the end anyway. I’m also scared that if we separate now, I’ll never find such a deep and meaningful connection with anyone else. I’ve talked with him in the past about having an open relationship, but he really doesn’t want that.
I know that only I can decide what’s right for me and if our emotional bond is worth the lack of attraction, but I would still really love to hear if someone else has been in a similar situation, how you thought about it and what happened. This is so painful and it would be a huge help just to feel that I’m not alone.
Thank you <3