Joe, it does sound like you have a lot of shame and anxiety about this relationship with A. I wonder if the inner voice you hear is telling you that you are the third wheel. It sounds like scapegoating when you write that A says you have to figure everything out before she can be with just you. Maybe your role is something different with this woman than you assume it to be. Normal is not necessarily a real thing but it sounds like you long for true intimacy. While you talk with this woman on the phone, your emotional tank does not get filled in this relationship because there is this side in which you watch or listen to her with other men. To me, I hear that it negates your self image and self esteem. I could be wrong but it doesn’t sound healthy to me. And I mean healthy in the emotional sense, forget about the sexual sense. What you like you like but you don’t sound happy about the entire thing. That you are made or forced to watch A pleasure another man seems highly manipulative to me, especially since you have uncomfortable and unhappy feelings about it. Insane is a loaded word and a bad label. It doesn’t sound insane to me in the way you use that word, but it sounds like you feel hurt by this relationship and can’t figure out why. What if this is the relationship A wants to have? How much longer can you be her second or third or always not good enough to her? A normal relationship is a partnership and hopefully physical and emotional intimacy. This just doesn’t sound like that is what you have with A. It is like you are her pet monkey, not her one true love, and not even her best friend because it sounds like you feel devalued and demeaned with how this all feels. Of course, it feels okay some of the time, it might be like a drug. As long as you are in what you consider a dysfunctional relationship, your mind is not free and clear to find someone else, someone who can offer you a real partnership and total intimacy. Perhaps sitting down and writing out how you feel, list the words with no judgement. Just write. Figure out how you do feel. Examine the things you say to yourself or if you put yourself down. Sometimes we think the current bad relationship is all we deserve or all we will ever find. These are fallacies and not true.

Dear Joe:

You wrote in your original post: “I feel as though I am torn between two worlds. One where I just have a normal relationship with a woman.. while at the same time  I want to explore all avenues of my sexuality”-

Your personal world currently is very empty: “I really do not do anything.. I do not really have any friends and I do not have any hobbies”-

– within this emptiness, it is not a good idea to aim at an extreme, such as to “explore all avenues of my sexuality”. Maybe better that you aim at a more  modest goal, such as to “have a normal relationship with a woman”. Did you ever have a normal relationship with a woman?

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by .

Dear Joe:

You are welcome. I will be back to your thread and reply further when I am back to the computer, in about 11 hours from now. If you would like to share about your childhood experience before I return, please do. It will help me understand your situation better.

anita

Dear Joe:

First, I will summarize some of what you shared so far and then I will offer you my input.

You are currently in your mid 30s, a college graduate working full time. You met a woman online 10 years ago. The two of you emailed back and forth, instant messaged, and talked on the phone (“talked about almost everything”), exchanging photos and engaged “in phone sex nearly every night” for a long while .

The two of you met in-person only once, “but she was nothing like her pictures. She looked older and bloated”, and you spent “one fully clothed night together”.

Online and on the phone, you encouraged her to have sex with other women, with a young man, 15 years her junior, and with a couple (“I find their escapades very arousing even though I only can listen”). Your plan at this point, is to travel and meet the woman and the couple next month.

You “feel a lot of shame and humiliation” sharing all this. You “feel like a sexual deviant”, “a freak”, but you also feel okay about it most of the time. You want to meet the woman and the couple next month, three weeks from now, but you are conflicted: “I still battle it mentally and it is wearing me down”, you wrote.

You shared that you had “a few normal relationships with women” in the past. “Women want more of me than I am willing to give and then eventually get tired of me and things end poorly. I never feel the strong connection with any one I have dated and I never really commit”.

About your childhood you wrote that it “was normal”, that you were “very shy as a child and socially awkward”, that you always kept your parents at a distance (“I don’t feel as close to them.. have always kept them at a distance”). You weren’t close to your younger brother either,  and you “did not really have too many really close friends growing up”.

More quotes from you and my input: you wrote, “My parents are very warm people but I do not feel as close to them as I guess I should be”- maybe they are warm people now, but in the ways that matter to a child, they were not warm people with you, when you were a child.

If they were warm people with you when you were a child, you wouldn’t grow up very shy, socially awkward and distant and disconnected from the people in your young life.

As a young child, it was not you who “always kept (your parents) at a distance”- a young child never keeps his parent or parents at a distance. The distance is always created by the parent.

I believe that the reason you have not felt a strong connection to any girlfriend you had in real life is that your parents rejected you early on, in ways that hurt you a lot. The reason you did not commit to girlfriends, I believe, is that you don’t trust them, just as you understandably didn’t trust your parents growing up.

But you do trust sexual feelings, you can depend on those to feel good again and again, so you pursue sex, but without the human connection.

In other words, you trust sex but you don’t trust people. You want to connect with sexual feelings, but not with the people involved.

“I feel as though I am torn between two worlds. One where I just have a normal relationship with a woman.. while at the same time I want to explore all avenues of my sexuality”-

– part of you still wants the human connection, the deep, warm connection you are yet to experience.

You used the word normal twice: you wrote that your childhood was normal (“my childhood was normal”), and that your adult relationships with women were normal (“I have had a few normal relationships with women”)-

– I think that the normal in your childhood was social isolation, disconnection from others, awkwardness with others. Fast forward, this is still your normal.

If you want, let me know what you think at this point, and we can  continue to communicate.

anita

You are welcome, Joe. Thank you for the note, take your time and I will be looking forward to read from you.

anita