Bonnie Kaye's Straight Talk Read Online Free Page A

gaining back my sexual confidence. Yes, it is scary starting this side of life over again, but it is so worth it. All women are born with sexuality. Women who are married to gay men have had that side suppressed or deadened by their spouse. We just learn to give up on that part of us and to bury it thinking that this is the natural course of marriage or a relationship. Please know that it can be revived and brought back to life.
    My soul mate has never called me a “nymphomaniac.” That’s because I’m not. I never was. I am just a normal woman with very normal sexual needs. Over the past seven and a half years, he has cultivated my sexuality and taught me that I can reach new heights of enjoyment. It is easy to keep me sexually interested because my partner never allows our sex life to become boring or mundane. He is a straight man—a straight man who appreciates a straight woman. Let this be a lesson for all of you. Never give up the part of you that helps maintain your identity as a woman. Give yourself a chance to be loved again. Look for your soul mate because chances are, he is out there looking for you.
    “GET OVER IT”
    Another problem that many women write to me about is the pressure they get from family members or friends to “get over it” when it comes to recovery from their marriages. They can’t understand why they are having such trouble doing this, and they feel even more inadequate (as if we need more to feel worse about) because it just isn’t happening as quickly as other people.
    I get upset when I hear this pressure expressed from women who are really trying to move past their anger and hurt but not at the pace that others expect of them. After all, marriages fall apart all of the time. In fact, almost 50% of marriages in this country end in divorce. People start over again and find new relationships. Why are you having such a hard time?
    What other people don’t realize is that there are numerous issues that we have to deal with after a marriage to a gay spouse ends. Some of these issues are unique and unlike those that women with straight husbands face. We have to figure out what to say to the children and when to tell them; we also have to decide what to tell family, friends, and co-workers. We live in a world where people still don’t understand about a gay husband and fear the ridicule we will face from them. There are many very ignorant people out there. Even in this day and age, people say, “What did you do to make him gay? After all, he wasn’t gay when he married you.”
    We have to rebuild our own self-esteem, which has been sorely damaged through these marriages by not only feeling the failure of a marriage, but also wondering how much of a lie we were living. We have to rebuild our sense of trust within our own decision-making processes knowing that we walked blindly into a situation where we were so misled. Most of us have lost or never had the feeling of what real intimacy means in a relationship. We have difficulty trusting men again and trusting our own ability not to walk into this situation one more time. And this is a genuine fear that many women express—”It happened to me once. How do I know the next man I get involved with won’t be gay?” After all, why couldn’t we tell the first time around? This is confirmed by the ignorance of others who insist that we “must have known but married him anyway because we thought we could change him.”
    There are other complications as well. There are those women who still feel some sense of responsibility for their husbands’ homosexuality. They are convinced that they played some part in their husbands turning to men.
    That’s because some gay husbands are cruel enough to say that to them rather than take the responsibility for the truth.
    We have to deal with our own feelings of homophobia. Even if we understood homosexuality in general terms, it took a whole new meaning when it entered our marriages and ruined our