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I’m a 31-year-old heterosexual woman who has been married for nine years. The math: my husband and I got married right after university. Like you, I grew up Catholic, and as a girl/woman, all of the purity culture bullshit was foisted on me. Over the years, I’ve come to reject everything I was brought up to believe. I never stepped out of line, and now I grieve for my younger self because I missed out on formative experiences — sexual and otherwise — that I should’ve had in my teens/20s. I feel stunted. It was pounded into me (only figuratively, sadly) that I would deeply regret having sex before marriage. Ironically, what I actually regret is not having sex with the kind, loving guys I dated before my husband.
In the last year or so, I’ve developed a curiosity to experience more and some very ambiguous desires. I wonder what it would be like to have other sexual partners and what it would be like to date now. I’ve talked about this with my husband, and he validates that my feelings are normal given my/our strict upbringing and lack of experience, but ultimately shrugs it off. After all, he says, we can’t go back in time and get married later or have different partners, etc. I cannot imagine him being open to any arrangement other than what we have now: garden-variety monogamy. My ambiguous desire had no outlet until recently, when I developed a huge crush on a coworker. While we’re flirtatious together, he’s also unavailable, so there is nowhere for this attraction to “go.” I have not felt like this for as long as I’ve been married. The alchemy of this crush is staggering.
Dan, what do I do if I want to experience more, but I can’t put my finger on what that means exactly? If I want experiences that aren’t possible within my marriage, are my only options to suppress those desires or leave when leaving could mean I would lose a mostly solid relationship for potentially nothing?
Grass Is Getting Greener Every Day
