A few glorious days of spring, then back to the 30's.  Like look what you COULD have Bree, but I'm not going to let you.  I'm going to make you be physically cold and stew while you're working through your latest emotional pissed offness.  Yesterday we were talking about our sex life in the car, and Nikki told me flat out he had been sexually bored for years, and he loves now that we're doing all sorts of new things. 

And it didn't percolate right away.  I didn't like hearing that, was minorly annoyed because I worked hard on trying to make our sex life good.  Alone.  Yes, alone.  The responsibility for it has always been in my hands.  I could barely even get him to tell me what he liked that we were doing.  And then it was just a casual humor her "yeah, that feels okay".  But then in a few hours, the thought really percolated and I got royally pissed off.  All the years I'd been TRYING to get him to tell me what HIS fantasies were, what things HE wanted to try (most of the things he's loving know I was only peripherally aware of at best, not withholding), the trips to the creepy adult store that he got weird and didn't look at anything at all after telling me a few times he wanted to go, and trying to get HIM ACTIVE in the whole sex life and telling him that <b>I</b> was bored with it because it was always on my shoulders and I had run out of new things to want to try after 10 years... and now he's admitting he was bored and didn't bother telling me and that's one part of why he was checked out for the last several years in that area of our marriage....

Just wow.  So have calmed down, and he was graceful when he realized the anger had finally set in.  He knew that was coming, and strait up told me he deserved it, keeping so many secrets that affect us both so deeply.  I think if he'd just shrugged it off and not admitted fault or put it on my inability to come up with enough sex ideas for 17 years by myself I would have lost it.  I swear the secrets in all of this have been the worst part, the most destructive parts.  I am having trouble with the dichotomy of knowing how much he loves me(I think), and my innate questioning of how someone who love me can hide that much from me that affects me so directly and deeply.   It's not an anger issue, it's really a questioning issue.  Did he really love me then, vs. now that he's all in?  Is he only falling in love with me now?  And that's why he's opening up?  What WAS the last 17 years? 

He asked me how I would have handled it if he'd told me honestly when I asked after the first few weeks of dating.  I'd cleaned his room (I was scared the mountain of boxes was going to fall on me in the night, it wasn't a little sloppy, it was scary) and found one of those DIY catalogs with all the creams and pills that promise you boobs.  He claimed it was junk mail that he sorta thought of as a fetish, and I accepted it.  I have NO idea how I would have belt about it then.  I can't answer what my thoughts would have been.  I was just out of yet another failed relationship with a girl, and a guy just before her, and at that time hadn't yet realized how much I had been forcing my minor attraction to women to be the full blown deal so I could hide from men as needed, so I probably would have been okay with figuring it out.   I hope I would have had the sense to wait to marry until he'd figured out who he was and who he wanted to be though.  But looking back on the last 17 years, particularly the last five, I will never be able to condone keeping secrets this big if you decide to marry someone.  Be it your sexuality, gender, addiction, mental illness, personal baggage, whatever, marriage without disclosure is just wrong.  It may be done with the best of intentions, but it's an abuse of trust.  Can we fix that abuse?  Yeah, slowly.  But I have some hangups making it harder, I had trust issues to begin with and he swore so hard and did so much to prove that I could trust him, that I slowly overcame them, only to end up here at the wrong end of secrets and the fallout there of.  So it's going to take time, and that's okay too. 

I want summer to come, so I can stop thinking about all of this for a while.  I WANT a break from it, but my brain is like nope.  We have nothing else to do, let's figure out our feelings.  Stupid brain.