Hey, Yitz, you’re doing great. I just want to throw in my two cents about marriage.

There are a lot of married men who feel a certain emptiness in their bedroom be it for their desire for men, or another woman. I was like that for a while and BH in the last 2 months I’ve made a lot of progress.

Marriage isn’t about having ‘having sex with a girl’ its about having that deep, loving connection (that you mentioned) with your wife and much more. No interaction with a man can come close to a healthy, loving caring relationship between husband and wife. Until two months ago I was not in a good place and BH I’ve changed a lot and I can you tell you that my marriage has changed drastically, my relationship with my wife is so much stronger and deeper because I’m refraining from schmutz.

So, while your doing a wonderful job and making progress, the yetzer hora will come and tell you how good an interaction with can be with a man and how ‘having sex with a girl’ wont satisfy you. But with Hashems help you will stay clean and IYH find your shidduch in the right time, work on that deep, loving, caring, supportive relationship with your wife and u’ll tell me then which one is better.

Don’t get me wrong, sex is a very important aspect of marriage but that’s not what it’s all about….

I definitely hear you.

I wonder if Chancy would see it the same way.

I’m right there along with you…

My brain knows that Heeling is right, but my heart can’t help feeling like Yitz. 

Heeling wrote on 17 May 2023 21:55:

Very well explained Heeling! it's so true.

I would like to share some of my thoughts and experience on this.

The primary purpose of sex is to connect and give to your wife, the more you focus on giving her what she needs and doing what pleases her the more satisfied both partners will be, When you stop focusing on her and start focusing on yourself the connection starts to decrease and fades away.
This is just the way hashem created our world.
Having sex for a kosher outlet and in order to be able to refrain from unwanted sexual behavior outside marriage is only the secondary purpose, and is not the prefered way a marriage should be like.
So when thinking about getting married, what should come to one's mind is, I want to give for another person to an extent of treating them more than myself, as the Ramban writes "ולכבדה יותר מגופו"
"Marriage is a give and give" the more you give the more she gives.
The contrast to all this is in at least most gay relationships as everyone looks to satisfy himself.

"Marriage is a give and give" the more you give the more she will give in return.

All the best
True self

true_self wrote on 18 May 2023 13:27:

Which in some (my) cases means not doing anything to please her...

yitz23 wrote on 17 May 2023 22:11:

What do  you mean?

yitz23 wrote on 17 May 2023 21:28:

Dear Yitz,

I want to wade in here. People are already giving you amazing insight into what real marriage is all about, but I want to give you a personal spin on it.

I can identify with you on a certain level because I'm not physically attracted to my wife. And I'm married for over 10 years.

However, I have the deepest, most exhilarating relationship with her that I can ever imagine two human beings having. And it only gets better with time.

And while I'm not sexually attracted to her body or looks, I'm sexually attracted to her soul and being as a person who is my best friend and partner in life. 

You can reach out to me privately if you'd like.

Bennyh wrote on 18 May 2023 17:30:

Blowing my mind. Can you expound?

chancy wrote on 18 May 2023 17:23:


Thanks for the question.

I mean to try and clarify the conflicting messages that I'm receiving from you and others on the thread.

On the one hand, I'm being told that undesired attractions are the manifestation of an emotional lacking. (For you it is, as you said, a feeling of not being seen (needing attention) and of unworthiness. For me it is something like loneliness and self-loathing and unworthiness.)

I can accept that.

Then you wrote that I "don't need to act out physically with guys but rather work on making close relationships with them."

I don't know if that is practical advice for me. There is a reason I don't have these relationships sufficiently as of now, and that reason is likely to stick around with me for the foreseeable future. You yourself say, heartbreakingly, that you don't have any friends at all (and presumably, that is why your SSA attraction is still so active despite how much you want it to go away).

Then I went on to say that even if I do create a healthy relationship with my future wife, it still won't satisfy the feelings that underlie my SSA, since my emotional system feels, somehow, that sexual closeness with a male is what I need to fill that emptiness (otherwise I wouldn't be attracted to men!).

That leaves me with the concern that I'll always be wanting to act out with a guy, and that I can't look forward to marriage to satisfy that. That, in my mind, is a bleak outlook, always so deeply craving what I will never be able to get.

(Edit: This is not to take away from the beautiful and hopeful points that Heeling, Bennyh and True_self brought up, I look forward so much to a warm, healthy marriage, I just wonder if it will be as effective on my SSA as they seem to believe.)

This may be me not understanding the SSA struggle, but if you are also attracted to women, and you have a wife, then why is the desire for a man any different than a desire for another woman, position, threesome, style etc.?

This may be me not understanding the SSA struggle correctly, but if you are also attracted to women, and you have a wife, then why is the desire for a man any different than a desire for another woman, position, threesome, ethnicity, color,style etc.?

Great question Grant

In a certain sense you are certainly right.

However, I think that from a psychological/emotional perspective, a healthy, straight man's sexual-emotional needs are (at least theoretically) fully satiated by his wife. He doesn't really need to sleep with another woman to gain completeness, he just wants to because of purely physical attraction (or his relationship with his wife is underdeveloped).

A bisexual man, while he's getting the feminine love from his wife, is still suffering from the lack of masculine affection (which could also be a lack in his self-affection). He needs to really get to the bottom of his issues in order to feel sexually satisfied and complete in his marital relationship.

(But listen, I'm just a bochur pontificating from his dorm room, were someone to consider my opinion insufficiently experienced, it would be a sound argument.) 

I hear you Yitz, you definitely write with clarity and I understand your point, but I'm way out of my depths in this topic.

Day 26 winds down, and I am now clean for longer than I ever have been since I started masturbating before my Bar Mitzvah.

Thanks for riding with me. I'm poised to make it to Day 30 and then Day 40, b'ezras Hashem.

Fire!