I've been debating a while now about putting this story back up on TAM. I took it down when I left TAM earlier this year. I decided to put it back hopefully as a warning to some, and to offer hope to others. It's a long read but then it's a long story.
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Several people here at TAM have asked me, "So, what's your story?" I keep telling them I'll tell my story some time. I've been asked several times so here it is. I'll probably break it up a bit as I guess I can get wordy when talking about myself.
I met the woman I thought I would spend my entire life with on a summer job with the California State Park service. We worked well together, had the same sense of humor, and I thought she was REALLY pretty. Her mother was Swiss and her father was Chinese and she was a beautiful blend of the two. Sure she had her quirks but who doesn't right?
We kept in touch after our summer job ended and eventually started dating. After a year I asked her to marry me. She accepted. We were in college, taking the same classes. All our instructors called us "the lovebirds." After a year of dating I asked her to marry me, she said yes without hesitation. Life was great. She took a job as hostess/waitress at The Good Earth, and I was transitioning between a job as a cook to a job as a delivery driver. At one point I had been awake for 48 hours and was returning home after a night of driving delivery. That's when I fell asleep.
I woke up skidding sideways on the wrong side of the road. A split second later I heard a loud, sickening crunch sound and the left side of my body went numb. I was broadsided by a woman in a Pinto. I found myself in the passenger seat with my head hanging out of a broken side window. The car was on the opposite shoulder now rolling into a shallow ditch. Somehow there were already people standing around my car yelling at me to put the emergency brake on. I slide over and pushed down with my left foot to engage the brake, felt a pain up my left side.
This was the accident that changed my happy go lucky life for almost forever. I was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. I got there and they said I was lucky I was not wearing a seatbelt in this case. I'd have almost certainly been paralyzed from the waist down given the accident. I ended up with a minor concussion, all my left hand ribs were cracked, my spleen was bruised (not sure how they determined that). I was on a 24 hour watch for an emergency spleen removal. Luckily I kept it.
I was recovering but my fiance didn't seem her normal self. She was a mixture of concern for my health and anger at me for getting in the accident. Within a month I was in court. I hadn't spoken to a lawyer or anything. While in court the bailiff came up to me and asked where my lawyer was. I told him I didn't have one. He told me when the judge asks you how to plead, tell her you plead no contest and tell her I said so.
So the judge asked how I plead to the charges, I told her no contest. She asked did anyone present or any officer of the court ask you to plead this way. I told her, yes, the bailiff did. She threw her gavel in the air and asked the bailiff to approach. He winked at me.
Turns out that the Judge was best friends with the woman I got into an accident with. That woman worked in probation and had friends at the jail. I was about to sent to jail and have the sh!t kicked out of me daily for as long as they could keep me there. The bailiff saved me from that. The case was transferred to another court.
So I got a public defender and I'm going through the courts, they don't want to prosecute until the civil lawsuit that was filed against me was settled. Plus her lawyers never showed up in court. The judge kept continuing the case. Meanwhile my fiance kept getting more and more distant and angry with me. We almost never saw each other. I still had a night job driving delivery. I finish, jump on BART (local transit) go to her house and crash in her bed while she was at work during the day. Then she'd come home, wake me up, I'd go home and shower and change and get ready for work again. I had dropped out of the college I was in and started at a 2 year vocational college instead. It was hard fitting that in as well.
I was finally offered a deal by the judge, 5 days community service or take it to a trial, which assured me I would be found not guilty. I told him I was as tired of seeing him as he was of seeing me and I'd just take the 5 days community service. He smiled and said DONE! Right after this I got a call from my fiancee. She said she wanted time to find herself and figure out if we really had a future together. Uh, what?
So turns out she dumped me for a sailor she had met at work. She had been seeing us both for some time. I was heartbroken. I still loved her. I thought with my legal troubles over (though I still had a lawsuit to pay off) that things would be better. Nope. She was gone and that was that. I fell into my darkest time ever. The pain was unbearable to me. I finally tried to slash my wrists.
Luckily I wasn't very good at that. I called my best friend M (a woman who was more like my sister and probably loved me more than my sisters). She called me an idiot in her loving way and came over and helped me clean up the blood and bandage everything up. Luckily I didn't hit a vein. She was a big comfort to me in the following months. We hung out a lot, went places, just had fun. I started hanging out with my old friends a lot too. That's when I started hearing stories from M and my friends about things my fiance had done or said to them. Apparently she was a real b!tch to them. She was actively trying to drive a wedge between them and I. I was so twitterpated I couldn't see it. I learned a lot about her from them.
I started trying to get more active in my church. Getting back to singing in the choir again and playing handbells. And I started trying to get to know a certain young woman named C a little better. C had actually gotten me in trouble when I was still engaged. My fiance caught me looking at her during a handbell practice and I heard no end of it. It turns out C would play a huge part in my life.
I started trying to get to know C. At first she tried to politely avoid me. We sometimes rode the same bus from BART and I would try to talk to her, she'd be polite but no dice. However, soon we started talking at church. My life was getting better my court troubles were behind me and I now had a stable good paying job. I worked swing shift which was never really busy. I would go over to one of the phone booths in another building in the plant and call her. The calls started out every other week, then weekly, then daily. We would talk for hours. I just loved her voice. So soft and sweet. She was so kind in listening to my troubles and I tried to listen to hers.
I asked her out a couple of times. We went to movie and walked around Tilden Park. Then she said she felt like this was a time that she couldn't be dating in her life. I respected that and just talked to her on the phone some more. I asked her out again and we started going out and doing things again. Usually regional parks. By this time she had let me kiss her. She had never kissed anyone before me and no one had ever kissed me like she did. Just... wow. But again, I made the mistake of referring to her as my girlfriend and then she told me she didn't want to date at this point in her life. I quickly learned that if I didn't call it dating, she go out with me and make out. Just don't call it a date, and don't call her a girlfriend. Check.
Well, one night her ultra-conservative parents (she was 20) found out she was at my house, with my entire family, AFTER DARK! It was a scandal. They came to the door and demanded she leave with them immediately. I didn't see her again for almost 2 months. They took her back to their home country to talk sense into her I guess. I was devastated. Her friends really became my friends at that point and consoled me and cheered me up noting that she had one more year of college to complete, they would have to let her come back.
And she did. I waited until she'd been back a week before I called her. She almost didn't want to talk to me. I just laid it on the line. I told her that I loved her and wanted to be with her forever. I told her I wanted to see her. She was reluctant but agreed. When we saw each other there was a brief pause but then we were all over each other, rolling around on the floor even. The C I knew came back to herself and she told me she wanted to be with me too but didn't know what to do.
That's when I asked her to marry me. She told me her parents would NEVER agree to that. I told, I know. I asked her again to marry me, that I would plan everything if she would just agree. Tears welled up and she said yes. Two weeks later I showed up at her house in my truck, helped her pack all her stuff into my truck and her car and we left for Reno. We eloped. Not quite, I took my whole family with me. Mother, father, sisters, everyone but my brother who was still in Georgia. We spent the night before at my sister's house. We spent our first night together in sleeping bags on her living room floor. We didn't sleep a wink, C was so nervous. Nervous about the wedding, nervous about her parents. We had left a note for them and they had gone ballistic calling everyone we knew demanding to know where C was.
We married in Reno, honeymooned in Disneyland, and I was back to work by Monday. I had rented us an apartment and had moved everything there prior to the wedding. We settled into our lives but her parents constantly harassed us. He father threatened and bellowed. Her mother demanded a second wedding that she could attend. So we got married again at our home church. Everyone was ecstatic except for her parents. Her father wouldn't come and her mother had to be helped to her seat because she kept fainting. Ugh.
Things finally simmered down and we tried to be happy with our lives. My wife graduated UC Berkeley and got a job. We moved out of the Bay Area and bought a home. She found a job close to our new home but I was still commuting 2 hours to work both ways. After being married for 5 years we felt like something was missing from our marriage. It had kind of become boring. We tried to travel as money would allow, the sex was great, the freedom was wonderful but we were just kind of bored. We decided it was time for children.
C quite her BC pills and we tried to get pregnant. Nothing happened for months. We tried all the usual stuff; boxers, taking her temperature to determine ovulation, best positions for impregnation. Kind of funny to think about now. Problem was, she was stressed at work. I took her on a long vacation to Florida and when we got back, BAM! She was pregnant! And this instantly healed the rift between us and her parents. ;)
We enjoyed feathering the nest for the new baby. Went to the classes, childproofed the house. Bought baby stuff. All the fun things new parents do. Her labor and delivery was very easy (from the doctor's perspective). She was only in hard labor for 4 hours. And then there he was, my perfect baby boy! We had so many hopes and dreams for him. We were planning his life out for him and he was still in diapers. But my mother and father noticed something. They kept clapping their hands and snapping their fingers by his ears. I told them to cut it out, it was weird. My mother tried as gently as possible to tell me there was something wrong with him and we should get him checked.
Sure enough he had moderate to severe hearing loss. Probably due to a high fever he had when he was 8 months or so. Okay, so we can adapt to this. I used to speak American Sign Language fairly proficiently in college I could pick it up again. Or do we teach him lip reading. At least we were relieved that now his developmental delays could be explained. We were assured his hearing could be corrected via hearing aids and that as soon as he could hear clearly he'd catch right up. Well, he didn't.
We had several evaluations done but most doctors told us to just give him more time, he'd catch up. C pushed and pushed the doctors on it and we finally ended up at UCSF for an evaluation by Bryna Siegel, an autism expert. My mother kept putting the autism bug in our ear because she used to work with autistic kids. Something I never knew until that point. We had S Jr evaluated and sure enough he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and was judged to be on the moderate to severe end of the scale. She very matter of factly told us to never expect him to love us or anyone else and that we better just get used to that fact right now. Ugh.
C went into red alert mode. She started researching the best ways to treat autism and finally settled on an aggressive in home program. We discussed it and she quit her job to stay home and run the program. She blamed herself for a lot of my son's problems even though I pointed out that there was nothing wrong with her that caused him to be this way. This therapy continued for years and took over our lives.
C and I became more and more distant and that's when my problem with computer porn began. C would never refuse sex but it always seemed like her heart wasn't into it no matter how hard I tried. I assumed that she just wasn't attracted to me. I now know she was just flat exhausted but I was too self-centered to see that. She kept telling me that it wasn't me, it was her. She just wasn't in the mood as much as I was. I kept trying to think of ways to make her feel sexier about herself. At one point I talked her into letting me take nude photos of her. She did feel sexy posing nude. I then talked her into letting me share them on some Internet newsgroups that I belonged to. She reluctantly (an understatement) agreed. She got glowing comments on her body. I kept trying to convince her how wonderful that was. She went along with it for a while but later asked me to stop and remove the pictures, which, I did.
It was also at this point I got into an obsession that would take YEARS to get over, wife-sharing.
I became fascinated with the whole wife-sharing porn thing. I liked looking at real women, not the plastic stretched Barbie dolls you see in porn. Real women, real wives. There was a taboo aspect of getting to have someone that wasn't mine to have. I read wife sharing stories, I visited wife sharing sites. I started sharing these fantasies with my wife. At first she didn't believe that I was actually turned on by that stuff. But once she believed me, she allowed herself to be turned on by that. She loved the fantasy too. It made sex hotter for us.
But I always push the envelope. At some point I started getting involved in swinger websites. Chatting with them, trying to find out how they convinced their wives to get involved in swinging. This was all under the guise of trying to spice up our sex life. She told me she was completely satisfied. I however, didn't believe her. My own low self-esteem wouldn't let me believe her. How could anyone be satisfied with me?
Eventually I started talking to her about swinging and how free and liberating it would be. She slowly accepted the idea and was even turned on by the notion of sexual freedom. I tried my best to make it sound wonderful and she bought into it. Eventually we even tried a swingers club. It was full of really skanky scary people. However, we did meet a nice couple there and kept in contact with them. I asked her if she would possibly like to hook up with them at some point. She wasn't sure so we talked to them on the phone for a while. Eventually the OM and my wife would talk on the phone and OW and I would talk. It was like dating again it seemed so fun.
We eventually planned a date night with them at a local hotel. OM was a really nice guy, bigger than me so I figured C would have a good time. OW was really sexy and pretty and really boosted my self esteem. Until our clothes came off. Here I was rolling around on this hot sexy woman and... nothing was happening. I never had ED in my life but it just wasn't happening that night. Eventually it did and we had sex. The four of us had sex in every permutation you can imagine (except for OM and I).
At the end of the evening OM/OW were satisfied but ultimately unhappy with us. They were unhappy because they could tell C and I weren't really all that happy. We felt like crap. C felt used and degraded. I felt disappointed and dirty. She didn't do any of the things that turned me on, wouldn't listen, and then got mad that I wouldn't kiss her after she sucked her husband's d!ck.
Afterwards C said this has to stop. I was resistant. I thought that if only we could find the right couple this could be fun and I kept up the search. C was despondent. It was at this point that she fell out of love with me. She later told me that she was about to ask me to move out so we could begin a trial separation. But she decided to try prayer first. We had left the church and left God to pursue our lifestyle, my lifestyle. C turned fully back to God and prayed for me several times a day.
Eventually I had a heart change. I could see that there really wasn't a woman out there that was better than C. But how could she settle for me? I decided that I would just have to take her at her word. I asked for her forgiveness, I even washed her feet, seriously. Just to show her I wanted to be her husband again to be a servant/leader if she'd have me. she forgave me with open arms.
Just prior to the whole swinging excursion our daughter A was born. As difficult as it was to get pregnant with our first, our second was just wham bam. I came home from flying one day, C was in heat, she demanded I take her right there on the couch, and bam. Preggo. A has been the source of light for C and I. Always happy, always singing, always sweetness. She still is even today. When she doesn't have PMS that is. :) I mean how many 15 yo daughters hang around talking with their dads at night playing Angry Birds in Space together? I love her so much.
C and I started back to church again. We changed churches a few times until we found our current church. Our faith grew, our love for each other grew. I became a leader in the church. I helped our church through some crises. C and I grew closer and closer to each other and the Lord. However, the specter of wife sharing lingered in the back of my mind.
C and I tried to be good and keep our sexual fantasies clean. But she enjoyed the fantasy too, just didn't want the reality. I just read that as, she would do it if it was the right situation. Plus, during the throes of sex, she would say as much. But afterwards would always say that's just talk to turn me on. We tried for years and succeeded but I still had that wife sharing desire. I convinced myself it was because I loved watching her. I mean I thought she was the most beautiful woman on this earth, I still do! I loved watching her in the throes of passion, she's gorgeous. I convinced myself that I could watch her enjoying sex with another man without distracting myself.
We came close to actually doing a threesome a couple of times. I would take out ads on adult websites and show her the men who were interested in having sex with her. Of course there were many. A few of them actually surprised her at how ripped and handsome they were. I wasn't surprised. Inside I felt she deserved a better looking man than me anyway. I couldn't understand why she settled for me. To my shame I have to admit to this fantasy and almost making it a reality has been ongoing until last year. Even after I joined TAM. She was even ready to go through with it as recently as last fall. We were actually talking to guy on the phone and setting ground rules.
Then we had a heart to heart. She wanted to know why I really wanted to do this. I came clean. I poured my heart out to her all the reasons and secret feelings I had never shared with her. I won't share them all because some are for her and her alone to know. But the big eye opener her and I is that I never felt loved because she always seemed to avoid my d!ck when we made love. (At this point all the ladies of TAM are saying, "Again with the d!ck why is it always about the d!ck, what is it with you guys?)
She seemed surprised and denied she avoided it. I asked her to tell me what she does. She couldn't remember and we had just made love the prior night. I explained how I felt. That part of my body is how I fully experience her, that part of my body is how I become one with her, that part of me physically links me to her. That if she couldn't love that part of me, I just felt it as overall rejection. That everything I had done in our marriage to try to tear it apart was really just a sh!t test. To finally prove to myself that she didn't really love me after all. Sure I was a good provider, a funny clown to make her laugh, but not someone she was sexually attracted to.
And then she kissed me. It was the most loving sensuous kiss I have ever felt in my life. She didn't say anything, just held my face in her hands and looked at me. I started bawling like a baby. Every bad thought I had ever had toward myself came out in those tears. And at that point I knew I didn't want to share her with anyone. I didn't want her to kiss anyone like that. That was for me and me alone. After I collected myself I told her. No more. I'm not sharing you. It's done. Then it was her turn to cry. She was so relieved. She was only doing it for me. I thought I was doing it for her. We were both stupid.
And from that moment last year I have never wanted to share her. And from that moment she finally understood why I never felt good enough. She asked me to forgive her for that. Can you imagine? The next day she gave me a bj. She's never wanted to do that because of her TMJ. She doesn't seem to have TMJ anymore, maybe because she's practiced so much. I tried to stop her because I wasn't feeling like myself afterwards. I felt like they were mercy bj's. I even started a thread on it. She finally convinced me that she was doing that because she never really thought of my d!ck as the way I explained it to her. That she finally "got" it. She was trying to show that part of me that connects me with her the love she felt for me. And when she thought of it like that, her TMJ didn't kick in. She's finally convinced me that she truly does love me for who I am.
And that pretty much brings us up to now. Sex is amazing now. Our marriage is stronger than ever. I love being around her more than ever. We date, we talk at night, we walk in the afternoons. I credit C and her prayers for keeping our marriage together, for keeping our family together. She put up with me, she put up with years of training, and homeschooling our two children, she put up with years of angry, self-injurious behaviors by my son (even up to today) and nothing but love has ever come from her. I guess there are no warts in this story after all. C has made them all non-existant.
C, you have my heart forever.
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Several people here at TAM have asked me, "So, what's your story?" I keep telling them I'll tell my story some time. I've been asked several times so here it is. I'll probably break it up a bit as I guess I can get wordy when talking about myself.
I met the woman I thought I would spend my entire life with on a summer job with the California State Park service. We worked well together, had the same sense of humor, and I thought she was REALLY pretty. Her mother was Swiss and her father was Chinese and she was a beautiful blend of the two. Sure she had her quirks but who doesn't right?
We kept in touch after our summer job ended and eventually started dating. After a year I asked her to marry me. She accepted. We were in college, taking the same classes. All our instructors called us "the lovebirds." After a year of dating I asked her to marry me, she said yes without hesitation. Life was great. She took a job as hostess/waitress at The Good Earth, and I was transitioning between a job as a cook to a job as a delivery driver. At one point I had been awake for 48 hours and was returning home after a night of driving delivery. That's when I fell asleep.
I woke up skidding sideways on the wrong side of the road. A split second later I heard a loud, sickening crunch sound and the left side of my body went numb. I was broadsided by a woman in a Pinto. I found myself in the passenger seat with my head hanging out of a broken side window. The car was on the opposite shoulder now rolling into a shallow ditch. Somehow there were already people standing around my car yelling at me to put the emergency brake on. I slide over and pushed down with my left foot to engage the brake, felt a pain up my left side.
This was the accident that changed my happy go lucky life for almost forever. I was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. I got there and they said I was lucky I was not wearing a seatbelt in this case. I'd have almost certainly been paralyzed from the waist down given the accident. I ended up with a minor concussion, all my left hand ribs were cracked, my spleen was bruised (not sure how they determined that). I was on a 24 hour watch for an emergency spleen removal. Luckily I kept it.
I was recovering but my fiance didn't seem her normal self. She was a mixture of concern for my health and anger at me for getting in the accident. Within a month I was in court. I hadn't spoken to a lawyer or anything. While in court the bailiff came up to me and asked where my lawyer was. I told him I didn't have one. He told me when the judge asks you how to plead, tell her you plead no contest and tell her I said so.
So the judge asked how I plead to the charges, I told her no contest. She asked did anyone present or any officer of the court ask you to plead this way. I told her, yes, the bailiff did. She threw her gavel in the air and asked the bailiff to approach. He winked at me.
Turns out that the Judge was best friends with the woman I got into an accident with. That woman worked in probation and had friends at the jail. I was about to sent to jail and have the sh!t kicked out of me daily for as long as they could keep me there. The bailiff saved me from that. The case was transferred to another court.
So I got a public defender and I'm going through the courts, they don't want to prosecute until the civil lawsuit that was filed against me was settled. Plus her lawyers never showed up in court. The judge kept continuing the case. Meanwhile my fiance kept getting more and more distant and angry with me. We almost never saw each other. I still had a night job driving delivery. I finish, jump on BART (local transit) go to her house and crash in her bed while she was at work during the day. Then she'd come home, wake me up, I'd go home and shower and change and get ready for work again. I had dropped out of the college I was in and started at a 2 year vocational college instead. It was hard fitting that in as well.
I was finally offered a deal by the judge, 5 days community service or take it to a trial, which assured me I would be found not guilty. I told him I was as tired of seeing him as he was of seeing me and I'd just take the 5 days community service. He smiled and said DONE! Right after this I got a call from my fiancee. She said she wanted time to find herself and figure out if we really had a future together. Uh, what?
So turns out she dumped me for a sailor she had met at work. She had been seeing us both for some time. I was heartbroken. I still loved her. I thought with my legal troubles over (though I still had a lawsuit to pay off) that things would be better. Nope. She was gone and that was that. I fell into my darkest time ever. The pain was unbearable to me. I finally tried to slash my wrists.
Luckily I wasn't very good at that. I called my best friend M (a woman who was more like my sister and probably loved me more than my sisters). She called me an idiot in her loving way and came over and helped me clean up the blood and bandage everything up. Luckily I didn't hit a vein. She was a big comfort to me in the following months. We hung out a lot, went places, just had fun. I started hanging out with my old friends a lot too. That's when I started hearing stories from M and my friends about things my fiance had done or said to them. Apparently she was a real b!tch to them. She was actively trying to drive a wedge between them and I. I was so twitterpated I couldn't see it. I learned a lot about her from them.
I started trying to get more active in my church. Getting back to singing in the choir again and playing handbells. And I started trying to get to know a certain young woman named C a little better. C had actually gotten me in trouble when I was still engaged. My fiance caught me looking at her during a handbell practice and I heard no end of it. It turns out C would play a huge part in my life.
I started trying to get to know C. At first she tried to politely avoid me. We sometimes rode the same bus from BART and I would try to talk to her, she'd be polite but no dice. However, soon we started talking at church. My life was getting better my court troubles were behind me and I now had a stable good paying job. I worked swing shift which was never really busy. I would go over to one of the phone booths in another building in the plant and call her. The calls started out every other week, then weekly, then daily. We would talk for hours. I just loved her voice. So soft and sweet. She was so kind in listening to my troubles and I tried to listen to hers.
I asked her out a couple of times. We went to movie and walked around Tilden Park. Then she said she felt like this was a time that she couldn't be dating in her life. I respected that and just talked to her on the phone some more. I asked her out again and we started going out and doing things again. Usually regional parks. By this time she had let me kiss her. She had never kissed anyone before me and no one had ever kissed me like she did. Just... wow. But again, I made the mistake of referring to her as my girlfriend and then she told me she didn't want to date at this point in her life. I quickly learned that if I didn't call it dating, she go out with me and make out. Just don't call it a date, and don't call her a girlfriend. Check.
Well, one night her ultra-conservative parents (she was 20) found out she was at my house, with my entire family, AFTER DARK! It was a scandal. They came to the door and demanded she leave with them immediately. I didn't see her again for almost 2 months. They took her back to their home country to talk sense into her I guess. I was devastated. Her friends really became my friends at that point and consoled me and cheered me up noting that she had one more year of college to complete, they would have to let her come back.
And she did. I waited until she'd been back a week before I called her. She almost didn't want to talk to me. I just laid it on the line. I told her that I loved her and wanted to be with her forever. I told her I wanted to see her. She was reluctant but agreed. When we saw each other there was a brief pause but then we were all over each other, rolling around on the floor even. The C I knew came back to herself and she told me she wanted to be with me too but didn't know what to do.
That's when I asked her to marry me. She told me her parents would NEVER agree to that. I told, I know. I asked her again to marry me, that I would plan everything if she would just agree. Tears welled up and she said yes. Two weeks later I showed up at her house in my truck, helped her pack all her stuff into my truck and her car and we left for Reno. We eloped. Not quite, I took my whole family with me. Mother, father, sisters, everyone but my brother who was still in Georgia. We spent the night before at my sister's house. We spent our first night together in sleeping bags on her living room floor. We didn't sleep a wink, C was so nervous. Nervous about the wedding, nervous about her parents. We had left a note for them and they had gone ballistic calling everyone we knew demanding to know where C was.
We married in Reno, honeymooned in Disneyland, and I was back to work by Monday. I had rented us an apartment and had moved everything there prior to the wedding. We settled into our lives but her parents constantly harassed us. He father threatened and bellowed. Her mother demanded a second wedding that she could attend. So we got married again at our home church. Everyone was ecstatic except for her parents. Her father wouldn't come and her mother had to be helped to her seat because she kept fainting. Ugh.
Things finally simmered down and we tried to be happy with our lives. My wife graduated UC Berkeley and got a job. We moved out of the Bay Area and bought a home. She found a job close to our new home but I was still commuting 2 hours to work both ways. After being married for 5 years we felt like something was missing from our marriage. It had kind of become boring. We tried to travel as money would allow, the sex was great, the freedom was wonderful but we were just kind of bored. We decided it was time for children.
C quite her BC pills and we tried to get pregnant. Nothing happened for months. We tried all the usual stuff; boxers, taking her temperature to determine ovulation, best positions for impregnation. Kind of funny to think about now. Problem was, she was stressed at work. I took her on a long vacation to Florida and when we got back, BAM! She was pregnant! And this instantly healed the rift between us and her parents. ;)
We enjoyed feathering the nest for the new baby. Went to the classes, childproofed the house. Bought baby stuff. All the fun things new parents do. Her labor and delivery was very easy (from the doctor's perspective). She was only in hard labor for 4 hours. And then there he was, my perfect baby boy! We had so many hopes and dreams for him. We were planning his life out for him and he was still in diapers. But my mother and father noticed something. They kept clapping their hands and snapping their fingers by his ears. I told them to cut it out, it was weird. My mother tried as gently as possible to tell me there was something wrong with him and we should get him checked.
Sure enough he had moderate to severe hearing loss. Probably due to a high fever he had when he was 8 months or so. Okay, so we can adapt to this. I used to speak American Sign Language fairly proficiently in college I could pick it up again. Or do we teach him lip reading. At least we were relieved that now his developmental delays could be explained. We were assured his hearing could be corrected via hearing aids and that as soon as he could hear clearly he'd catch right up. Well, he didn't.
We had several evaluations done but most doctors told us to just give him more time, he'd catch up. C pushed and pushed the doctors on it and we finally ended up at UCSF for an evaluation by Bryna Siegel, an autism expert. My mother kept putting the autism bug in our ear because she used to work with autistic kids. Something I never knew until that point. We had S Jr evaluated and sure enough he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and was judged to be on the moderate to severe end of the scale. She very matter of factly told us to never expect him to love us or anyone else and that we better just get used to that fact right now. Ugh.
C went into red alert mode. She started researching the best ways to treat autism and finally settled on an aggressive in home program. We discussed it and she quit her job to stay home and run the program. She blamed herself for a lot of my son's problems even though I pointed out that there was nothing wrong with her that caused him to be this way. This therapy continued for years and took over our lives.
C and I became more and more distant and that's when my problem with computer porn began. C would never refuse sex but it always seemed like her heart wasn't into it no matter how hard I tried. I assumed that she just wasn't attracted to me. I now know she was just flat exhausted but I was too self-centered to see that. She kept telling me that it wasn't me, it was her. She just wasn't in the mood as much as I was. I kept trying to think of ways to make her feel sexier about herself. At one point I talked her into letting me take nude photos of her. She did feel sexy posing nude. I then talked her into letting me share them on some Internet newsgroups that I belonged to. She reluctantly (an understatement) agreed. She got glowing comments on her body. I kept trying to convince her how wonderful that was. She went along with it for a while but later asked me to stop and remove the pictures, which, I did.
It was also at this point I got into an obsession that would take YEARS to get over, wife-sharing.
I became fascinated with the whole wife-sharing porn thing. I liked looking at real women, not the plastic stretched Barbie dolls you see in porn. Real women, real wives. There was a taboo aspect of getting to have someone that wasn't mine to have. I read wife sharing stories, I visited wife sharing sites. I started sharing these fantasies with my wife. At first she didn't believe that I was actually turned on by that stuff. But once she believed me, she allowed herself to be turned on by that. She loved the fantasy too. It made sex hotter for us.
But I always push the envelope. At some point I started getting involved in swinger websites. Chatting with them, trying to find out how they convinced their wives to get involved in swinging. This was all under the guise of trying to spice up our sex life. She told me she was completely satisfied. I however, didn't believe her. My own low self-esteem wouldn't let me believe her. How could anyone be satisfied with me?
Eventually I started talking to her about swinging and how free and liberating it would be. She slowly accepted the idea and was even turned on by the notion of sexual freedom. I tried my best to make it sound wonderful and she bought into it. Eventually we even tried a swingers club. It was full of really skanky scary people. However, we did meet a nice couple there and kept in contact with them. I asked her if she would possibly like to hook up with them at some point. She wasn't sure so we talked to them on the phone for a while. Eventually the OM and my wife would talk on the phone and OW and I would talk. It was like dating again it seemed so fun.
We eventually planned a date night with them at a local hotel. OM was a really nice guy, bigger than me so I figured C would have a good time. OW was really sexy and pretty and really boosted my self esteem. Until our clothes came off. Here I was rolling around on this hot sexy woman and... nothing was happening. I never had ED in my life but it just wasn't happening that night. Eventually it did and we had sex. The four of us had sex in every permutation you can imagine (except for OM and I).
At the end of the evening OM/OW were satisfied but ultimately unhappy with us. They were unhappy because they could tell C and I weren't really all that happy. We felt like crap. C felt used and degraded. I felt disappointed and dirty. She didn't do any of the things that turned me on, wouldn't listen, and then got mad that I wouldn't kiss her after she sucked her husband's d!ck.
Afterwards C said this has to stop. I was resistant. I thought that if only we could find the right couple this could be fun and I kept up the search. C was despondent. It was at this point that she fell out of love with me. She later told me that she was about to ask me to move out so we could begin a trial separation. But she decided to try prayer first. We had left the church and left God to pursue our lifestyle, my lifestyle. C turned fully back to God and prayed for me several times a day.
Eventually I had a heart change. I could see that there really wasn't a woman out there that was better than C. But how could she settle for me? I decided that I would just have to take her at her word. I asked for her forgiveness, I even washed her feet, seriously. Just to show her I wanted to be her husband again to be a servant/leader if she'd have me. she forgave me with open arms.
Just prior to the whole swinging excursion our daughter A was born. As difficult as it was to get pregnant with our first, our second was just wham bam. I came home from flying one day, C was in heat, she demanded I take her right there on the couch, and bam. Preggo. A has been the source of light for C and I. Always happy, always singing, always sweetness. She still is even today. When she doesn't have PMS that is. :) I mean how many 15 yo daughters hang around talking with their dads at night playing Angry Birds in Space together? I love her so much.
C and I started back to church again. We changed churches a few times until we found our current church. Our faith grew, our love for each other grew. I became a leader in the church. I helped our church through some crises. C and I grew closer and closer to each other and the Lord. However, the specter of wife sharing lingered in the back of my mind.
C and I tried to be good and keep our sexual fantasies clean. But she enjoyed the fantasy too, just didn't want the reality. I just read that as, she would do it if it was the right situation. Plus, during the throes of sex, she would say as much. But afterwards would always say that's just talk to turn me on. We tried for years and succeeded but I still had that wife sharing desire. I convinced myself it was because I loved watching her. I mean I thought she was the most beautiful woman on this earth, I still do! I loved watching her in the throes of passion, she's gorgeous. I convinced myself that I could watch her enjoying sex with another man without distracting myself.
We came close to actually doing a threesome a couple of times. I would take out ads on adult websites and show her the men who were interested in having sex with her. Of course there were many. A few of them actually surprised her at how ripped and handsome they were. I wasn't surprised. Inside I felt she deserved a better looking man than me anyway. I couldn't understand why she settled for me. To my shame I have to admit to this fantasy and almost making it a reality has been ongoing until last year. Even after I joined TAM. She was even ready to go through with it as recently as last fall. We were actually talking to guy on the phone and setting ground rules.
Then we had a heart to heart. She wanted to know why I really wanted to do this. I came clean. I poured my heart out to her all the reasons and secret feelings I had never shared with her. I won't share them all because some are for her and her alone to know. But the big eye opener her and I is that I never felt loved because she always seemed to avoid my d!ck when we made love. (At this point all the ladies of TAM are saying, "Again with the d!ck why is it always about the d!ck, what is it with you guys?)
She seemed surprised and denied she avoided it. I asked her to tell me what she does. She couldn't remember and we had just made love the prior night. I explained how I felt. That part of my body is how I fully experience her, that part of my body is how I become one with her, that part of me physically links me to her. That if she couldn't love that part of me, I just felt it as overall rejection. That everything I had done in our marriage to try to tear it apart was really just a sh!t test. To finally prove to myself that she didn't really love me after all. Sure I was a good provider, a funny clown to make her laugh, but not someone she was sexually attracted to.
And then she kissed me. It was the most loving sensuous kiss I have ever felt in my life. She didn't say anything, just held my face in her hands and looked at me. I started bawling like a baby. Every bad thought I had ever had toward myself came out in those tears. And at that point I knew I didn't want to share her with anyone. I didn't want her to kiss anyone like that. That was for me and me alone. After I collected myself I told her. No more. I'm not sharing you. It's done. Then it was her turn to cry. She was so relieved. She was only doing it for me. I thought I was doing it for her. We were both stupid.
And from that moment last year I have never wanted to share her. And from that moment she finally understood why I never felt good enough. She asked me to forgive her for that. Can you imagine? The next day she gave me a bj. She's never wanted to do that because of her TMJ. She doesn't seem to have TMJ anymore, maybe because she's practiced so much. I tried to stop her because I wasn't feeling like myself afterwards. I felt like they were mercy bj's. I even started a thread on it. She finally convinced me that she was doing that because she never really thought of my d!ck as the way I explained it to her. That she finally "got" it. She was trying to show that part of me that connects me with her the love she felt for me. And when she thought of it like that, her TMJ didn't kick in. She's finally convinced me that she truly does love me for who I am.
And that pretty much brings us up to now. Sex is amazing now. Our marriage is stronger than ever. I love being around her more than ever. We date, we talk at night, we walk in the afternoons. I credit C and her prayers for keeping our marriage together, for keeping our family together. She put up with me, she put up with years of training, and homeschooling our two children, she put up with years of angry, self-injurious behaviors by my son (even up to today) and nothing but love has ever come from her. I guess there are no warts in this story after all. C has made them all non-existant.
C, you have my heart forever.
Put the internet to work for you.
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