Evan Urquhart

What if the impulse to tell your wife you maybe want to fuck men and trans women isn't really about fucking? What if it's about wanting a deeper emotional connection with your wife?

Heterosexual men are starting to notice the new ideal of openness and honesty and bringing your full self into your lifelong intimate relationships. I think the LW is one of these men. He's jealous of queer honesty and intimacy, and wants that for himself.

This is radical within a traditional view of heterosexual marriage. In that view, men and women are vastly different creatures who must be constantly on guard lest their emotions or desires terrify and disgust their counterpart.

For women, the traditional heterosexual marriage demands you not be too talky, too needy, or too emotional, lest you put off your stoic, emotionally unavailable spouse. For men, the demand is not to have too much sexuality, lest you disgust or frighten your chaste, naive spouse.

The LW wants a more modern ideal, where he can share all of himself with his wife... but he fears rejection. He wants to be able to talk with her about big questions in life. Questions like "If I'd been born 15 yrs later, would I have identified as bisexual?"

"How do I mourn the experiences in life I might have had, if my life had taken a different path?"

His yearning is not, at it's core, about sex, it's about conversation. But sex and sexual attraction is the biggest taboo subject in traditional marriage, so it becomes a stand in for his desire for a deeper and more honest bond with his wife.

So he conceives of this simple binary choice: Does he A) stay silent or B) tell his wife he's attracted to men and trans people and see what happens? (Most likely, what happens is she freaks out.)