Trying to Understand Myself

For the past few years I’ve been struggling with an intense internal conflict surrounding my sexuality, identity, attraction patterns, and my relationship. What began as occasional doubts turned into constant overthinking, emotional checking, fear, guilt, and confusion that now affects how I experience both myself and my partner. A major turning point was a series of recurring dreams involving women that felt emotionally significant, almost like an “awakening” or subconscious revelation. Even though the dreams themselves were not always deeply sexual or romantic, they made me fear that I was secretly lesbian and had been unknowingly living a lie. After that, I started constantly analysing my past relationships, attraction, fantasies, and emotions looking for certainty about who I really am. I’ve realised I’ve had a repeating pattern in relationships with men. After around 2–3 years I begin losing sexual intensity and emotional excitement, feeling disconnected, uncomfortable, emotionally flat, or like something is “wrong.” Instead of understanding this as attraction fluctuation or emotional burnout, I automatically interpreted it as evidence that I must actually be lesbian. I would spiral, detach, leave, or obsess over my sexuality, only to later become attracted to another man again and repeat the cycle. At the same time, my attraction to women has always been genuine and emotionally meaningful. I dated and flirted with girls secretly as a teenager because my Christian family would not have accepted it. Attraction to women often feels more emotionally intense, exciting, emotionally charged, or like “fireworks,” whereas attraction to men has generally felt more stable, grounding, emotionally safe, and consistent — but less intense. I’ve had over 100 experiences with boys/men and often moved quickly from one relationship to another, rarely staying single long. During long-term relationships with men I sometimes downloaded lesbian dating apps or flirted with women, which later became “evidence” my brain used against me during periods of doubt. My current relationship has complicated everything further. My boyfriend is 11 years older, has a lower sex drive, rarely pursues me sexually, and we only have sex around once a month. Over time the relationship became emotionally safe but lower in erotic energy, novelty, and excitement. Because I seem highly responsive to intensity, desire, pursuit, and emotional charge, attraction toward women became associated with novelty and excitement while my relationship became associated with pressure, guilt, emotional monitoring, and fear. Now I constantly monitor my feelings toward my partner. If I don’t immediately feel romance, desire, or warmth when he touches me, my brain interprets it as proof that I no longer love him or that I’m secretly gay. I often feel emotionally numb, disconnected, avoidant, guilty, and terrified that I’m deceiving him. At the same time, when we actually do have sex, it usually feels genuinely good and connected, which makes it difficult to believe my attraction to men was never real. I strongly relate to concepts like bisexuality, “bi-cycles,” Relationship OCD (ROCD), and Sexual Orientation OCD (SO-OCD), especially the compulsive checking, fear of uncertainty, mental auditing of the past, and constant need for certainty about my sexuality. Learning about attraction fluctuation and obsessive thought loops gave me temporary relief because it helped me realise attraction is not always stable, equal, or emotionally loud across genders.