Until last night, I thought I had a pretty clear picture of my boyfriend. We live together, we’ve been together almost three years, and I’ve always understood him to be straight. Then I asked whether he had any OnlyFans accounts.
He said no. Something in his voice sounded like a lie to me, so I took his phone and tried logging in with his email addresses. That was how I found two old accounts, both from before we started dating.
The content I found featured trans performers. As far as I could see, every account he followed did. I kept looking for something different, as though one more scroll would make the discovery easier to understand. It didn’t.
When I asked him about it, he said he preferred that content to watching a man and a woman together. I already knew he liked watching women together, but his explanation still left me confused. I couldn’t work out how it fit with what I thought I knew about his attractions.
Neither of us is hostile toward trans or gay people. I don’t want my surprise to sound like I think there’s something wrong with the performers. But I was surprised, and underneath that surprise was a much more personal fear: What if the body he wants looks nothing like mine?
That thought arrived fast. Suddenly I was questioning whether he had ever really been attracted to me, whether I’d misunderstood something important, whether our relationship had been giving him a way to appear a certain way to everyone else. Those are fears I’m having, not things I’ve discovered to be true.
The accounts predate us. His answer last night happened inside the relationship we have now. I’m struggling to separate those two things, especially because I went looking after deciding I didn’t believe him.
We still live together. We still have nearly three years behind us. I just don’t know what to ask him next that will get me closer to understanding, instead of giving me something else to worry about.
