Pretty pretty sure this is a rerun of a rerun. Now, how about a goddam Guest Columnist? Quit being so stingy, Mr. Savage, and let a G.C. fill in and you be their little mentor. This "vacation" shit is really old, especially when there are budding writers and advice columnists waiting for a break. Man up, Mister!

Have to agree Dan. I don't know any columnist who reruns as much as you do! You are a big time writer now -- do your readers a solid! We can all read the archives -- and probably have.

If I was her, I'd keep sleeping with the acquaintance. Grad students are too busy to pursue relationships much, anyway, and a good hookup might be just what they both want.

Fuck the rerun thing, I'm just outraged at your endorsement of Jager shots, Dan.

Of course, if lining up a guest columnist is just too damn much work while you're "on vacation", you could just print a couple new interesting letters & toss them to US (aka the peanut gallery) for comments/advice/mockery/...

Yeah, Dan seems to take as much vacation as Jon Stewart.

Is Stewart off this week for Easter?

At least Dan is not smoking crack cocaine and then lying about it.

I'm completely jealous at the amount of 'vacation' this guy takes.

It seems to me that Dan only every really committed to one new column a week. That's what Savage Love always was. Anything else is just a bonus.

If we're going to reclaim "slut", then maybe there should be an alternate, sex-positive spelling of it, so that people can see that it's being reclaimed.

I propose, 'slyt"

Can't the interns find some letters from way, way back like the pre-internet 90s to rerun? That would be more interesting.

Agreed with 1 and 2, this "vacation rerun" crap is really getting old. If Dan doesn't want to do it, don't post these reruns.

Dan also really needs to accept some proven evolutionary psychology:

Women are attracted upwards only (due to high cost of egg), Men are attracted up, down, and around (cheap and plentiful sperm.)

A man who allows a woman to stray will most likely see her drop him for an upgrade.

This is true for humans, chickens, monkeys, horses, bower birds, whales, and more.

PSA: The stranger's "edit comment" button doesn't work.

I wanted to note that my advice in my comment #14 is my own opinion but the science exists, you can see it in a survey done on OKCupid. Women on average rated 80% of men as ugly, men on average related 30% of women as ugly.

I agree with the other complaints about the reruns. If Dan's going to do reruns, he should pull some old-ass letters out or do where-are-they-now style follow ups. Or both.

Indighost, I kind of think that you're over-interpreting the OKCupid stat. That set of statistics, to my mind, said a lot about how the sexes view and message according to looks in completely different ways. The men had a fairly accurate opinion of women's looks (a nice bell curve) but their messaging patterns indicated that they would only message the women on the super-hot end of the spectrum. So on OKCupid at least, men are only willing to spend their cheap sperm in the most perfect specimens of beauty. Whereas the women were more discerning about looks but more likely to message guys they didn't think were all that good-looking, which seems to me like it tells us that looks are not the primary standard for men that women want to date.

What's more, to look to OKCupid data for "proven evolutionary psychology" is a little dubious. All this OKCupid data really says is how men and women (the vast majority of which are white and American in this sample) deal with selecting mates in THIS era. There's no reason to believe its an evolutionarily-instilled behavior, especially since there are several good reasons to believe that this is affected by environment/culture.

In addition, that data is about people messaging others on the open marketplace. It isn't about what makes people stay or leave. What I'm inclined to conclude (though this is opinion only) from the OKCupid data is that women are less likely to have one-night stands not just because of the stigma of being a slut, but because they find fewer men attractive enough to go for it compared to the number of women straight guys think are sufficiently hot to sleep with (yes, the men only messaged the hottest women, but I'm pretty sure most men would settle for sleeping with a girl in the "good-looking" part of the spectrum if she messaged him).

Also, if we're going to attribute anything to evolution in those OKCupid stats, I'd say it's the low value women put on looks in terms of messaging men. The egg in itself is not really high-cost; it's high-cost compared to the sperm, but really, the egg happens once a month, and very few end up getting fertilized. The expensive part is the pregnancy and birth. Maybe a woman needs to make sure that the baby's father (or at least someone at all) is around to protect her and help her find food when she's pregnant and post-partum, or do that for the baby if she dies. It's not surprising that good looks are not a good predictor for women about whether or not that's going to work.

I think women might be likely to sleep with an "upgrade" as you put it, but I don't necessarily think leaving the stable mate would be evolutionarily favored.

Thanks for the thoughts though, this makes for a discussion that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

@12-it looks like it needs to be pronounced "slit".

@14 "A man who allows a woman to stray will most likely see her drop him for an upgrade."

Evidence for that, besides your imagination? If the other people she sleeps with are insecure, controlling, and jealous (ICJ), then she may not see them as "upgrades" on the guy she already has, who has demonstrated that he's not ICJ. Unless of course she only values men who are ICJ, in which case she wasn't compatible with the first guy anyway, and it just took them some time to figure that out.

In my case, I slept with a lot of guys the first couple of years that we opened our marriage, and then I figured out that, generally, I was wasting my time, and I'd rather be alone on the couch with cold pizza and a new episode of Game of Thrones than out with a new guy. The sex was blah and the guys were too, for the most part. Partially that's because my body isn't great at sex -- especially with a new person, I'm very unlikely to come without a lot of effort and/or alcohol, but then if I'm wasted, it's hard to get home again after the date. And partially it's because I'm an introvert, who does okay meeting new people but doesn't see dating as fun for its own sake.

@18--That's really interesting. I had assumed from previous posts that you had found your calling in open marriage and were still enthusiastically pursuing the options.

I'm intrigued because Mrs. Bloomer reached the same conclusions as you have, but she packed it in after meeting only a handful of guys, and sleeping with just a couple of them (culled from an initial offering of literally hundreds). She had decided it was our poky small town and its lack of variety that produced so many duds for her to date, and gave up on the whole thing as not worth the effort of pursuing. Interesting that you in a large centre (are you? I'm assuming) with more to choose from came up equally dissatisfied with the whole experience. Hmm.

Well, I am enthusiastically pursuing my options -- but that means BDSM parties, with no orgasms. (Some people at the parties have orgasms, but not in scenes I've been involved in so far. Maybe in the future.)

At some point I just realized that I look back fondly on almost every interaction I've had that involved BDSM and the BDSM subculture. I'm really tweaked that way.

While I look back with distaste on most of the sexual interactions which began off OKCupid or AdultFriendFinder or the like. I don't know if the guys look back fondly on the sex we shared, but it wasn't great for me. Even the one guy with whom I had an ongoing friends-with-benefits relationship for about a year...At some point he began teasing me for being a goody-two-shoes, not like the really wild women he was also seeing. So, fuck that noise. Also, I caught HPV (whether through my adventures or my husband's is impossible to tell). Still working on fighting that off, so sex with new people isn't high on my agenda these days. But I don't miss it, either, the way I would miss regular BDSM play if that had to stop.

Oh, also wanted to add that I do like the fact that if I hit it off with a guy, sex is not off the table. I do like being able to flirt a little more than a married woman is "supposed" to; maintaining eye contact with the cute bartender, that sort of thing. It's nice to know that I could take it further, even though now I generally don't.

@21. I wonder if your "meh" attitude (for lack of a better term) might not be in part due to the removal of the forbidden, if you follow. That it's enough to know you can. When my boyfriend and I first started up (he of long term imposed celibacy), I offered him the option of seeing other women, the better to know what he wanted and to be sure he never felt that he had either settled or wondered what else might be out there for him.

But I got involved in a mate for life kinda guy:

The discussion practically made him cry. I brought it up again and he asked me not to mention it again. But I still think it would've worked and I do think that knowing he had that option pleased him.

At any rate it's good know that I still agree with Dan, just as I did when I read this letter back when.

@20--I'm sorry to hear about the HPV, but I think it's fantastic that you've found something exciting and kinky that works for you. I guess that's the happy ending, but one you might not have envisioned at the start.

As for us, I know exactly what you mean @21, so if we ever open our marriage again it would probably be something more along those lines, something more relaxed and organic than the OKC and AFF business. We're both kind of shy so there's almost zero chance of success, but like you say, half the excitement is just knowing that it could go farther if the opportunity ever arose. Things would have to fall pretty exceptionally into place.

EricaP--I am sorry to hear about your diagnosis of HPV. I have always been so appreciative of the way you openly share your experiences with non-monogamy, both good and bad, in this forum.

I hope you don't mind my asking whether you had been vaccinated, as I seem to remember in some other thread you mentioned that you had been. Do you know whether the strain you have is covered by the vaccine? My understanding is that the immune response in "older" women isn't as good as in adolescents, which is one reason why the vaccine is targeted to girls and young women, but of course there are also many other strains not (yet) covered by the vaccine.

Thanks for being a resource for the 40-something set.

I thought about being vaccinated but my doctor didn't advise it at my advanced age (40s). I got the high risk kind, not the warts. Doesn't really have any consequences, except more frequent paps.

Thanks for your good wishes, KN and LateBloomer

"My question is, if I'm just looking for casual sex or a one-night stand, should I make it clear that we're just going to have sex and I'm not interested in dating? How much should I tell the person I'm trying to pick up about a significant other they won't ever meet?"

I think this letter writer is unnecessarily conflating factors. Imagine asking the first question in the context of not having a boyfriend at all. The answer is still the same. If you meet someone new and lead them on, getting them excited about you and getting their hopes up about a relationship with you, when you know perfectly well that you have no intention of it ever developing into something real, you are being an asshole.

@14 "Women are attracted upwards only (due to high cost of egg), Men are attracted up, down, and around (cheap and plentiful sperm.)"

And there comes another insecure monogamist woman-hater, a defender of traditional marriage where women-shan't-sleep-around but men-can-because-sure-they'll-come-back.

Women who are independent financially are NOT attracted "upwards only". They make their own money and they're able to provide for themselves and their eventual offsprings. They're free from the tyrany of having to alienate theirselves to a male, not to die or see her offsprings die of hunger.

As for the high cost of eggs, yeah right. Every month another egg goes down the toilet and that should be a tragedy for me, according to you, I guess ? Well, I. don't. even. care. Evolutionary psychology is mostly bullshit by guys who let their guy bias guide them, in order to have science bend and tell them that women, they're so much unlike us ! Let's not let them live as free as us !

"Allowing" a woman to stray ? There are usually two *equal* people in a relationship, and agreeing to the relationship being non-exclusive, is not one domineering male partner giving an extra allowance to the submissive female one.

And then, you think all what women want in life is one single male partner, and you see non-exclusivity as a ploy for a female to sneakily shop around for "an upgrade". Time for you to learn that for polyamory or monogamishamy women, even the most wonderful guy in the world is a hell of a downgrade, if he's a strict monogamist, or a "traditional monogamist" - read, traditional egostist - like you.

@LateBloomer, EricaP

I am not inside a marriage but I'm still enthusiastic about having several relationships at once - maybe because it doesn't happen much to me. I reached three concurrent relationships once, for a few months, and now I'm down to either one or none.

I didn't take the meeting sites route though, I only approach guys/let guys approach me whom I knew in real life, and for already some time. They think of me as single before they approach me, so they do ; and I see how it could be much more difficult for a married couple to use the real-life venue to find suitable partners. But so far, each sexual encounter has been pretty nice to very satisfying for me, there wasn't any dud as far as sex goes. As for relationships, I cut ties with one who was good in bed but otherwise an entitled idiot (the anal-pushing guy). The others I'm totally friends with.

@sissoucat, maybe your body is better at getting pleasure from sex than mine is. I tend to get stuck in my anxieties; bdsm is intense sensation which takes me out of myself and into the moment. I know others can do that through sex, but I generally don't. Glad you've been enjoying yourself!

@EricaP

I sure don't know how good my body is at getting pleasure from sex compared to yours. I was anorgasmic until 35, when I was first introduced to oral sex practiced on women. I've had severe anxieties in the past, but after knowing people a long time before I approach them (typically several months), and after having hoped for/dreamt of our encounter several times, I seem to have not much anxiety in the act nowadays. I hope it lasts.

It's great that you've found unambiguous pleasure for your body in sensations in BDSM. It's a relief we're all different, otherwise how boring human life would be ; I wish you every continued enjoyment and fun in your prefered activities !