My boyfriend and I are in college and doing the long-distance thing until June 2013. Over the years, he’s granted me increasing amounts of freedom to be intimate with women—I’m female, and date women while we’re apart—but I still don’t have full autonomy. It’s much better than it used to be, but lately another one of my “needs” has been eating at me: my masochism. He’s repeatedly refused me permission to let someone lay into me with a flogger. That’s all I ask!
I don’t even want to have anything sexual with the person who flogs me! I just want them to beat me! And this might be relevant: He has the freedom to do whatever he wishes but—God only knows why—he never indulges in anything more than the odd vanilla woman here and there. Also, I’m not allowed to attend fetish clubs because he knows I’ll make bad choices if I do (I’ll play!), but the burner and fetish scenes are converging here in Los Angeles and I’m going to get in trouble soon!
University Pain Slut
You’ve given your boyfriend permission to do who he wants, what he wants, when he wants. But you’re not allowed to do half of humanity—the male half—or get your ass beat at a BDSM club?
That hardly seems fair, UPS.
But my knees don’t automatically jerk when I hear about a couple with an arrangement that appears to be “unfair” on its face. If Person A enjoys more “freedom” than Person B, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Person B is being wronged. Some people get off on the tension that an erotic power imbalance creates, and nothing says “you’re in charge” quite like your partner having the freedom to do people and things that you’re not allowed to do. Or maybe the idea of you being with other men makes the boyfriend feel threatened and insecure, while the idea of him being with other women turns you on. If that’s the case, UPS, then you’re not doing something that makes him unhappy (sleeping with other men) while he’s doing something that makes you happy (sleeping with other women).
For me, UPS, it comes down to this: If you’re happy—if you’re getting off on your unfair deal—then I’m happy.
But are you happy? Or are you still happy? If this deal isn’t working anymore, UPS, then it’s time to negotiate a new, perhaps slightly fairer deal. His insistence that you mess around only with other girls while you’re apart is understandable—I don’t think it’s fair, UPS, but I can understand it—but the “no flogging” rule seems ridiculously arbitrary. Battle your sexual submissiveness and negotiate from a position of strength: Tell your boyfriend that you’ll continue to stick to his no-other-dudes rule on the condition that he lift his silly flogging ban.
I’m a 21-year-old college student living in San Diego. I have some sex-related issues/questions that I’d like to talk with a counselor about. These issues are complicated—porn consumption, sex work, ability to orgasm, etc.—but I hesitate to go through my insurance; since I’m still on my parents’ plan, that would involve me talking to my parents about this. They are very nosy and also very traditional, so I can only imagine the shitstorm. Is my university health care something that would cover this? Would my university report back to my parents about what I was seeking counseling about?
Uneasy Collegian Seeks Discretion
Rules about patient confidentiality apply even to college students, UCSD, so your student health center is not going to rat you out to mom and dad. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
“I want your reader to know that care provided at UCSD Student Health Services and the Counseling and Psychological Services is confidential,” writes Regina Fleming, director of Student Health Services at the University of California, San Diego. “We don’t bill insurance for visits to Student Health, though sometimes the cost of lab tests are put on the student’s account; these charges do not specify what type of tests were done. [And] all services at our Counseling and Psychological Services are free.”
My girlfriend of four years cheated on me. I’m in college now; we’ve been dating since high school. She and a male friend hooked up four times when they were both drunk. This guy was supposed to be her best friend, and it turns out he was into her. I asked her once about their relationship, and she assured me that nothing had or ever would happen between them. That was a few weeks after she cheated on me. She rationalizes the events in a manner that makes her seem like she’s not to blame and she constantly tells me how much she really loves me. Do I hook up with another girl and tell her about it?
Cucked Over College Kid
No, COCK, you don’t hook up with another girl. You ask yourself this question: How many adults—people over 30—do you know who are still with and/or married to their high-school sweethearts? The answer is either zero or approaching zero. A breakup was inevitable-ish all along, COCK, and now seems like a pretty good time to pull the plug. And while your girlfriend is telling you she loves you, and while she may still have feelings for you, she’s slamming her hand down on the self-destruct button because—consciously or not—she wants out, too.
In your advice to The Straight Best Man, you suggested that the first gay couples to legally wed in both Canada and the United States ended up divorcing, and that this fact was largely unknown because anti-divorce and anti–gay marriage evangelical Christians have essentially dodged the issue in a bid to divert attention from their own spectacularly high rates of marriage implosion.
While the first American same-sex marriage ended in divorce, I can happily report that the first legal same-sex marriages in Canada are still going strong 10 years later. A gay couple, Joe Varnell and Kevin Bourassa, and a lesbian couple, Anne and Elaine Vautour, were married in a joint ceremony on January 14, 2001, at Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto (MCCT). At that time, the government was still refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. To solve this problem, the church, on advice from their legal team, did an end run around the pre-authorized license requirement, using the ancient, but perfectly legal, Christian tradition of proclaiming the banns of marriage. While the government refused to register the marriages as valid, on June 10, 2003, the Ontario Court of Appeal declared that the marriages had been legally performed, and ordered the Province of Ontario to register them immediately. The court also ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and ordered the province to begin issuing marriage licenses for same-sex couples that same day.
Both couples remain happily married, having renewed their vows in a public ceremony at MCCT on the occasion of their joint 10-year anniversaries earlier this year.
Nice Thing To Be Wrong About, Eh?
I’m happy to stand corrected—I’m delighted—and I’d like to send my belated congrats to Joe & Kevin and Anne & Elaine on the occasion of their 10th anniversaries. Here’s to many, many more happy years together!
Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.
It’s so ridiculous to state how much a person should or should not post. And if a person states a problem they’re having in the thread, its a fairly safe assumption that they’d like advice about it.
Unfortunately, a person is only able to give advice based on their own experiences or the experiences of people around them. Even an advice columnist grows over the years because the more questions they’re asked, and the more scenarios they’re offered, the better they are able to hone their answers.
No one is required to take the advice of anyone who posts here. It’s offered as an option. Sure. it may not apply to everyone who reads it, but there may be some who can find what they need. And if several people are giving advice, it’s possible to piece together what you need from the various answers.
It’s so easy to avoid someone’s posts if you don’t like them. I’ve seen the back and forth between EricaP and Hunter78 in almost every thread. It’s a shame that it had to come to that. Instead of looking @ Hunter as a troll, I prefer to think of him as playing devil’s advocate. And, actually, I’ve seen him give what I’d consider to be good advice, though it’s usually more short and “sweet” than Erica. She’s given good advice as well. I’ve seen the thread where the feud started, and I’d agree that some posts were uncalled for, but isn’t the point here for us to be able to discuss the issues in the letters and that others post in the thread. Picking at each other doesn’t really accomplish anything other than taking up space.
My, my there are so many regulars here and yet it’s always Ms. EricP who is expected to justify her continued presence. That seems like quite a compliment to her considering that the trolls don’t even garner that much push back.
Me, I like EricaP’s posts. She is a consistent voice of reason, insight, compassion, experience and maybe a little of whatever it is that makes some of us say, “Oh yeah, baby; that’s what I’m talking about!”
For some people (too many, in fact) their first post is one too many. EricaP has never worn out her welcome in my mind.
@108 By that little bit of logic Rick Santorum is a f–kin’ rock star. Sorry, EricaP. That was probably an unfair comparison, but it was the easiest one to make.
Anyways, she does give some good advice. My tiff is the sheer inconsistency of her general attitude, though its improved lately. Sometimes she’s advocating her own lifestyle choices other times she’s very vocally blaming those same choices for some ill going on in her life. It’s like going on a comment board to discuss legalizing mary jane to have someone say one week “It totally got me thru chemo! Everyone should try it!” to the same person saying “OMG! Pot made me run over my dog!” a week later.
@110
Keeping with your analogy, you don’t hear some GOP candidate griping every week that Santorum shouldn’t be making speeches. Santorum would get that kind of attention only if he was the front-runner.
@111 True, but that’s a competition. I hope the comment thread isn’t slowly morphing into a popularity contest or some kind of bid for the best amatuer sex columnist since the whole reason I come here is to get some perspective on relationships, sex, and etc.
@110: pot has pros and cons — gets you through chemo, but can make you late to work. Non-monogamy too: if one partner is frustrated with monogamy, yes, I think opening up can be a better option than undermining/ending an otherwise strong marriage through lies and/or divorce. But that doesn’t make it a painless option. At that point, there are no painless options.
@105 – because I don’t have that kind of time?
You know, if any given person wants to hold court in the comments section of a popular blog, that is totally fine. No skin off my back, and I am generally entertained.
From my point of view, there is no such thing as someone else Posting Too Much. There probably is, though, posting too much for it to be consistent with a healthy and joyful life, and I know a lot of people get into that territory. It is a little sad, but I guess not as sad as if people didn’t have social networking at all. Maybe?
@113 I understand that there’s pros and cons to every choice. I also understand that there’s no such thing as a painless life and that your lifestyle takes a lot out of you at times, but I still think that the inconsistency you displayed before (one moment the mentor, the next minute the victim) just lends ammo to your critics and makes you come off as disfunctional especially when you describe your lifestyle less as a choice and more as a last ditch effort. Though for awhile now you’ve been more even handed, really sound and rational. I bear you no disrespect or ill will, so please don’t take any offense.
Thanks, everyone, for the overall kindness of the remarks today. Hope that tomorrow we can talk about something else 🙂
@ Erica: “an otherwise strong marriage”
This is the unstated premise right here.
As if a desire to be unmonogamous exists in a magical vacuum. If I were married and my husband spontaenously decided that he should be allowed to fuck other girls? I would not consider that marriage to be “otherwise strong”* I would consider that not strong at all, in any way.
I have no interest in a man who is either
a. too stupid to know that he can’t handle monogamy and gets in a monogamous relationship without realizing that he’s going to fuck it up.
or b. a lying asshole.
It’s like how Dan talks to the men who come in whining about how their girlfriends were bangers when they started dating but now they’ve gotten fat. You go into a relationship with a certain expectation that your partner will (within reason) maintain the qualities that made them desirable in the first place. To do otherwise is false advertising. If a guy tried to pull a monogamy bait n’ switch on me I would show him the door. Period.
* This is assuming that two people are in a relationship where there has been a conversation about monogamous/polygamous tendancies and both partners have agreed that they are monogamous types and want that in a relationship. This is the case with me, but if people enter a relationship without confirming this, what I said doesn’t really apply.
@118, Over decades, people change. Either you change together, or you separate. It’s not complicated in theory, but living through either one (changing together or ending a long marriage) is definitely hard, painful work.
@119 EricaP: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
Oh, God, how do you stay so right on??
Thanks for your great advice and insights and God bless!
And tomorrow is another blog!!!
Sure people change as they age, but often these are subtle maturational changes not massive shifts in a person’s values and personality.
Personality is fairly stable throughout lifetime.
I think a larger problem isn’t people changing, it’s people not knowing themselves well enough.
@119 I do not think this describes your situation very well. “Change together” implies both partners grow and change and accommodate each others changes.
Wasn’t your situation more that your husband went through a sea change and you accommodated it by enduring considerable stress and pain, through panic attacks and tears.
But, it is not just the pain of opening the relationship. It was sprung on you and demanded of you, wasn’t it?
I don’t even know how you would ever remove the stress of not knowing when or with what huge, painful, stressful change your husband will suddenly redefine your relationship AGAIN.
Do you have any reassurance the he won’t do such a thing? Unless you have a compelling reason to believe he won’t do it to you a third time (or fourth, I have been gone a while) I do not see how you could describe such a state of pain, stress, fear and uncertainty as an “otherwise strong relationship”.
What could possibly happen otherwise? What rebar is there that could possibly reinforce concrete that brittle?
@123 you want details? I’ve known the guy since we were both 18, we started dating at 24 and got married at 26. And now we’re 42, with two kids and a mortgage.
When we were first dating, he asked if I’d be okay if he saw an exgirlfriend, who was in town for just the weekend. That was really tough on me, hearing about how he fisted her and how amazing that was, but I coped. Maybe that was a test; in any case, it did provide a context — his desire to open up our marriage didn’t erupt out of nowhere.
In our first years as a married couple, we went to tons of strip clubs and BDSM sex parties together. That stopped for about five years when career and kids became the focus of our lives. But when he hit his midlife crisis 2 years ago and wanted to open the marriage, I can see how from his perspective it was more like returning to our old ways (and stepping things up so they’d feel new and exciting.)
Life provides everyone with stress and uncertainty. Which of our parents will we have to take care of first? What if our kids don’t find jobs or fall in with a bad crowd? What if one of us falls in love with someone else? What about unemployment, or illness, or death, which comes for us all?
I wrote to Dan, in the depths of my pain, and he wrote back (privately) that, in his view, my husband hadn’t done anything worth of “DTMFA.” This was a normal marital crisis we could weather together as a team.
So I remembered how lucky I was to find a partner whose touch and smile still enchant me, decades later. Neither of us is perfect, but we don’t walk away from each other when the hard times come. Our way of helping each other through life may not satisfy your vision of a happy relationship. It works for us.
Oh, and take a look at this, for another example of learning to love more deeply by getting through infidelity:
http://therumpus.net/2011/08/dear-sugar-…
I guess I’m just gambling that I can find better…
Wishing you all the best, mydriasis.
@126
Thanks
@Hunter
No troll feeding today, thanks.
@124: Wow. Thanks for sharing, Erica.
@126: You, too, mydriasis.
Re LW1: There’s a way to get everything you want and nothing you don’t from just one person: Pairbond with a person who wants everything you want and nothing you don’t.
The INSTANT you let in “exceptions” you’re in an untenable position similar to (though not necessarily identical to) LW1.
Once those sharp lines are blurred, at the end of the day EVERYTHING blurs. Which may be just fine for one partner — like the bf here — but is NEVER OK with BOTH partners.
Skip this shit. Enumerate your deal breakers VERY early on: on the first date is prolly too soon, on the fifth date is almost certainly too late. Yeah, you’ll go on a lot of 1st-5th dates that go nowhere — at least nowhere you WANT — but you WON’T end up married for five or ten years to someone who has a need you never even suspected (and might even have accomodated had you only known).
When you’re adult/responsible enough to pay your own health care bills, THEN go ahead and have any kind of sex you want.
As long as you still rely on your parents’/guardians’/government’s dime to clean up the health messes you are very likely to make with blithe promiscuity, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET OVER IT. When you’re adult enough to pay your own way, you’re old enough for potentially harmful sex. I’ll defend (almost) to the death your right to have almost any kind of legal sex you want…so long as you don’t selfishly expect somebody else to pay for the risks that YOU choose to incur.
@Spikey
I think I just threw up in my mouth.
Careful about the health stuff. I’ve had medical situations that were supposed to be confidential, but then summaries were sent to me at my parents’ address (at the time it was my permanent address) and my mom opened my mail. Get a po box or have it sent to a friend.
Lord have mercy people if you think a post’s too long or not relevant to you, then activate your scrolling function. And get a life.
@31 Crinoline, hearing your story I can understand your concerns about privacy. The current regulations are such that even when you sign a release of information from a medical center where you have medical and psychological records, only your medical records will be released unless you specifically request psychological records to be released. Even then, usually only an initial assessment or discharge summary would be released.
As for people being fired for accessing or disclosing private health information, it has definitely happened. Can’t recall off the top of my head which hospital this was, but someplace in LA several staff were fired for accessing records they did not need to access to provide care.
Also, I should add that psychologists usually try to keep their notes really vague, as the kind of info that needs to be documented for billing purposes is pretty minimal, and beyond that, it’s no one’s business what you are being seen for unless there is imminent threat of you killing or seriously harming yourself or someone else.
My wife and I were married in Ontario just after same-sex marriage became legal throughout Canada. We’re approaching our 12th year together, in our 7th year of legal marriage.
I’m sure some same-sex couples divorce, but I think we’re set for the long haul.
My wife and I were married in Ontario just after same-sex marriage became legal throughout Canada. We’re approaching our 12th year together, in our 7th year of legal marriage.
I’m sure some same-sex couples divorce, but I think we’re set for the long haul.