I am a 30-year-old woman,
married for five years to a man eight years my senior. Lately I have
become more aware that I am turned on by the idea of bondage,
specifically men locked up in chastity devices. I am ashamed because it
seems pretty perverse and disturbed.

My husband is a pretty dominant alpha-male
type. I am a relatively dominant personality, but I’m a bit submissive
around him in order to keep the peace, as he will not tolerate any
disagreement in certain situations. So I am wondering: Is this new
fetish springing from my frustration at being dominated by the man in
my life, or am I just becoming more aware of my proclivities as I get
older? Is this a sign of a psychological problem? Should I discuss this
at all with my husband?

Turning The Tables

The emotional dynamics in your
marriage—he won’t tolerate disagreement in “certain situations,”
you bite your tongue to avoid conflict—sound a hell of a lot more
perverse and disturbed to me than your growing awareness/acceptance of
your interest in bondage and chastity. Your interest in consensual
power exchange is as sexy as it is common, TTT, and your kinks don’t
require his constant submission, e.g., he’s not tied up once you untie
him, his dick isn’t locked up once you unlock it. His inability to
“tolerate any disagreement in certain situations,” on the other hand,
does require your constant submission.

No relationship lasts unless both partners
are willing to bite their tongues from time to time in the interests of
keeping the peace. But when someone says her husband “will not tolerate
any disagreement in certain situations,” that worries me. The list of
situations in which your husband won’t tolerate disagreement may be
short now, TTT, but if he realizes that he can control you with this
anger, the list is likely to grow. Be careful.

On to your fetish: It sounds like you were
always turned on by the idea of controlling a man; you write that
you’ve become “more aware” of this fetish, which leads me to believe
that you’ve had some awareness all along. Why is it coming to the
forefront now? It could have something to do with hitting your sexual
peak, which women do around 30, and it could be because your kinks go
so strongly against the grain of the established emotional dynamics of
your marriage.

I would encourage you to discuss your kinks
with your husband. They’re not anything out of the ordinary (or the
extraordinary, I should say), and lots of dominant dick
swingers—guys like your husband—secretly fantasize about
submission. The cliché about the high-powered CEO who goes
crawling to a professional dominant to get his ass beaten is a
cliché because it’s frequently true. Your husband could be one
of those guys—but you’ll never know until you ask.

I won’t bore you with the story of my
19 years in a sexless marriage. That must be one of the most common
complaints you get, and you’ve given plenty of good advice on the
topic, some of which I’ll be taking any minute now to keep me from
blowing my head off. What I want to know is, am I… is everyone
entitled to an active sex life?

He Only Really Needs Your Okay

I don’t need the whole story, HORNYO, but
you could’ve bored me with a few relevant details. For instance, has
your marriage been sexless for all 19 years of its existence? Or did
your sex life collapse at some point during those 19 years? Did the sex
end a year ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen?

But to answer your question: No one is
entitled to an active sex life. We are all entitled to freedom of
sexual expression—consensual sexual expression—but to
express your sexuality with others, you have to find or marry or rent a
willing sex partner. And while each has the right to seek sexual fulfillment,* HORNYO, sadly not all who seek shall find. Some
folks are unlucky or unfuckable or wind up trapped in marriages that
always were or have become sexless—which is where compassionate,
understanding sex workers and/or the Ashley Madison Agency (www.ashleymadison.com) come in
handy.

Back to your marriage: If you were doing
something wrong, HORNYO, if you destroyed your wife’s attraction to you
through neglect (or something worse), then you are obligated to make a
good-faith effort to undo the damage. But if the wife cut you off
because she simply isn’t interested in sex anymore—or if she
never was interested in sex—then you are entitled to seek what
sexual fulfillment you can find outside your marriage.

* Offer not good in Saudi Arabia or
Jamaica.

My boyfriend and his best friend are
close. Last summer, I noticed that when my boyfriend gets drunk he
tries to grab his friend’s ass, throws his arm around him, and sits
close to him. Then one day I found a pair of underwear in our bedroom
that belonged to my boyfriend’s best friend. My boyfriend said he
didn’t know how they got there. I figured he and his pal messed around
and he didn’t know how to talk about it honestly because he’s pretty
macho. I was jealous, but I asked myself if I could accept a bi
boyfriend and decided that I could.

So a few days ago, my boyfriend’s best
friend asks me if I tell my boyfriend everything he, the best friend,
tells me. I say no, not necessarily. So he asks me to promise not to
tell my boyfriend what he’s about to tell me. I say that depends. He
brings up the underwear incident and says that he called a prostitute
that night and fucked her in my bed, and that’s why his underwear was
in my room. He tells me that my boyfriend let me think they were gay
for each other rather than tell me that they called a hooker. And he
tells me my boyfriend didn’t touch the hooker—to which I say yeah
right.

Why did he tell me this? And what do I do
with it now? Please give me some advice. I feel like I can’t trust
either of them right now.

Secrets And Deceit

Why would your boyfriend’s best friend come
to you now, SAD, so many months after the Underwear Incident, and tell
you this involved, incriminating, improbable story and then swear you
to secrecy? Either he’s gone rogue on your boyfriend and made up all of
this crap about the hooker in an effort to sabotage your relationship,
SAD, or he and your boyfriend are concerned that you’re onto them and
this is some bizarre effort to cover their tracks, i.e., to offer some
excuse for the sole piece of incriminating evidence that indicates they
may be something more than best friends.

Fucking each other or not, your boyfriend’s
best friend is fucking with your head, and you’re under no obligation
to keep this conversation secret from your boyfriend—and your ass
is more than covered by that “that depends.” Talk it out with your
boyfriend, SAD, and tell him you want the truth. Is he
bisexual—emphasizing that you can live with bi—or is he
gay? Or is he really such a scumbag that he’d tag-team a hooker in your
bed with his best friend? Give him a chance to come clean and/or come
out. And if your gut tells you he’s lying, SAD, end it.

mail@savagelove.net

91 replies on “Savage Love”

  1. This column is one of my favourite reads. Over the years, nothing has kept me more centred. Once again this week, I am reminded that the reason SO MANY people are in completely damaging, fucked-up relationships is simply because they ALLOW their partners to treat them like shit.

    You get the partner you settle for.

  2. #39, when you live with someone and pay an ounce of attention, you eventually learn what type and size of underwear they wear. SAD is condensing her story for the sake of space. She probably found a pair of underwear she didn’t recognize as her boyfriend’s pair and asked him who they belonged to and he probably responded that they were his friend’s underwear. Or, as she was already suspicious of how unusually close and flirtatious her boyfriend and his friend were, she may have just assumed that the strange pair of underwear belonged to her boyfriend’s best friend.

    In any case, the little detail of how she discovered the underwear owner’s identity is irrelevant. The issue is not whether her boyfriend is gay, bisexual, or straight, but whether he thinks it’s okay to cheat on her, as it does not appear from her letter that they are in an open relationship. Sleeping with your best male friend when you are in a monogamous relationship with someone else is no different than sleeping with your best female friend, as far as cheating goes. Also, being bisexual does NOT mean you are incapable of having a monogamous relationship.

    SAD needs to confront her boyfriend and tell him that he should respect her enough to tell her the truth. I suspect the truth is that he has been cheating on her with his best friend. SAD will need to decide whether she wants to stay in the relationship and see if they can work to move past his infidelity and lying, or whether it is a deal-breaker and she should just move on.

  3. @37 — If you can determine the owner of a pair of underwear through “the process of elimination,” you have an altogether unhealthy obsession with elimination.

  4. @46:

    “Finally, they have no ambition, and find it virtuous to remain in their current station (while always complaining about it & blaming others for it.)”

    sounds alarmingly like the same classist rhetoric anti-welfare conservative assholes use. i’m from rural oregon and i don’t call the people from my community “rednecks” i call them ignorant fucks.

  5. I don’t want to justify homophobia, but there’s a reason it’s much more common in poverty-stricken areas (even in the US), and Jamaica is a VERY poor country. It’s also one of the few 3rd world countries where men are MORE marginalized than women, therefore they have to be proud of things like how many women they have f*cked or are f*cking, how many children they have fathered, and how even though they might not have a job or education, at least they are not gay.

  6. @41
    Quoted from your post-“Beenie Mon’s well documented defense when he was queried about his militantly homophobic lyrics was that in Kingston, the only homosexuals in Jamaica are rich white men who come into the ghetto to rape little boys. Sounds like most of the gays I know (sarcasm).”

    Yeah, because there aren’t and have never been any cases of white men (rich or otherwise) traveling to Third World countries to have sex with small children. Gary Glitter and Frédéric Mitterrand are the only men in history to travel to foreign countries to have sex with underage boys, ever. No one else, regardless of racial/cultural background or fetishistic inclination has ever done this. For the entire history of the human race. Ever. So yeah…

    Simply put, homosexual rape (the sex may have been “consensual”, but having sex with children makes it rape by default) was a very common occurence in Jamaica pre-independence. The (for lack of a better word) “charitable” English men would arrive, throw around a few sets of clothing and say a few words about “helping” the poor children of Jamaica, then have their way with any of the children (mostly the boys, almost never the girls) who made the mistake of visiting the private quarters of their benefactors. Jamaicans didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Fuck de bumba clot battymen!”, they learned it by having to tend to the children who were left behind when the sex tourists went home. And it’s quite possible that they’d still visit Jamaica if the local environment wasn’t so hostile to that sort of activity. Unlike Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, Jamaica has the advantages of being closer(8 hour flight versus a 15+ hour flight), cheaper (relatively speaking) and friendlier (English-speaking, conjoined history, similar religious beliefs which allow for proselytizing Christian ministers to sample their targets while wearing the cloth). It’s your right to decry their current behaviours (as I do), but tarring an entire country with the “ignorant homophobe” brush is senseless.

    That being said, I have no problem with LBGTQQ people and their supporters refusing to visit Jamaica or purchase it’s products. Soft diplomacy of that type will work far better to change the minds of the average Jamaican citizen than vilifying them for embracing a distinctively self-destructive mental pattern. If you scream and rant about their actions (while continuing to enjoy their exports), you look like a hypocrite. If you decide to spend your tourism dollars in a friendlier island (say, the Bahamas?) and are adult enough to tell any West Indian acquaintances *why* you’ve decided to avoid Jamaica, the people will vote with their wallets.

    P.S.-Despite all of the sturm und drang, there are a few places in Jamaica in which being gay won’t result in your immediate evisceration/defenestration. I wouldn’t advise straying too far into the non-touristy areas, but the citizens won’t attack the resort areas en masse with flaming torches or anything else.

  7. Ah the asinine best friend, aren’t they fun. He hates you and wishes his buddy were single again so he could go back to being the center of his attention. But he doesn’t want to get in trouble with his friend so he tells you he your bf didn’t touch the hooker, knowing full well you won’t believe that bit. If your bf is siding with this asshole who hates you, dump him.

    Either that or they’re bi and he’s cheating on you. Sounds like a lose-lose.

  8. “My husband is a pretty dominant alpha-male type. I am a relatively dominant personality, but I’m a bit submissive around him in order to keep the peace, as he will not tolerate any disagreement in certain situations. So I am wondering: Is this new fetish springing from my frustration at being dominated by the man in my life…”

    Yet another woman attracted to dominant alpha males who marries one knowing full well what he was like and then turns around and complains about him being dominant.

  10. @26, ARE YOU INSANE???!!!

    i’m seriously baffled by your comment.
    i actually went numb there for a bit. a giant wave of stupidity came over me. wow…just wow.
    i’m ok now. i got a glass of water and caught my breath….but holy shit, i can’t even dissect and breakdown exactly how ‘ignorant’ you sound.

    ugh…please don’t ever post again.

  14. pfft. She doesn’t have to catalog all her bf’s briefs. The easiest way she could know right away is if they were a different SIZE.

  15. You may need to add Uganda to the list of countries where citizens are not free to express themselves sexually; parliament there is in the process of passing a law which would not only criminalize homosexuality, but would penalize anyone who knowingly conceals the fact of someone else’s homosexuality in order to shield them from prosecution. That’s some fucked up shit!

  16. To TTT:

    My husband is very submissive, and I want nothing more than for him to be dominant in the bedroom. This is something we’re working on, because of his natural submissiveness, but my biggest turn on is for him to take total control and leave me no options in bed. However, if he did this IRL, I would be quite upset, as it would change the whole dynamic in our relationship. So I think it’s perfectly normal to want the opposite in the bedroom from what you have in your relationship. I bet your husband does too, but maybe start off light… little dominance games moving up to the whole chastity belt thing.

  17. Throwing an arm around a friend or sitting close is not exactly homosexual behavior — it is normal behavior for straight boys too, bred out of American young men by homophobia. Grabbing ass might indicated gayness, but can also be childish horsing around.

  19. Great advice, Dan. I’m really curious about SAD. I wanna know what happenssss!

    And it sounds like HORNYO just wanted it in writing: “LOOK! Dan Savage said I could fuck other girls! It’s not MY fault!”

  20. What happened to the promised excoriation of some dumbass Indiana high school prinicipal as told on this weeks’ podcast? I was really looking forward to it Dan!
    And I’m surprised the sneaky shit who submitted the pix of the girls monkeying around on their summer break escaped unscathed by your bang-on and tremendously accurate vitriol 🙂

  21. I have read countless times that AshleyMadison.Com is mostly a scam. I don’t want the poor guy taken. That said, he does sound like he just wants Dan’s OK to cheat on his spouse.

  22. Truth is stranger than fiction, I actually believe SAD’s boyfriend’s story because I had a similar thing happen to me many years ago.

    My long-term girlfriend was out of town and I went out drinking with the boys one night. One of my friends stayed over in the spare bedroom and I crashed out in my room. During the night he got horny and called up a hooker. I am a heavy sleeper, especially when drunk, and was oblivious. He was gone the next morning when I woke up and the bed was made. I wasn’t even sure if he spent the night.

    My girlfriend found an empty condom wrapper under the bed about a week later and of course accused me of cheating. I called my friend to find out WTF happened and he told me the story. He even explained the story to my GF, much to his embarrasment, in an attempt to smooth things over but she just thought he was covering for me.

    Her suspicion of me led to our eventual break up about a year later. It’s been ten years and I still think about her, sad how the little things effect life…

  25. @73 – choose your friends wisely, they reflect on you.

    @HORNYO – When I was in a really good relationship, we hit a drought and I started to freak. We did have the “options” talk, and neither of us wanted to end it, so she agreed to the “open” thing… stipulating that she didn’t want to know. I knew that “open” means “open information”, so it was still closed and it was not settled. Then, one Monday morning the “mood” came back. That Friday night she rocked me, and again the next Monday. Sex three times in eight days was a new kind of miracle for us, and things are back to our normal, comfortable 3-a-month rhythm. I’m very glad I stuck it out, because deep down I know I’m not an “open” kind-of-guy and she isn’t the “open” type either. The “options talk” was a very important part of the progression, though, just to air things out. It was hard, it was uncomfortable, but knowing we got through it tells me that we can get through that and other things that may come up in the future, too.

    Sticking things out can be worth it if you do the work. 🙂

  28. @68 (“Throwing an arm around a friend or sitting close is not exactly homosexual behavior — it is normal behavior for straight boys too, bred out of American young men by homophobia. Grabbing ass might indicated gayness, but can also be childish horsing around.”):

    They’re in a gay bar, ignoring their girlfriends whom they aren’t even sitting with. That makes it way more homosexual behavior than in other circumstances.

  29. @34 While I recognize that having a bisexual partner doesn’t automatically open up a relationship and that bisexuals are every bit as capable of being monogamous as anyone else, there’s a few reasons these relationships are more likely to be open than others:

    1) A partner of a bisexual will feel less threatened/jealous by a “rival” who is a different sex. A woman is more likely to feel comfortable with another man than another woman because she recognizes another man with her man is a compliment to, and not replacement for, her.

    2) A heterosexual partner of a bisexual is more likely to be attracted to a third wheel of the opposite sex than a member of their own sex. Most heterosexual men love the idea of a two female threesome, but would only do a two male threesome for the sake of their girlfriends and not themselves. So in a sense, opening up a bisexual relationship is mutually beneficial instead of one person humoring the other.

    Basically, it’s not that bisexuals have more incentive to open up a relationship; it’s that they have less of the reservations that heterosexuals would have.

  32. There’s one more posibility that no one brought up. I thought of it because I saw it happen. Two male best friends, one has a secret crush on the other, which could lead to the ass-grabbing when drunk. The guy who desires his straight friend talks that friend into them doing it together with a woman. “See, I’m not gay, because there will be a woman in the room while I’m getting off on watching your naked body have sex” (ha ha) . The friend goes along with the idea of them sharing a woman, simply because he’s in the mood for sex and the friend is providing a woman. I was lucky enough to be the woman in this ‘manwich’, and it was all great until man-in-love decided to try to slip in kissing his crush while the three of us were hooked up. “Woops, I must have gotten confused and thought I was kissing the girl!”. Yeah, well, eventually the covetted male caught on, and the other guy started to blow a gasket from wanting something he couldn’t have for so long. Their friendship broke up, and I was left feeling very very lucky to have been the woman in this situation, there was great fun ’till the truth became obvious. Anyway, Because SAD says her BF grabs his friend’s ass, but not the other way around, maybe the friend is straight. I’m thinking that maybe SAD’s BF set it up for his friend to have sex at his place so that he could have the opportunity to watch his friend in action. This could explain him not touching the girl, it really could be true. And, the straight friend may be bugged by the idea that someone/anyone thinks he is gay because he is not. In any case, SAD’s BF is not straight, and she could do better than being with a man who will be seeking dick from another sourse after he realizes it will never happen with his friend. Just putting another possibility out there. She doesn’t need to know the exact truth anyway, because she can withdraw from the whole messy drama and get someone new and better.

  33. There’s one more posibility that no one brought up. I thought of it because I saw it happen. Two male best friends, one has a secret crush on the other, which could lead to the ass-grabbing when drunk. The guy who desires his straight friend talks that friend into them doing it together with a woman. “See, I’m not gay, because there will be a woman in the room while I’m getting off on watching your naked body have sex” (ha ha) . The friend goes along with the idea of them sharing a woman, simply because he’s in the mood for sex and the friend is providing a woman. I was lucky enough to be the woman in this ‘manwich’, and it was all great until man-in-love decided to try to slip in kissing his crush while the three of us were hooked up. “Woops, I must have gotten confused and thought I was kissing the girl!”. Yeah, well, eventually the covetted male caught on, and the other guy started to blow a gasket from wanting something he couldn’t have for so long. Their friendship broke up, and I was left feeling very very lucky to have been the woman in this situation, there was great fun ’till the truth became obvious. Anyway, Because SAD says her BF grabs his friend’s ass, but not the other way around, maybe the friend is straight. I’m thinking that maybe SAD’s BF set it up for his friend to have sex at his place so that he could have the opportunity to watch his friend in action. This could explain him not touching the girl, it really could be true. And, the straight friend may be bugged by the idea that someone/anyone thinks he is gay because he is not. In any case, SAD’s BF is not straight, and she could do better than being with a man who will be seeking dick from another sourse after he realizes it will never happen with his friend. Just putting another possibility out there. She doesn’t need to know the exact truth anyway, because she can withdraw from the whole messy drama and get someone new and better.

  34. I’m guessing the boyfriend is bi, and had some sort of fling with the best friend…who is now tired of waiting that he didn’t break it off with the girlfriend, and so now is trying to stir some shit up. Confront him, listen to his BULLSHIT story, and then move on. Even if you can accept a boyfriend who is bi, can you accept a boyfriend who is a liar and a cheater, and may have exposed you to STDs? I’m a bit worried that you didn’t find any condoms with the underwear!

  36. for SAD i mean… It sucks. I’ve dated someone who put me on edge that he might be gay. He had been teased for his intonation and even questioned it himself, but came to the conclusion that he wasn’t. However, he had such a weird way about women. He’s completely awkward and has to say everything he likes about every single woman he see whether on tv and in real life. He’s a complete bachelor type and he’s overly friendly and acts like he wants something, but would still push me away. And to top it off he even told me he liked if the dude had a bigger dick in porn. I know guys like this for some reasons, that it makes the girl look smaller and they like to feel like it may be them instead.

    Still, with all his doubts about himself and his complete inability to make a girl feel important and giving time up to his male friends versus his girlfriend or even being jealous of girlfriends in his friendships with his guy friends, it sometimes seemed like he might really be gay. Gay or bi or just really fucking awkward.

    Either way it sucks for a guy to be hiding it, or for him to not be able to admit that he may truly be gay, or for it to be so denied that it just isn’t apparent even to him. You have to compete with something you will never ever be and you just don’t know unless they admit it.

    I feel for you SAD. I hope he just tells you the truth. Don’t settle for him being bi as an excuse. He cheated on you so either way, it is you or this guy. If he really loves you, even if he is bi, he will choose you. Myabe he just needed to get it out of his system. In any case, I hope you’ll do the right thing for yourself.

  37. Yes I also agree w. Candy C that there maybe a possibility that boyfriend wanted to watch. In any case, he has a girlfriend. People cuckold their wives and girlfriends all the time and the women are into it. You don’t think if he was into this he would’ve mayb joked about it with her or brought it up over the course of their relationship.

    It’s the fact that she has the suspicion to begin with that is the problem. There had to be a lot of “friendly” touching going on for her to start to feel uncomfortable or even jealous that something might be going on.

    Come on even when a female gets to close to your man, or they start touching and flirting, you raise your eyebrow to that, especially if it starts to happen often enough.

    Smells Fishy Fishy Fishy…

  40. No it’s not an eiffel tower, an eiffel tower is different. i think he/she’s talking about the guy and girl going down on each other, while the second guy enters the first girl from behind. an eiffel tower has one guy getting a blowjob while the other guy fucks her, and when they high five over her that’s the eiffel tower bit.

  41. Excellent stuff from you, man. I’ve read your things before and you are just too awesome. I adore what you have got right here. You make it entertaining and you still manage to keep it smart.
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