I am a 50-year-old male married for nineteen years to a female who hates sex. (Her first husband divorced her because they had too little sex. I thought there had to be a reason that would not affect us. I was wrong.) I brought some rope on our honeymoon for her to tie me up with and she was upset but she tried and then she didn’t untie me for quite a while. About nine years later I got her permission to have a photographer from one of a male bondage website tie me up and take my pictures. She regretted agreeing to that and then accused me of getting assaulted and refused to look at the pictures.

I’m writing to you today because I still think about it all the time and I joined Recon to talk to see if someone would want to tie me up. One of the guys recommended I listen to you. In a video about kink discordance you said kink is sexual. So my question for you is this: Is my desire to be tied up sexual? If so, would be getting tied by anybody other than my wife be a sexual experience?"

I have been tying myself up since I was seven and I stopped before I turned 40 because I was tired of being able to escape and the whole thing had become a bore. But I began searching for someone that would tie me up so that I couldn’t escape. Now I am 50 and I want to be a man of integrity in my relationship with my wife and I am not sure of the best way to move forward.

Brooding Over Unmet Needs Daily

P.S. I've gotten two kinds of answers from guys on Recon. The first is that unless I tell my wife everything I have no integrity whatsoever. The second is that life is too short and I need to stop overthinking this. But I'm worried about whether this would be cheating. My self-bondage sessions always ended with masturbation. Even now I feel aroused just thinking of bondage. It's very possible I would get hard if somebody else tied me up but I do know that it would have nothing to do with them.

Life is short, BOUND, you're going to be dead one day soon (we all are), and you're going to stay dead for a very long time. So go get your ass tied up, dude. And even if you should get sexually aroused during a bondage scene with another man—as you almost certainly will—your wife isn't interested in having sex with you or tying your ass up. So you wouldn't be cheating your wife out of anything she wants, BOUND, which means it wouldn't really be cheating at all.

But in answer to your question: If you tie yourself up and your dick gets hard and then you jack off, your kink is definitely sexual. While most people prefer to indulge their kinks with others they're attracted to sexually, sometimes the kink works—turns them on—all by itself. Which is why there are lots of straight bondage guys into bondage who play with gay men. They're not doing it the gaiety of it, they're not in it for the dick, they're in it (ropes, cuffs, straight jackets, etc.) just there for the bondage of it. (And freeness of it.) So, yeah, I promise you, BOUND, you're not the only straight guy on Recon looking to get tied up.

And there's an easy way to avoid being judged because your wife doesn't know you're getting tied up by other dudes and then having to explain to strangers that you're seeking bondage play outside your marriage because your wife isn't interested in your kink and then having to explain that your activities with men present zero risk to your wife because you don't have oral or anal sex with the men you get tied up by and even if you were sucking their dicks of letting them fuck you—which you aren't—it wouldn't put your wife at risk because your marriage is sexless... and that's by not bringing up your wife at all. A casual bondage play partner you meet for a one-off doesn't need to know you're married, BOUND; so long as you're not presenting yourself as single and interested in romance in addition to bondage—so long as you're making it clear you're only interested in a discreet/discrete bondage scene and nothing else—you're under no obligation to disclose the existence of your wife.

But if you want to be a man of integrity... you should inform your wife that you're seeking bondage, just bondage, outside the relationship. Not sex, not romance, just bondage—and to ensure it's just bondage, you're going to play with men. Then ask her how she'd like to handle it: full and complete disclosure or DADT?

P.S. Did your wife know about your interest in bondage before you pulled that rope out of your bag on your honeymoon? If so, well, okay then. If not, BOUND, that's a hell of thing to spring on someone during a honeymoon.