Fast forward to now. I find out he’s been dating a man. I can barely cope with the anger I feel about this. I feel like a casualty of his shame. We have progressive friends! His sister has dated women! His parents are accepting! None of the reasons you list as appropriate ones for staying closeted apply to him, Dan! His inability to accept himself caused me the most severe emotional trauma of my life and I just feel enraged. I logically know this is not about me. It’s about him. So why does this retroactively bother me so much? Part of me wants to say something to him but I’m not sure that would make me feel better. I’d be very appreciative of any guidance you may have. Not sure what to think.

I’ve slept with his wife four times since, and the sex we’ve been having is phenomenal for both of us. But the talks I have afterwards with my friend make me uncomfortable. We’ve gotten on the phone later in the day or the next day and I give him the details and insult him a little, which he likes, and honestly none of that is the problem. What makes me uncomfortable is that I can hear him beating off during these phone calls, which makes me feel like I’m having phone sex with a guy. I’m not comfortable with this and I feel like our friendship has become sexualized in a way that just feels unnatural for me. The one time we met in person to talk after I fucked his wife he was visibly aroused throughout our entire conversation. I would like to keep fucking my friend’s wife, and she wants to keep fucking me, but I don’t want to talk with my friend about it afterwards. Shouldn’t it be enough for him to just know I’m fucking her?

Distressed Aussie Chafes Under Cringe Kink

My friends and I have hinted to her about this pattern in the hopes of helping her see what her role might be in these breakups. But she takes extreme offense to any criticism and insists she’s the victim. I’m sympathetic to her plight, but her unwillingness to accept any responsibility makes it difficult to offer her any useful advice. I’ve been there for her, calling her daily, and stopping by when I could in a COVID-safe way. But every conversation turns into a three-hour-long rehashing of these relationships with all blame assigned to her exes. I've let a few weeks go by without reaching out because I don’t want to have another one of these conversations. I'm curious what you would do here. Our entire friend group is now debating whether we should share our actual opinions with her at the risk her being angry with us. The other option is to leave it alone and hope she comes to her own conclusions. I wish her exes had the courage to tell her their true feelings.

I’ll give you a moment to recover from that jaw drop.

Okay, now the background. We’ve been married for almost thirty years. Our relationship is not all wine and roses but we had counseling years ago and decided we wanted to grow old together. We have similar interests, we love spending time together, and it’s just not the same when one of us is gone. Our sex life was never “off the charts” and, yes, this was one of our main problems. He wanted a lot of sex and I was content with very little. I came to believe he was content too and that he long ago accepted that spending his life with me meant this would be how it was. And I truly believed that our marriage was monogamous. Now I know that only I was monogamous.

If it was any other women than his cousin I might be able to deal with this! I wish it was someone else! I feel trapped! I feel like I can’t talk to anyone! All I can think of is how disgusting and disappointed my children, who are in their 20’s, and his family would be if they found out. This cousin has had many ups and downs. And years ago when my children were small I noticed some flirtatious behavior between her and my husband. I confronted him and demanded to know what the hell was going on! I thought that was the end of it! I was wrong!

I was on my husband’s iPad when I found their explicit chats along with requests for “visuals.” I went to my husband and asked if they had ever gotten together physically. He told me no. A few days later we were on our way to a big family event and this cousin was supposed to be there. With me standing next to him he called her and left a message disinviting her. She called him back and he answered on speaker and I said hello and then asked her if she was fucking my husband. She sounded surprised and caught off guard but she said no. We are about to move to new place to retire! Now what?!?

The technical term here used among linguists for this kind of phenomenon is "peeve." Let me clarify, it's not the "cum," "cumming," and "cummed” that's a peeve but the shuddering. You see, the snide sound there is due to the fact that causes peevers to shudder causes linguists to get interested. The point is language always changes, and linguists are interested in these changes however much they horrify normal people. (That's our technical term for non-linguists.) Grandparents are forever lamenting about how their grandchildren's generation is ruining the language. Documentation of this phenomenon goes back to the Roman times. And indeed generations upon generations of grandchildren turned Latin into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and host of lesser known forms of ruination.

In terms of the sticky substance at hand (or on hand), cum as a verb and cumming are just alternative spellings, which are common enough for slang. It's slang! You really gonna insist slang follow uptight and buttoned-down spelling rules, Dan? That's just stoopid. Cummed is more interesting—and also causes peevers to shudder—because it's a real change in the language. But why shudder? Why not appreciate it instead? "Cummed” shows us how creative we are with our language, how we play with it, and in this case do something useful, differentiating the sublime "got off" (climaxed) from the banal "got there" (arrived).

Don't fall into useless peeving, Dan! You've famously instigated language change. Just ask Rick Santorum, your former college roommate, or the men who've cummed and cummed hard while a nice vagina-haver pegged their ass.