I think I’ve developed a crush on my wife’s ex. I’m in my forties and my wife is older than me. We’ve been together for fifteen years. We are both women. Before we dated each other, we dated men exclusively. She had told me a lot about her ex before me. They were together for six years and lived together, so he came up a lot. I was really insecure at the beginning of our relationship and felt really jealous of him. As time went on, I became more secure in our relationship and I stopped thinking about him. They never spoke while we dated. That is until about two years ago, when he called out of the blue to say he was in town and asked if she wanted to meet up for dinner. We already had dinner plans so I told her to ask him to join us. The dinner was pretty awkward, as you could tell he was nervous. He cried at least once and kept asking us if we were happy in our relationship. He shared that night that he and his wife were in couples counseling for the second time. My initial reaction was to be put off by him and the whole experience — too much sharing — and I could still sense sexual tension between him and my wife. She wants nothing to do with him. However, recently I’ve been thinking about him and have realized I think he’s hot. I know he has a big dick. I would love to sleep with him but I don’t even know what he thinks of me from that one dinner. My wife has always said that I could open up our relationship if I wanted to sleep with someone else. She’s not interested in sleeping with anyone else but would be fine with me doing it as long as we discussed it first. However, I’m not sure she meant that she’d give her blessing for me to sleep with her ex. My questions:
1. What do I even do here? 2. Should I just leave it as a fantasy? 3. Should I bring it up to her? 4. Should I contact him? 5. Have I finally lost my mind?
Thinking Really Intensely About Novel Group Love Experience
1. Keep your mouth shut. 2. Yes, you should. 3. No, you should not. 4. Abso-fucking-lutely not. 5. Sounds like it.
Crushes are a kind of madness, TRIANGLE, and we’ve all been there — we’ve all lost our minds, some of us way more than once. Hell, I don’t think someone who’s never had an obsessive, all-consuming, wildly inappropriate crush can really say they’ve lived. And while it sounds like this crush only recently bubbled up, this guy has loomed large in your psychosexual imagination for a very long time. But just as you’re not the first person to lose their mind like this, you aren’t the first person whose jealousy transubstantiated into lust. (Yes, yes: We see you, aromantic people! You are valid! But even if you’ve never had a mad crush on someone, you’ve surely had a crush on something. Cinnamon rolls? Weighted blankets? Percussion massagers?)
And while it might help this dude to know your relationship isn’t perfect either — his ex’s partner has struggled with obsessive jealousy and now has a crazy-making crush on someone else — I can’t see how it would help him to know he was the focus of your obsessive jealousy and is currently the focus of your obsessive crush. As for the sexual tension you perceived between your wife and her ex, TRIANGLE, that sounds like projection. After all, you’re the one who wants to fuck this guy, not your wife, who says she wants nothing to do with her ex. And, I’m sorry, but there’s no way for you to act on your desire to fuck this guy — which, again, sounds like an eroticized fear — without getting your wife involved.
Luckily for you, TRIANGLE, crushes are almost always a temporary insanity. Like the jealousy that came before it, this too shall pass. Pray on it, masturbate about it, wait it out.
P.S. I’m such a contrarian that I can’t even resist contradicting myself: If you absolutely, positively must bring up the subject of fucking her hung ex with your wife (!), you could claim to have had an erotic dream about her ex and see how she reacts. Try to be neutral, bemused, and matter-of-fact when you mention your dream. (Don’t make the mistake I detailed in my response to Q6 here!) If your wife reacts with horror, drop it forever. If she sighs and says that she sometimes misses the sex and/or that big dick… you could continue to discuss him (maybe have one or two more dreams to goose the convo along) and see where it goes. But follow her lead, TRIANGLE, and be prepared to pivot to praying on it, masturbating about it, and waiting it out.
My 11-year-old granddaughter has discovered masturbation. She is in full-on puberty and she has her period but is very much emotionally a child. She uses the family percussion massager for self-stimulation and keeps it in her bed. No one is particularly concerned about the self-stim, but I am concerned about her use of the massager. It is not delicate stimulation and seems designed for back and shoulder massage. My question is, could it be harmful used on her genitalia? I’m thinking her delicate female parts may end up completely desensitized especially since it is used frequently. My daughter-in-law seems unconcerned and my son steers clear of that topic. What do the experts say?
Too Much Intensity
I’m no expert, TMI, but lots of adults have told me about all the crazy things they used to self-stimulate when they first began exploring their bodies as kids, and almost all report growing up to be sexually healthy adults with fully functional/sensate genitalia. Maybe survivorship bias is at play here — I haven’t spoken to guys who didn’t survive putting their dicks in a vacuum cleaner hoses at age eleven, what with them being dead and all — but I’ve heard so many off-the-wall stories, from men and women alike, and I’ve always asked the obvious follow-up question: “Are you okay now?” (If someone tells me they used the family blender as a sex toy, I’m allowed to ask as many follow-up questions as I want.) And very few reported lasting trauma and/or loss of sensation on account of the banister railings, blenders, rolling pins, washing machines, cucumbers, personal massagers, etc., etc., etc., they experimented with as kids.
But I imagine more would’ve reported lasting trauma if their grandmother had known how they were masturbating and had decided it was her job to intervene. Also potentially traumatizing: their grandmothers writing to sex-advice columnists about the precise stage of puberty they were in (full-on is the most serious stage!), whether they were having periods yet, what the experts might’ve said, etc.
Here’s what you do: Say your piece to her parents — that’s a grandmother’s right — and then slowly disappear into the bushes. Worst-case scenario, your granddaughter grows up to be one of the many adult women out there who need the kind of powerful stimulation only a vibrator can provide in order to climax. Since there’s no way of knowing what percentage of those women conditioned themselves to need those powerful sensations during childhood explorations and what percentage would’ve needed those powerful sensations regardless, TMI, your best course of action is to stay out of it.
P.S. So, it was a woman who confided in me about sneaking into the kitchen at night when she was a teenager and swiping the blender — just the base, not the pitcher — and taking it to her room, where she would plug it in, turn it on high, and press the side of it between her legs over her sweats. Her mother found the blender in her bed on more than one occasion, and never once asked what she was doing with it… because her mother knew. This is anecdote and not data, I realize, but this woman told me she’s fine now, thanks, she doesn’t require a blender in order to come, and her mother eventually left a vibrator — still in the box — under her pillow.
P.P.S. I hope your daughter-in-law is talking to her daughter about sexual health, that she’s already told her know it’s normal for kids her age to explore their own bodies alone and safely and in private, and that your DIL has also told her that, right now, no one else should be touching her body. If she’s done/said all that, your DIL is doing great. Once you’ve verified the above, you could — one last time — express your concerns about your granddaughter using “the family percussion massager” to explore and then add: “Maybe you could leave a gentler gentler ‘personal massager’ on the same shelf where you keep that percussion monster. And now I’ll butt out!”
I’m a bisexual, 28-year-old man in a monogamous relationship with a 26-year-old woman. We’ve been dating for four years. My partner knows I’m bi and is fine with me using solo exploration to get that out, but recently, solo exploration isn’t cutting it anymore. I feel a very strong urge to be with a man again that at times verges on overpowering. My partner is not comfortable with an open relationship of any kind. I don’t want to cheat and lose a good relationship, but I’m also not sure how long I can hold out against these urges. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Boy Is Getting Usual Yearnings
It’s not my place, as a gay man, to tell a bisexual guy how he should experience or describe his own bisexuality — your bisexuality is yours to experience and describe — but letters like yours put me in an awkward position. It’s similar to the position I find myself in when I get letters from lesbians who occasionally fuck with men.
When I respond to questions from self-identified lesbians who sometimes fuck men, BIGUY, I get angry letters from lesbians who don’t fuck men. There are already way too many straight guys out there who refuse to take “lesbian” for an answer, these angry lesbians tell me, and reading letters in advice columns from lesbian-identified women who fuck men encourages these guys to keep hitting on lesbians; it could even cause guys who take “lesbian” for an answer to stop doing so. Being a lesbian is hard enough, these angry (and absolutely right to be angry!) lesbians tell me, without me running letters that seem to confirm a dangerous and damaging stereotype about lesbians: They’re just women who haven’t had the right dick yet. The problem of men who refuse to take “lesbian” for an answer is so great that even lesbians who do fuck men have written in to tell me I shouldn’t run letters from other lesbians like them.
For the record: We should all operate under the assumption that lesbians do not wanna fuck cis men — the overwhelming majority fucking don’t — just like we should all operate under the assumption that bisexual guys are every bit as capable of honoring monogamous commitments as straight guys (who are only okay at monogamy) and gay guys (who are no better at monogamy but are way better at ENM). The idea that bisexual guys can’t be monogamous — the belief that all bisexual guys in monogamous relationships with women will eventually cheat because the urge to get with a man eventually becomes too overwhelming to resist — is a biphobic stereotype that does real harm to bisexual guys who wanna date women. (There was just a poll that found (once again) that only 20% of women will date bisexual men. When asked why they won’t date bisexual men, the most cited answer was the fear that a bisexual guy would inevitably cheat on them to get with another man.)
So, yeah, the belief that bisexual guys can’t be monogamous is a biphobic stereotype that harms bi men — not only by drastically shrinking their pool of potential partners, but also by incentivizing the closet, which is an emotionally damaging place to live. And the way you’ve framed your problem — you’ve been monogamous for four years but you don’t think you can keep this up because you miss dick so much — would seem to confirm this stereotype, BIGUY, which isn’t great.
You do not represent all bisexual men, of course, just as the lesbian women who fuck men (and send me letters about it) do not represent all lesbians. But confirmation bias is a big factor here, BIGUY, and some straight women are going to read your letter and think their hunch/prejudice about bisexual guys — they can’t be monogamous — is correct and they should keep avoiding bisexual men.
So, maybe I shouldn’t have run your letter, BIGUY, and maybe instead of essentially saying, “I want to open my relationship with my girlfriend up because I’m bisexual and I miss fucking men so much,” in the future — when you discuss this with your current girlfriend (or with your future girlfriends) — you could frame your problem in a way that’s specific to you: “I shouldn’t make monogamous commitments because I won’t be able to honor them over the long term, so I’m either gonna have to do the difficult work of revising the commitment I’ve already made or I’m gonna have to end this relationship and not make monogamous commitments in the future.”
You’re young, BIGUY, and there’s no shame in learning you aren’t cut out for monogamy in your twenties. I learned the same lesson about myself when I was your age: I made monogamous commitments in my twenties that I couldn’t keep. The problem wasn’t that gay men can’t be monogamous — some can, some do — but that I couldn’t be monogamous. It doesn’t sound like you can be monogamous either.
Which is also fine! Not everyone can, not everyone should. But that’s a fact about you specifically, BIGUY, and not a fact about all bisexual guys generally.
P.S. Ask to open your relationship. If she breaks up with you, it’s probably for the best.
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