Struggle Session: Summer Advice-Palooza Experiment Continues

...of this week’s Lovecast. Says David… Not to be “that guy” (I’m totally about to be that guy), but describing Telegram as “end-to-end encrypted” could lead people to view it as “private.” And some in the global listening audience are the very people who should absolutely NOT. “Encrypted” is accurate at some level. But without getting into the tech weeds, the far safer option is and has been @signalapp, which actually implements the kind of encryption called to mind in this case. (The tech weeds, courtesy of @matthew_d_green: “Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?”) Thank you for being “that guy,” David. Everyone likes to complain about “that guy,” but sometimes “that guy” (those guys?) knows something the rest of us need to know. This came in via email… The Meth Baby show (Savage Lovecast, Episode 930) had a lot of information I could relate to. I particularly appreciated your comments on the sorry state of dating apps. I tried OK Cupid the first few months of 2024 and found the experience terrible and felt defeated. I’m a cis hetero male in my fifties and it felt like I failed at the last resort dating option. I don’t get a lot of attention from women walking around in public and when I’m in some social situation it seems every woman I meet is already spoken for or uninterested. I need to get out more and I’m working on that. The dating app was a disaster from restricting who you can view, to the unfortunate meetings I had with two women — one not very interested, the other not a considerate person — but I feel less like a failure after listening to your comments and I hope you’ll deliver more advice on how people meet up successfully, especially when they’re in their older years. I could use a lot of advice, but for now I just wanted to send my thanks. Keep up the good work, Dan! People have gone from complaining about dating apps to abandoning dating apps to suing dating apps — so, clearly you’re not alone in having such an awful experience on the apps. Short advice for people who want to get off the apps: go places, do things, meet people! Says a listener via email… Hi Dan! I was just listening to Episode #929. There was a gal on who spoke about her past troubles cumming — I can totally relate — and how she discovered she was able to cum pretty easily using  suction toys. I have thought about trying suction toys, and I was wondering if there were any in particular you recommend. Thanks! Your show is a delight! Thanks for that too! I have not personally used one of the vibrating clitoral suction toys flooding the market (and basements), as I am sadly clit-less. But Wired, BuzzFeed, Women’s Health, and even the New York Times (!!!) have all tested and ranked and recommended suction toys! Okay, here’s this week’s letter — a letter that raises some interesting issues but that’s way too long for the column. If you have some good and helpful advice for this LW, share it with the whole class in the comment thread. I’m a cis bi woman in my late forties who has been married to my late forties cis male straight husband since our early twenties. As we’ve grown up together we’ve raised children, advanced our careers, travelled well, all while genuinely loving and appreciating one another. But I won’t ever have sex with him again. I bristle against monogamy as a concept and always have. I like to fuck — men and women, friends and strangers. Despite this, I made a decision when we got married to commit to monogamy. But that was a mistake, and about seven years in, I broached the concept of an open marriage. After nearly a year of talking about it, my husband and I got into swinging. We went to clubs, joined online dating sites, and had some great experiences and made some great friends (also had some weird experiences, but mostly stuff we could laugh at later). It was always important to my husband that this be something we do together, so we mostly stuck to couples, with a few exceptions where we’d have a threesome or play separately with people we got comfortable with. But, as we progressed in the lifestyle, some things went sideways. Turns out not everyone is as easily DTF as I am, and it soon became more work than fun to find, screen, contact, and coordinate with couples where all four people would be attracted to and compatible with one another. Trying to schedule playtime became one more goddamn thing on my plate to manage. On top of that, my husband was mentally keeping score, and everything had to be tit-for-tat, down to specific sex acts. If I did get permission to play solo, he demanded a play-by-play recap, and would be put out until we had sex again. Not unsurprisingly, as a woman I had an easier time attracting attention from would-be partners (both male and female) than he did, and he became fairly resentful, even though I kept to our arrangement and did not play separately unless I had explicit permission. Our own sex life got worse, in large part because my husband acted entitled to sex with me and pressured, cajoled, guilted, and bullied his way into it, which of course is a huge turn-off and the more he pushed the more I pulled away. More than once, unenthusiastic sex turned into marital rape. Shortly after one incident, I told him exactly how I felt and exactly why what he’d done to me was actually rape. He denied it and dismissed my feelings. And then I was done. We never talked about getting out of swinging, but I stopped putting the work into trying to find us dates, and we fell away from the lifestyle. He would still pressure me for sex, which I would ever-increasingly reject. He slowed down in his attempts, at first because he didn’t like the rejection, but then as he became more self-aware and enlightened, realized that he had been an absolute asshole about things in the past and stopped pressuring me. So for close to 10 years, we’ve been essentially celibate. I’ve permitted sex a handful of times, hoping that as I’ve worked on my own trauma and as my husband has made real changes to improve on his past shitty behavior, that we could move on. But I’m clearly not done working through the trauma, because every time we attempt anything physical, it’s triggering and upsetting. After the last attempt about six months ago, a switch flipped for me, and I realized it’s not reasonable that I have to continue to subject myself to trauma and that it’s also not reasonable for me to just never have sex again. And I said this to my husband (who validated my feelings and copped without prompting to having been an asshole, but has still not acknowledged that what he did rose to the level of rape), and he suggested counseling. I agreed, but I also said I don’t have a goal that he and I will ever resume a sexual relationship. We’ve had difficulty locating a counselor who has openings and will work with couples that are pursuing ethical non-monogamy, and so all these months later are still trying to find someone. Other than all that stuff I just said, I’d rate our marriage as nearly ideal. We’ve built a really great life together. We have a circle of good friends, we work in the same profession and have long talks about policy that impacts our field, we enjoy hanging out watching movies and shows, we go to concerts, are foodies, travel well together, and are aligned in nearly all our values. We have a ton of shared interests, but also pursue our own interests and hobbies. I’ve insisted on reclaiming some measure of independence that I didn’t always have, and have my own friends that I go out with and do things with. (He has his own friends too, but also leans on me to maintain our social ties.) We’ve figured out how to manage household chores, money, and minor disagreements about life by both of us getting much better at communication and compromise over our years of partnership. My husband is my best friend, my fiercest advocate, and I truly do want to grow old with him. For the record, I have always been 100% fine with him pursuing sexual relationships independently outside of marriage if he would allow me the same freedom, which he hasn’t. It’s hard for him to set up anything without me as wingman, which I’m not willing to do. I want no part of his sex life and I want him to be no part of mine. And that’s the central conflict here. He wants me desperately and would be content with only me, but I will never be the willing, enthusiastic partner for him that I used to be. I want to have a sex life separate and apart from him. I see only bad options here. I don’t want to divorce/separate. I’m not willing to cheat on him. I have no interest in polyamory (one relationship is enough, thank you). But I don’t want to see another 10, 20, 30+ years slip away being celibate and miserable because of it. Even if we can hash out a new arrangement with the help of a counselor, I don’t think there’s a way to avoid him becoming hurt and resentful, because he’s not going to end up with what he wants (he wants me), and I don’t want to hurt him either. So, which of my bad options should I work towards, or should I just accept that there’s no way out of this? Sad, Traumatized, Unfulfilled, Conflicted, Knackered I have some thoughts for STUCK — because of course I do — but I’m gonna let my readers go first. What say you, Subs?