STRUGGLE SESSION: Potty Mouths, Gift Cards, Death Wishes and More!

...elievable. This email is from a Karen — I’m not referring to the disparaging term sometimes used to describe women who call cops on black kids playing basketball on basketball courts. No, this email is literally from a woman named “Karen.” She signed her email with “Karen” and her email address includes her full name and her first name is Karen. For Karen’s benefit, let’s quickly review the first rule of accusing someone of being uneducated in an email: Don’t use run-on sentences and do use proper punctuation and be careful about sentence structure. (I’m pretty sure the distro team at Queen City Nerve uses vans to distribute the paper in Charlotte and not, you know, my mouth.) And if you’re dictating your email using a voice app, maybe give it a quick look-flash-see before saying send. Great suggestion from Andrew for the caller who wanted to knock out and whore out her partner (with her partner’s consent)… I would have gone with a simple answer to the CNC conundrum, which she kind of floats in the call: give him the Ambien, tell him you can’t wait for all the naughty things you’re going to do when he’s zonked, then don’t do anything but let him believe you did. Bonus points: leave some mystery clues around the room where he wakes up. If he asked what happened while he was asleep, tell him that he promised not to ask. Some good advice from My Cat Is Cool for the mom who was wondering if she should get her son a vibrator… I’m a trans guy too but have a nonexistent relationship with my own mother so that may be why I’m squicked out by the notion of offering your son a vibrator. Dan’s advice was fine (though I recommend Good Vibrations over Amazon; higher quality, better selection) but ultimately this seems like an issue mom doesn’t need to assist in solving. I wondered if her son is on hormones or plans to start taking them. The bottom growth that T produces will rock his world and make masturbating a much more natural thing. (I didn’t have my first orgasm until I was months on testosterone for six months.) I had a great relationship with my mom and it would’ve squicked me the fuck out if she’d offered to get me a Pocket Altar Boy when I was teenager. (And I would’ve died a hundred thousand deaths if my mom had tried to point me in the direction of grinding.) As for why I recommend giving an Amazon gift card to a kid who might need or want a vibrator as opposed to one from Good Vibrations (or Smitten Kitten or Early To Bed): allowing for a little plausible deniability is good. An Amazon gift card allows a teenager to pretend — if they feel embarrassed about ordering a vibrator and/or don’t wanna have another conversation with mom about vibrators — that they didn’t wind up ordering a vibrator. A box from Amazon could contain anything whereas a box Good Vibrations contains one of those things. If the kid wants to keep talking about it, he can. But if he wants some privacy and/or to establish a boundary with mom, handing him an Amazon gift card — as opposed to a gift card from a sex shop — is good way for mom to signal that, having hard the convo she felt like she needed to have, mom fully intends to respect his right privacy going forward. But Kent makes an excellent argument in favor of a Good Vibrations gift card… You need to be careful buying sex toys from [Amazon], especially one that goes inside your body. These devices are often cheap and sold as novelty items, they may not be made of body safe material. I don’t know how else a minor could purchase a sex toy safely on their own, but they all least need some education on shopping for one. Hulk Hogan died. His wasn’t the obituary I wanted to read today, which I mentioned on Twitter. James Brown responded… Do you have any idea how many voters decide to never vote Democratic again when they see liberals wishing for the deaths of conservatives? I’d say it’s a lot. Saying his wasn’t the obituary I wanted to read means I wish Hulk Hogan was still alive because then I wouldn’t be reading his obituary. There’s only one obituary I wake up very day wanting to read. And that means… with one exception… I want everyone else to live forever. Aren’t I nice? Speaking of Pocket Altar Boys… I squealed (sqweeled?) when I heard @dansavage.bsky.social use the phrase “pocket altar boy” on today’s Savage Lovecast! Not everyone approves of that phrase. As a former altar boy, I feel I have a right to use it. And I mean… just look at this thing. A nice note — via email — from a grateful listener… This isn’t a question but a thank you. I was so moved listening this week to your response to man who was ghosted by women. You took the time to explain to him what women experience when we say no and that every woman on earth has had a man at some time get scary at us when rejected. I just so appreciate that as a man you have really educated yourself about what women experience and that you’re doing the work to teach other men. It actually made me almost tear up. I think so few men do this and so few take women seriously when we explain the sort of insidious micro aggressions we experience. Thank you! You’re welcome! Alright, here’s this week’s letter that isn’t going to make it into the column… because it’s way too fucking long for the column. As Karen reminded us, my column still appears in print publications like Queen City Nerve, which means I don’t have unlimited space. In my mid 20s, I dated a girl for about four years, most of which time we spent living together, coparenting pets, etc. A few months after we broke up, her younger sister — who was 22 at the time and four years my junior — reached out via DM to tell me she had a crush on me the whole time I was with her sister. I’d also been pretty mutually infatuated with her but never dared to act on it, even after her sister and I split up. In spite of my better judgement — I was seeing someone at the time, and knew it was a bad idea regardless, but I was also 26 and out of my mind with lust for this person, whose interest in me seemed like a completely fantasy — I responded and pretty soon we were in the midst of a fun and secret affair. For context, the younger sister (TYS) lived with and still lives with her parents in her childhood home, having dropped out of school. She has never had a consistent job, and she deals with serious physical and emotional health issues under the thumb of a raging 700-Club-watching speaking-in-tongues tyrant of a religious mother. (Great cook though!) Despite my best efforts to stay emotionally at arms length, including breaking her heart by never being willing to commit exclusively (this was supposed to be affair!), after years of blissful weekend trysts which always involved her lying to her family about where she was, I had to admit that I had fallen in love with her, and finally let myself say so to her. After that point we fell into a kind of tacit monogamy. At the start of our affair, she would have dalliances with other guys, but these dalliances were always attempts to punish me for my own exploits, which were mostly sad efforts on my part to prove I wasn’t catching feelings for TYS. Some time later, I began experiencing vague health problems — weird pelvic pain — that slowly spiraled into a full neurotic panic, as I became fixated on these mysterious pains. At that point I began fooling around with other women again, now jto demonstrate to myself that I was still “ship-shape” as a man, if you get my drift here. (In my defense, I also tried therapy.) She eventually began to suspect me (damn context clues!) and laid a trap for one: one day she said — after we hadn’t seen each other in a while due to her own health concerns and how difficult it was for her to sneak away — that she “would understand” if I needed to see someone else once in a while for “company.” I should have listened to the alarm bells ringing in my head — I had never known her to be anything other than apoplectically jealous and wildly suspicious at all times — but instead I essentially said, “Thanks for the permission, you’re the best, I’m so lucky,” and started seeing some other women. Within a few weeks, she got quite cozy with another guy, a guy whose anatomical details I forced her to reveal to me, something I instantly regretted. She only began to see this other guy, she said, in attempt to protect herself emotionally, since she knew I was seeing other women. I had a complete breakdown, and slid into the abyss. (I’ll spare you the gory details.) We tried for ages to make things work, through months of gut-wrenching confessions, depressive withdrawals, and, on my side, the emergence of dehumanizing psycho-sexual complexes, substance abuse patterns, disordered eating behavior, and eventually, compulsive cheating. After a very profound detox and rehab experience, I finally felt secure enough to come clean to her, and end the relationship. Mind you, from the meltdown until this time, I wanted SO BADLY to come out to the world about our relationship, to end a secret that was so much fun until it suddenly wasn’t. Every time I brought it up, she freaked out and begged me not to reveal our secret, saying that that her sister — my original ex (MOE), with whom I was “on good terms” — would do her actual physical harm, her parents would disown her, and that she would become a burden to me because she would have to move in with me, etc. We parted. Finally sober myself, and with lots of supportive friends, and in a new and healthy relationship, I was able to manage for a while. I avoided all interactions with TYS, I blocked her number, all of that. This is such a disgusting multiyear slog that I’ll skip a bit but basically, last year, I began to backslide physically and emotionally. A resumption of communication with TYS commenced at Christmas of last year. After another meltdown, I told her via snail-mail that until such a time as we weren’t seeing other people (I was no longer seeing someone else when I wrote but she was with a different man) and until such a time as we could own up to our history with her family, I couldn’t bear to communicate except via snail-mail. I haven’t heard from her since. Despite my best efforts, I cant shake the feeling that I won’t be free — and she won’t either — until her sister and her parents know. Selfishly, I’ve let myself grow closer to MOE the last few months. I know I’m just doing this to obtain some psychological advantage over over TYS (who is now also my ex — sorry this is so long and confusing) and feel somehow closer to TYS through the awful power of fear and being in her head, since I’m sure MOE has shared with TYS that we’re hanging out more, but I can’t seem to stop. Sweet Jesus, here’s my question: Is it more merciful to take our secret to the grave and let TYS find her own path in life? (MOE tells me that, despite Tinder boyfriends or whatever, TYS is still living with her mom and dad and hasn’t “found her wings.”) Do I disappear in her rearview mirror once and for all or do I lance this infected boil? Not to hurt her — I don’t want to hurt her — but because, despite all the shit we’ve put each other through, I really do still love her! It’s been two years and seven months since we last saw each other and TYS still haunts my dreams. I’ve half convinced myself that it’s in her best interest for me to spill the beans because the nuclear option might be her best shot at not becoming a shut-in forever, even if we never see or talk to each other again. Rationally, I know — despite my dreamer’s heart — that there’s no happy ending for us. Our entire “relationship” was built on quicksand, it was a mirage, it was whatever dumb metaphor you want to use to capture the absurdity of it all. But I can’t seem cut this person from my heart, no matter how many trips I take (literal and chemical), no matter how many the meds I try, no matter how many other women I fuck, no matter how sober or fucked up I am at any given time. Do I tell my original ex the truth or not? If so, how? Thanks for taking the time to absorb all this, even if you don’t answer. I appreciate just the chance to share it. Take care. Secret That U Can’t Keep  Have at.