Struggle Session: Not Getting Married Today

...;s AQFARTIFROLOTGOMIITC… I’m a cis gay guy and I was considering renewing my Magnum subscription. Then I listened to today’s Lovecast and ended up fast forwarding through the whole thing. So boring! No gay content at all! Can you recommend a podcast that actually has gay content? Non-gay content has been a regular feature around here since… well, since I started writing Savage Love more than thirty years ago. For the record: I only took questions from straight people at first but the Lovecast has always featured questions from gay people and lots of gay guests. (Recent gay guests: Dr. Carlton Thomas, actor Ben Palacios, kink educator Pup Amp, Drag Race star Jackie Cox.) And while there wasn’t much (or any?) gay shit in this week’s Lovecast, we’ve got tons of great gay shit coming up over next few weeks! Still, I’m happy to recommend a few of my favorite gay/gayer podcasts to gay listeners who need more gay content: That’s a Gay Ass Podcast, Dad and Daddies, and Butt Honestly. Okay, here’s this week’s AQFARTIFROLOTGOMIITC… I’m a longtime reader with a quandary for your consideration. My partner and I have been together more than eight years, living together for five, and we adopted a dog almost three years ago. We look cishet to the assuming, but we’re both queer in sexuality and in gender. My partner has had non-het intimate experiences, and I haven’t, so we opened up our relationship about 2.5 years ago to give me the chance to explore. Though our relationship isn’t perfect, I would be content to “round up.” I’ve fantasized on and off about a wedding, buying a house, and growing old together. We last talked about marriage a couple years ago, and I shared two sticking points I wanted us to resolve before we considered marriage. One was the whole “know your queerness” thing. (I believe queer people are queer whether or not they act queer or have queer relationship, but for myself I need to experience it to know.) The other sticking point was my partner’s weed consumption. They smoked every day. Although I don’t think there’s anything ethically or morally wrong with imbibing, I’m a “fixer” and I knew it wouldn’t be good for me to tie myself to someone who I felt like I needed to “fix.” Here’s why I’m writing to you now. For reasons unrelated to my marriage qualms (and are mostly a product of much-needed therapy), my partner spent the past couple of years tapering off of their weed habit, and as of this writing, they haven’t smoked in more than eight months. They’ve said they’d like to eventually treat it like alcohol, smoking a few times a week or maybe in social settings, but for now the habit is on ice. So, now the thing holding us back from marriage is me: I need to go kiss some ladies… and I can’t do it. I’ve known that I’m queer since I was in middle school, and I know in my heart and soul that this is who I am. I’ve led queer advocacy projects in school and at work! I have sapphic sex dreams! But I have no clue how to date, online or otherwise, and I’m terrified at what happens when I do put myself out there. What if someone in my wider network who doesn’t know the terms of our relationship sees me on an app, and takes that information and runs with it to the worst places? How do I make it clear that I’m ENM and only looking for casual flings without potentially hurting people’s feelings? A lot of this is my run-of-the-mill social anxiety, while some of it is the awareness that ENM still carries a lot of stigma. And I think I’m still deprogramming some biphobia that I learned when I came out in high school (hence my dating history being all men). I have a couple lady friends who have volunteered themselves as wingwomen for a night on the town, but we all functionally sober and I’m not interested in being surrounded by drunk people (or making out with a drunk person). It also doesn’t help that my libido’s been in the dumpster for the past few months (a combo of stress and a new IUD), so I haven’t wanted to get frisky with my partner (who has a nice penis, a skilled tongue, and is GGG). And it’s not like I have oodles of time to spare for this pursuit. I work, I volunteer, and the state of the world is just so exhausting. Dan, what the hell do I do to get out of this slump? Do I just get on the apps and risk offending people? Do I need to look for a mythical sober sapphic ENM meetup group? While my partner and I are not in a hurry — we already do a lot of the things typical of life partnership — we’re not getting any younger here either. How do I make this happen for myself? And, in a weird way, for him too? Bi In Theory, Shy In Practice Got some advice for BITSIP? Drop it in the comments…