Should I feel weird about my husband’s grooming situation when he was young with a family friend if he doesn’t feel weird about it? He’s mid-thirties. He’s known this woman since he was seven and she used to babysit for him. She was a family friend. Once she returned to England, my husband went to visit her when he turned eighteen. They wound up having a lot of crazy sex. It squicks me out because she is one of his mom’s best friends and his mom is constantly bringing this woman up in conversation (she doesn’t know) and because I’ve had similar experiences where people who were friends of my parents (people I looked up to) made passes at me later, which shattered my feelings towards them. I met this woman once when she stayed with us a couple days. She was cold towards me, despite me trying hard to make her feel welcome. (I think she was trying to get a read on whether I knew or not, hence her cold behavior.) I have held my tongue the last four years, and I want to continue to hold my tongue, but I feel like she had to have been grooming my husband when he was a child for this to have happened. I am not a jealous person. (My husband had an ex in our wedding party!) and I suppose it’s possible my strong reaction is based on my own feelings about my own experiences. But this whole thing is weird, right?
Think Of England
I don’t think “grooming” is the right word to describe your husband’s situation.
Now, I realize words don’t have fixed meanings anymore, TOE, but I feel like this particular word — when used to refer to the actions of adults who sexually violate children and not giant machines that prepare ski slopes — still means something very specific. When a pedophile insinuates himself into a family’s life, earning the trust of the parent or parents and the affections of the child, that is a grooming situation. To be sexually abused by someone you thought you could trust adds another layer of trauma for the victim. Worse yet, children being sexually abused by skilled groomers often feel so conflicted about the abuse (or even complicit in it, as was the case with all those pre-gay boys molested by Catholic priests) that they can’t bring themselves to tell their parents what is going on. In some truly horrifying cases, children who did go to their parents weren’t believed.
Your husband was not a child when he had a bunch of crazy sex with this woman. You don’t mention how much time passed between this woman returning to England and your husband going to see her when he was eighteen, a detail that, while not exculpatory, does seem relevant. Because if they knew each other when your husband was a small child and then reunited years later (a decade later?) when your husband was legally an adult… yeah… that doesn’t make all that crazy sex any less (pick your word) squicky, icky, gross, weird, etc. But it sounds less like grooming and more like two adults doing something that would make all the other adults in their lives feel uncomfortable… if all those other adults knew about it… which, ideally, none of those other adults would.
As to why your husband feels differently about this experience than you do about similar ones, TOE, that’s probably because his frame of reference is radically different. As a young woman you most likely endured a lot of unwanted sexual attention from men and then, adding insult to injury, you were subjected to the unwanted sexual attentions of adult men who’d known you since you were a child. As a young man, your husband probably didn’t have to fend off a lot of unwanted sexual attention from older women, which may be why he experienced the one pass made at him by an adult who’d known him as a child — assuming she was the one who made the first move — so differently.
None of which makes this okay. In an ideal world, our first sexual partners — all of our early and formative sexual experiences — aren’t people who used to be our babysitters. You would be more comfortable if your husband had lost his virginity to an eighteen-year-old girl he met at a club when he was on that trip to England, TOE, and quite frankly so would I. But your husband not having a problem with what happened isn’t evidence that he was victimized by an expert groomer playing a very long game. It’s most likely evidence that, despite the legitimately icky/squicky/weird details, this was a positive experience for your husband.
It could just have easily gone the other way, i.e. all that crazy sex with his former babysitter could’ve fucked him up, and there was no way for his former babysitter to know how things might turn/play out for him. So the onus was on her, as the older person, not to do it/him even if he made the first move and/or seemed to enthusiastically consent. But there’s no undoing what happened and rather than faulting your husband for not being traumatized by the experience, you should be grateful (to fate, not her) that he wasn’t, and then stuff it down the memory hole.
P.S. If you think the only reason an eighteen-year-old boy might wanna fuck a friend of his mom’s is that he’d been groomed by that person when he was a child, TOE, you haven’t met many 18-year-old boys.
P.P.S. You have every right to tell your husband that you don’t want to lay eyes on this woman ever again.
P.P.P.S. I shared your letter with Jamie Zane Brazell, a psychotherapist and AASECT certified sex therapist.
“TOE says she’s held her tongue for four years and she might need some assistance on how to approach her husband with her own feelings,” said Brazell in an email. “She’s holding a lot of these feelings in and I’d hate it for her if they ended up coming out sideways when she just can’t hold it in anymore. I also think it’s unfair to him if she projects her own feelings onto his experience and assumes he SHOULD be traumatized when he was not. Lots of people make it into adulthood and look back with regret on experiences they had with someone who woke them up sexually and who would not be considered an age-appropriate partner. And then there are lots of other people who have had a sexual awakening occur from a much older person and then later feel a bit conflicted about it because they don’t personally feel weird about it until they find out that maybe they should. But should they really?”
To learn more about Jamie Zane Brazell’s work and her practice, visit her website www.outofthewoodstherapy.com.
I’m a 31-year-old cis straight woman. I lost my virginity at age 29 to my boyfriend, a 32-year-old heteroflexible cis man. Growing up, my family was very critical of my appearance, and I internalized this and took it for granted that I was ineligible for sex and romance. I forced myself to try dating apps a few years ago which is how I met and fell in love with my boyfriend. Our relationship of two years is romantic, affectionate, fun, and fulfilling. However, despite our strong mutual attraction (he is crazily handsome!), our sex life is just okay. While talking about new things that might make sex more exciting for both of us, my boyfriend said he wouldn’t mind if I slept with another man. He says it’s not a turn-on for him, he just feels like it wouldn’t be fair to me if he was the only man I ever slept with.
The idea of opening the relationship was interesting to me, as I think having sex with other people might improve my sexual confidence, and that sex with my boyfriend might improve as a result. Unfortunately, I’m not as secure as my boyfriend is, and I don’t think I could handle him sleeping with other women. Just the idea hurts me. I told him this, assuming he would then accept that opening our relationship was not viable. But he said that that wasn’t a problem. He had many partners before we met and says he doesn’t feel a need to be with other people. The idea of our relationship being open on my side only feels unfair to me. On the other hand, there’s an imbalance between our levels of sexual experience that opening things on my side would help correct.
Would it be ethical to open the relationship only on my side? Or would it be a recipe for disaster?
Sexual Erotic Experiences Knowingly
If it’s recipes for disaster you’re after, SEEK, you came to the right place: I write cookbooks full of them in my sleep.
If you don’t take your boyfriend up on his offer — so you can experience other men and perhaps get the confidence boost that improves your sexual relationship with him — your shared dissatisfaction with sex could grow until one of you ends the relationship. If you do take him up on his offer, you could meet someone who blows your mind — you could wind up having amazing sex with someone who wants to be your boyfriend — and wind up dumping the man you love for some boy you just met. Or after a year of living with a one-sided open relationship, your boyfriend could rationalize fucking someone else on the side himself, since you’ve been out there fucking other guys, which could result in a messy breakup that saddles you with trust issues that make it harder for you to bond with your next boyfriend.
Basically, SEEK, there are lots of ways this could go wrong. So, instead of opening the relationship on your side, you might wanna work on the sex first. There’s no shortage of sex therapists out there who work with couples on improving their sex lives and very few recommend fucking other people as a first move — not even when fucking other people is the obvious solution, e.g. cases where the sex is never going to work and transitioning to a companionate relationship that’s sexually open on both sides may be a couple’s only hope of staying together.
I’m not saying a one-sided open relationship isn’t right for you, SEEK, what I’m saying is that — given the stakes — you might want to examine, with the help of a professional, your other options first.
P.S. I know your boyfriend denied having cuck fantasies but that could’ve been kink shame talking. You might feel better about taking him up on this offer if the idea of being with other men gives him as much pleasure as it gives you. So, you might wanna ask him that question again.
P.P.S. He thinks he would be fine with you sleeping with other men… but he can’t know that for sure since he’s never been in an open relationship. You think you couldn’t handle your boyfriend sleeping with other women… but you can’t know that for sure since you’ve never been in an open relationship before. His reaction to you sleeping with other men may surprise him, SEEK, and your reaction to him being with other women — if you should wind up evolving in the direction of a fully open relationship — might surprise you.
I am a 33-year-old she/they from the PNW and I need some breakup advice.
Last August I broke up with my partner of eight years — or rather they broke up with me. He was my first love and first long-term relationship. We lived together for years, we adopted a dog together, and our lives were completely intertwined. While there were multiple things that led to the breakup, my partner falling in love with another person was a big catalyst. We were poly, and this new relationship rocked our partnership in a lot of normal poly ways — but also in some confusing and hurtful ways. My own behavior definitely played a part in our breakup. During our breakup, my ex moved in with his new partner while I prepared to move out. Within about a month of the breakup, my ex had collared his new partner, a clearly symbolic statement about their commitment to each other. Then less than two months after I moved out of the home we shared, my ex moved his new partner in. When I found out, he acted like it was no big deal.
I had moved away from friends and family to build a life with my ex. That home meant a lot to me, as did our partnership. That’s all to say, moving out was really sad and hard. Any attempt to acknowledge the massive change to both our lives, the change in our relationship, and the impact of his choices has often led to conflict. I know my ex has his own side of the story and things that feel hard and hurtful, including how I’ve behaved. I take accountability for my shitty actions. But at the same time, I only ever hear about his experience during our fights or in reaction to my attempts to share my own feelings. It’s been a steady loop for us since the breakup. At the moment we see each other once a week when I pick up our dog for the day. Those interactions are generally brief and mostly friendly, but I feel that things are just getting swept under the rug. In the initial stages of the breakup, we discussed the possibility of friendship. Part of me feels that it doesn’t make sense to scrap a relationship after almost a decade spent together, even if the sexual and romantic part has ended. The other part of me feels deeply hurt by all the humiliating and painful parts of our breakup, but expressing my feelings about this to him only leads to conflict.
Do you have advice for navigating any of this?
Still Hurting About Rough End
Get your own dog.
P.S. That was a heartless thing to say, I realize, as you are no doubt emotionally attached to the dog you adopted with your ex. But it sounds like these weekly dog handoffs are reopening wounds that have barely had a chance to scab over. So, while telling you to get your own dog may be heartless (full disclosure: I’m not a dog person), if sharing custody of this dog is making you miserable (due, in no small part, to your unrealistic expectations about these meetings should entail) and if a new dog couldn’t possibly fill the this-particular-dog-shaped hole in your heart, SHARE, then at the very least you should ask a trusted mutual friend to pick the dog up and drop the dog off for the next six months.
P.P.S. If fights with your ex have been on a “steady loop” since your breakup, you’re spending way too much time talking to your ex.
P.P.P.S. It’s always painful to watch an ex move on quickly — it’s a sign that you were the last to know the relationship was over — which brings us to another good reason not to see your ex: then you don’t have to watch. And if processing your feelings about your breakup with your ex isn’t getting you anywhere, SHAME, it might be a sign that you’re processing your feelings with the wrong person. If you need to pour your heart out to someone who’ll tell you what you want to hear, e.g. your sins (the blowups you hint at) pale in comparison to his sins (collaring the new GF, moving her in so soon after you moved out, refusing to get pulled into another argument each time he sees you), SHAME, pour your heart out to your therapist or your best friend your new dog.
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