The Invite

I’m a late-thirties hetero married man. I’m also a flirt. I’ve known this about myself for a long time, and while my spouse knows this generally, she probably doesn’t know that I can lean into a bit at times when she is not around. For a long time it was fine. I considered my flirting to fall into my “zone of erotic autonomy” and never intended it to lead anywhere. Then twice in the last year it’s led to women getting the wrong (but honestly, understandable) impression that I’m open for more. Nothing happened but I realize now that I need to… not do this anymore? No more flirting, no more coy innuendos, no. more dangerous-but-plausibly-deniable interactions, chats, etc. But thinking about a life without flirting makes me a little dead inside. It’s the spice of life, isn’t it? Not having that little bit of tension, that sense of danger, that glow that comes from a successful flirtation — the thought of never experiencing any of that again leaves me feeling almost despondent. But I love my relationship and don’t want to endanger it anymore and I don’t want to be a dick to other people when they realize I’m not open for more. I’m not sure what to do. Or how to think about this. Do you have any words of wisdom?

Feeling Like I’m Risking Trouble

A little light flirting is fine, FLIRT, even for people in monogamous relationships. With the exception of the “micro-cheating” lunatics, everyone understands that even married people occasionally get to/need to flirt.

You can only be faulted for leading someone if 1. the person with whom you’re flirting doesn’t know you’re happily married and hopelessly monogamous and 2. the flirting crossed that sometimes nebulous line between harmless married-not-dead (MND) flirting and what a reasonable person would interpret as flirting with intent (FWI). Married-not-dead flirting looks (and sounds) like two people acknowledging and enjoying a mutual attraction that — in the timeline in which they find themselves — can never be acted on. MND flirting tends to be lowkey, it sometimes has a slightly melancholic tinge, and ideally it stirs up sexual energy that you take home and plow into your spouse. Flirting with intent, on the other hand, is reckless and disrespectful — of both your spouse’s feelings (if they should find out you were thinking about fucking someone else) and the feelings of the person you’re cranking the fuck up (when they find out you can’t actually fuck them).

As with so many things, FLIRT, you just use your words. Once you’ve engaged in a little light MND flirting, pause to clarify that you’re married and monogamous. Then you can dial it up a few notches and maybe tiptoe up the the FWI line. If you sense that your flirting partner is starting to doubt whether you meant it when you said you were monogamous, dial it back down.

First of all, I need to thank you. I’ve been following you for almost ten years and you gave me such a spectrum of possibilities in relationships and a really open mindset. My little drama is, I’m in an open relationship where we’ve had ongoing issues with communication and emotional labor. I’m always the one carrying the baggage while he gets to be the “light” one, which makes me feel unconsidered. We finally had a deep conversation about this, and I thought things were finally understood. I really needed a demonstration from him. Instead, just three days after that conversation, he went away and slept with someone else. It’s true that he was checking in more than usual on that trip, since I had just asked, but it felt like a demonstration done completely negatively. I guess my question is, how do I navigate an open relationship in this case? In my head, you shouldn’t be sleeping around when things are not stable within the relationship, or am I wrong? If things are lacking on the inside, is it still okay to have sex on the outside? Why do I feel like he cheated?

Italian Fan For Years

If you told your partner you didn’t want him fucking other people for the time being — if you literally said, “No sex with other people while we work on us,” and he agreed to close the relationship — and then he turned around and fucked someone else at his first opportunity… yeah, IFFY, your partner cheated on you.

But if you told your partner you felt like there was an imbalance in the emotional labor department and that you needed him to be more attentive… but you did not literally say you wanted to close the relationship back up… and then he made an effort to be more attentive before fucking someone else, IFFY, which he was allowed, then… no, he didn’t cheat on you.

Not wanting your partner to sleep with other people when your relationship doesn’t feel safe and secure — when things aren’t feeling stable — is a fine and perfectly valid thing to want. But if that feeling remained “in your head,” i.e. if you didn’t say it out loud and say it unambiguously, you can’t be hurt — feelings are feelings — but you can’t angry that your partner for failing to read your mind. Now, maybe he known and/or figured what it is you wanted, IFFY, but we’ve already established that your partner needs all the help he can get where emotional sensitivities are concerned. And while it’s possible his failure to understand exactly what you meant was self-serving, dick-motivated reasoning, but it’s also possible your emotionally dense partner is just be… dense.

So, if you want to stay in this relationship and closing it while you work on these issues together is a requirement, IFFY, you need to make that clear to him. With apologies to Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his freedom to fuck around depends on his not understanding it.” No hints, no ambiguity, no hoping he gets it — tell him.

I’m a guy, age 65, and writing to you from Seattle. My wife is also 65 and we are both considered young and fun for our age. We’re sexually active and ambitious, but happily monogamous, having been married for 44 years. Many of our best friends are in their thirties and forties and they seem to enjoy hanging out with us. That’s the good part. Now here is the confusing part and the basis for my question. Five years ago, one of our friends let me know that they are in “the lifestyle.” I filed this info away and have always been just a little bit curious about logistics and other details. I spend way too much time on social media, and I have realized that many, many of our other friends are also connected to this person, even though, ostensibly they seem to have little in common. I now have a fun, weird theory that I cannot prove or disprove. Almost every one of our friends is also active in the lifestyle, but for reasons that I cannot fathom they have never spoken of it to us or even said a word, much less invited us to join in. Should I take this as a compliment or an insult? Are all of our friends having kinky fun behind our respective backs? Just to make this more fun, and to give you a good laugh, the odds that my wife and I would ever want to do this are about a million to one against. But you never know!

Swingless in Seattle

If you wanna get a general conversation about swinging started in your friend group, SIS, you could send a group text asking these your thirty- and forty-somethings what they thought of The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s amazing new movie starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton. If they haven’t seen it yet, suggest a group outing.

As for your theory that the one swinger you know is swinging with every other person and/or couple they know…

While people in the lifestyle do know other people in the lifestyle (obviously), SIS, it doesn’t follow that every person a swinger knows is in the lifestyle. So, while you can’t rule out the possibility that all of your thirty- and forty-something friends are fucking each other, you shouldn’t assume they are either. But even if they are fucking each other — let’s go ahead and make that assumption as a thought experiment — I can easily fathom up two good reasons why most of them haven’t spoken to you about it:

1. These swinging singles and/or couples assume you and your wife aren’t interested in swinging.

2. These swinging singles and/or couples aren’t interested in swinging with you and your wife.

If you are interested in the lifestyle for intellectual reasons — if you have questions about the logistics — you could raise the subject with the one friend who came out to you as a swinger. When someone volunteers that kind of information about themselves, SIS, you’re allowed to ask non-intrusive follow-up questions. So, if you want to know how your friend and his partner meet other couples, how they got into the lifestyle, what their rules are, etc., you can ask those questions. But don’t ask your friend to rattle off the names of other people you know who are in the lifestyle, SIS, as that would require him to violate their privacy. (And if you ask your friend for names and he answers, he won’t have any respect for your privacy either.)

P.S. I’m guessing the odds against you swinging are a million to one because your wife doesn’t want to — or you assume your wife doesn’t want to — and not because you don’t want to. Because I don’t think you would be asking me about this if your curiosity was entirely idle and/or logistical.

I’m a bisexual woman in a hetero marriage. We’ve been together for fifteen years, we have two amazing kids, and we’re very happy/committed to our relationship. As so often happens when kids enter the picture, our love life has hit a long-term dry spell. So, my question is twofold:

1. How do I spice things back up without creating more of a problem by adding pressure?

2. I’ve been thinking of asking if he’d like to explore group sex or sex with another hetero couple. How on earth do I begin this conversation? Neither of us want to open the relationship. For some reason bringing in just one woman for a threesome feels like it could lead to tricky territory (what if this other woman wants more?) but being with another couple that is also committed to each other could be a fun/safe way to explore. It would also allow me to reconnect with my queerness. I don’t think my husband has any queer leanings. Are straight guys also into group sex?

Distressed About Mounting Pressure

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