I’m a 31-year-old heterosexual woman who has been married for nine years. The math: my husband and I got married right after university. Like you, I grew up Catholic, and as a girl/woman, all of the purity culture bullshit was foisted on me. Over the years, I’ve come to reject everything I was brought up to believe. I never stepped out of line, and now I grieve for my younger self because I missed out on formative experiences — sexual and otherwise — that I should’ve had in my teens/20s. I feel stunted. It was pounded into me (only figuratively, sadly) that I would deeply regret having sex before marriage. Ironically, what I actually regret is not having sex with the kind, loving guys I dated before my husband.
In the last year or so, I’ve developed a curiosity to experience more and some very ambiguous desires. I wonder what it would be like to have other sexual partners and what it would be like to date now. I’ve talked about this with my husband, and he validates that my feelings are normal given my/our strict upbringing and lack of experience, but ultimately shrugs it off. After all, he says, we can’t go back in time and get married later or have different partners, etc. I cannot imagine him being open to any arrangement other than what we have now: garden-variety monogamy. My ambiguous desire had no outlet until recently, when I developed a huge crush on a coworker. While we’re flirtatious together, he’s also unavailable, so there is nowhere for this attraction to “go.” I have not felt like this for as long as I’ve been married. The alchemy of this crush is staggering.
Dan, what do I do if I want to experience more, but I can’t put my finger on what that means exactly? If I want experiences that aren’t possible within my marriage, are my only options to suppress those desires or leave when leaving could mean I would lose a mostly solid relationship for potentially nothing?
Grass Is Getting Greener Every Day
You have four options, GIGGED, not two.
Option #1: Ask. You may think you already asked your husband for permission to fuck other men, GIGGED, but if your husband was able to shrug your concerns off — come on — you failed to communicate exactly what it was you were asking for. And if you can’t imagine him being open to “any arrangement” other than the one you agreed to when you married, then you failed to ask him a direct question about other possible arrangements. If you had, you wouldn’t have to imagine how he might feel. You would know. Like a lot of married people who want to open their marriages, you kept the ask vague — and plausibly deniable — in case he reacted with shock or anger, and you wanted to walk it back. So, ask him directly: Can we open our marriage? Can I fuck some other guys? If he surprises you and says yes, you’ll have the freedom you want without having to give up the husband you still love. If he says no…
Option #2: Leave. This means losing your marriage — and just asking about openness has cost some people their marriages — but even if you lose him, GIGGED, you won’t be left with nothing. You will have your freedom. Freedom isn’t a guarantee of current or future romantic or sexual happiness, of course, but freedom ain’t nothing either. You don’t mention children — which would change the math here — and divorce is painful and messy with or without kids, but you’re still young. And if you suddenly found yourself single at 32, you’ll be able to make up for lost time and lost dicks.
Option #3: Cheat. This advice pisses everyone off, but it belongs on the table because people do it and because in some instances — not your instance, GIGGED, but in some — cheating is the least worst option for all involved, including the person who got cheated on. But it’s a high-risk gamble: you could get caught and blow your marriage up and be seen as the villain, or you could get away with it but then spend the rest of your life with the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Some people manage to have affairs and get away with them, some don’t. Some people learn to live with the stress of a secret, some crack under it.
Option #4: Suppress. Basically, suck it up. Tell yourself your marriage is good enough, your husband is good enough, and you’re willing and able to go to your grave decades from now without having sex with anyone else even once. This is the path of least resistance — it’s the path most monogamously-married-but-sexually-frustrated people choose to walk; it’s also the path lots of cheaters tried to walk and/or pretended to walk. But it’s also the path most likely to slowly rot your marriage from the inside out, GIGGED, as your feelings of resentment grow and that grass on your coworker starts to look greener and greener. Most people who wind up cheating were attempting to suck it up but couldn’t keep it up. (For the record: Not all monogamously married people are sexually frustrated! And not all cheaters are sexually satisfied!)
None of these options are perfect. All of them come with costs. But pretending you only have two options — suppress or leave — simply isn’t true.
I’m a 40-year-old straight married guy. This past weekend, I got a day pass to a nearby nudist club — you know, the kind with families, a lake, kayaks, tennis courts, that sort of thing. I was basically on a scouting mission to see if it was the kind of place my wife might like to spend some time. (It was fun!) Everyone was super nice and welcoming, but I always made sure to drop a reference to my wife and kids in conversation, especially with women — it just seemed to make things go smoother, given I was a single, unaccompanied male. At one point, though, another unaccompanied male, around age fifty, approached me and started talking. It became clear pretty quickly that he was flirting. Totally fine, all good, people do that! But I then dropped in a reference to my wife, almost without thinking about it, because that’s what I’d been doing all day, and he ended our conversation abruptly and walked away.
I felt bad about it afterward. I think he read it as me trying to communicate my straightness to him, which I wasn’t really trying to do. Or at least, I wasn’t communicating anything I hadn’t been communicating to everyone else all day. Is there a good way to subtly let a guy know I’m straight and not interested without making it sound like I’m trying to get out of the conversation because he’s gay and I’m not? And is that advice any different when we are both standing naked in front of each other?
Needs Understanding Dan’s Evaluation
You’re overthinking this. In a mixed nudist environment — a mix of queers and straights, olds and youngs, naked tennis players and naked kayakers — you will occasionally be approached by men who are interested in your dick. So, unless you get “STRAIGHT” tattooed across your forehead (Pete Hegseth knows a tattoo artist who would be happy to do it), you’re gonna have brief interactions with gay men drawn to your dick.
Now, you only had one conversation that ended abruptly, NUDE, and unless that guy was the kind of pushy jerk who felt entitled to your dick because he could see it — and pushy jerks aren’t welcome at nudist resorts — I doubt he took it personally when you mentioned the wife. He hoped you might be gay, he realized you weren’t, and he moved on. You most likely talked with other men that day you didn’t realize were gay because 1. they were just making conversation and weren’t trying to get into your invisible pants (and so they kept chatting with you even after you dropped the “wife” bomb) or 2. they were trying to get into your invisible pants but stuck around after they realized you were straight because they were enjoying the conversation.
That said, NUDE, you don’t need a secret handshake or subtle wink or an appalling tattoo to let people know who you are. All you need is a willingness to make conversation and the ability to slip relevant details about yourself into the conversational flow. This advice applies whether you’re wearing nothing at the nudist resort, a full gimp suit at the fetish club, or a tux at your best friend’s wedding.
READ THE REST OF THIS WEEK’S COLUMN HERE! And on this week’s Lovecast: A newly out pan man is ready to dive into gay culture. But he isn’t quite ready to shave his pubes! Does he have to?
On the Magnum, Dan chats with novelist and television writer Kashana Cauley. (Author of The Payback and The Survivalists.) They talk about the pleasure of dystopian novels in a dystopian present, on being a clotheshorse, the student debt crisis, setting boundaries in kink and more! Listen here.
