I’m a cis bisexual American woman in my 30s, married to a man. I’ve been living in Europe for the past decade. I’m self-employed, and it’s a pretty lonely existence sometimes. I don’t speak the local language well. It’s a very tight-knit culture, and everybody seems like they’ve had their friend groups since birth.  I’ve had a really hard time forming close relationships with people here. ANYWAY. My husband and I tried opening our marriage around 2018 and slept with other people on and off until last year. I don’t feel like the experience was a net positive for me; it really exacerbated my loneliness and anxiety, but we’re monogamous again and our marriage is fine. In the midst of all of this, I met a woman, and we became friends. It came up in conversation that I’ve been to certain nightclubs in Berlin and, after dancing around the topic, we both admitted to being in open relationships. Since then, whenever we hang out, she spends a lot of time talking about her dating life and how great it is, and goes into really explicit detail. I’ve told her that I’m not dating anymore. I’ve cried in front of her, telling her the effect that it all had on my mental health, but it doesn’t seem to stop her from viewing me as her kinky, open friend that she can talk about this stuff with.

I have hardly any friends, so I’d hate to lose her, but I also don’t enjoy her company when it’s so much about her amazing sex life. It’s not like I’m her only outlet for sex talk, because she tells me (brags, even) that she can talk very freely about her sex life with other friends, coworkers, and even her siblings. Do I politely decline her invitations to hang out until she gets the point and stops reaching out? Do I tell her directly that listening to her stories puts me on the verge of a panic attack? Do I work harder in therapy?

I Can’t Hear You

Fading away — declining your friend’s invites until she gets the hint — will definitely send a message, ICHY, but it’ll be a vague, self-defeating, and needlessly cruel one.

Zooming out for a second: this woman would have to be dense not to realize you don’t wanna listen to her sex stories. But some people are dense. You met her when you were open, and you cried in front of her when you told her why you were closing your relationship. Someone of reasonable emotional intelligence might think, “Hey, it might be painful for my friend to listen to my stories about KitKatClub when her experiences there were so painful.” But this friend — if she is a friend (more on that in a moment) — might figure you’re okay hearing about her stories since her experiences aren’t the ones that made you cry.

If you haven’t told her that hearing about her sexual adventures dredges up your own painful memories, your friend — if she’s really that dense (and some people really are) — might not know she’s upsetting you. And if she really is that dense, she’s not going to be able to figure out what she did wrong when you ghost her and might obsess over what she did wrong.

Or — hey — maybe she knows hearing about the last four dicks she sucked is making you miserable, and she doesn’t care.

There’s only one way to find out whether your friend is either a well-meaning but clueless dolt capable of a course correction or whether she’s a self-involved asshole who doesn’t care about you: speak the fuck up. If you say something — if you politely ask her to spare you the sex stories — you might save this friendship. If you ghost her instead, you’re definitely going to lose one of the few friends you have. Seeing as you already feel isolated, ICHY, it seems to me that you should err on the side of saving this friendship.

If you can’t find the words, ICHY, feel free to copy, paste, and send this to your friend: “I like spending time with you but hearing about your sex life makes me anxious — not because you’re doing anything wrong but because I’m still processing the fallout from my own experiences with openness, which weren’t great. Remember how I cried? You’ve got lots of other people you can talk to about this stuff — even your siblings — so I want to be the friend you talk with about anything and everything else. Deal?”

If this woman is an asshole, the next time you get together, she’ll launch into a story about her last visit to KitKatClub, and you can feel free to ghost her. If she’s not an asshole, she’ll talk with you about the shows she’s binging or the museums she visited in Berlin when she wasn’t getting fucked on the dance floor at Berghain, ICHY, and you can keep hanging out.

P.S. You say you opened your marriage in 2018, closed it again last year, and met your friend “in the midst” of this open phase — so, you met her three years ago. So, it’s possible your friend is neither an idiot nor an asshole. If you were comfortable telling her about your outside sexual adventures at first (or you appeared to be) and you were comfortable listening to her talk about hers (0r you appeared to be), ICHY, your friend may have assumed you’re okay hearing about her adventures still even if you’re not having any more of your own. Speak up.

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I recently signed up for a free fetish website and discovered I LOVE sharing photos of my body and getting anonymous comments/likes. However, I’m keeping things pretty PG-13 for fear of my identity somehow being exposed. I literally worry about an ex recognizing my butt freckles or a roommate seeing our shower tiles. And the imagined consequences: how it might impact my job, my family, my reputation in the community, etc. I’d be turned on by posting more NC-17 or even R-rated content, but have been quelled by my fears. Any advice? Should I go for it with the naughty stuff or stay modest? 

Posting Online Smut Entails Risk

Millions of people are going to share dirty pics online today, POSER, and most will face no negative consequences. But your fears are not unfounded: people have lost jobs, friends, and spouses — and gotten in trouble with their roommates — after making their homemade smut public. You can protect your identity by using a fake name and burner email, scrubbing metadata from your photos (don’t ask me how to do that; I literally have to ask my husband’s boyfriend to turn on the TV), cropping your face out of photos, and blurring out uniquely identifying features, e.g. tattoos, freckles, shower tiles, framed family photos on your nightstand, etc.

And remember: Even if you delete an image seconds after posting it, someone may have already saved it and/or some bot may have already scraped it — and an image you posted to one website (or shared privately) can end up on a million other websites. (A friend posted a photo online fifteen years ago that became iconic in gay kink circles and wound up on coffee cups.) But in addition to the billions of dirty photos already in circulation and the millions that will be added today — to say nothing of the advent of AI porn and the penumbra of plausible deniability it has created (“Sure, that’s my face but that’s not me! That’s obviously AI!”) — your dirty pics will most likely get lost in the pile. And with almost everyone having shared a few dirty pics online these days, dirty pics have less power to destroy a person’s life. (Cuddling during a Coldplay concert, on the other hand…)

P.S. No risk, no reward.

P.P.S. Not giving a fuck who sees your photos is also an option.

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Read the rest of this week's column here!