Hi Yana!
I’m a lady in a happy, healthy, committed relationship with a man. We have a good sex life but my sex drive is much higher than his.
I’m also really into girls and have wanted to ask him for a long time how he would feel if I was Friends With Benefits with another girl. The idea excites me, but I’m really nervous to open up to him about this.
I’m afraid that he might propose an open relationship but I’m not down with that. I feel like me being intimate with another female is different than him being intimate with another female.
Is that hypocritical and selfish of me? How do couples talk about these things? If I take the plunge and all goes smoothly, where does a lady find another lady in the Pioneer Valley who shares similar desires?
— Slightly Ajar
Dear SA,
I hear this a lot when I talk to people about open or otherwise non-monogamous relationships: “I’d love to do that if I was the only one sleeping with/dating others” or “I could never let my partner sleep with/date someone else. I’d be way too jealous.”
While people can easily imagine the value of having both a committed relationship and outside sexual partners for themselves, they’re unable to trust that their partner could do the same without leaving them. No one ever says, “I could never be non-monogamous; I’m afraid I would leave my partner for my fuck-buddy.” Put clearly: fulfilling our own sexual diversity sounds swell, but when it’s our own vulnerability, the stakes are suddenly too high to bear.
Monogamous/non-monogamous pairings like you’re proposing above do exist. Couples can decide to do this for a number of reasons, such as one person being bisexual and the other not, or one person is living with a sex-life-impeding illness, or there’s an extreme difference in sex drives. But these structures aren’t about one person being “allowed” to sleep with others and the other being “forbidden” from doing so — they succeed because it’s the arrangement that both partners want.
One of the major myths supporting monogamy is that our partner’s commitment to us is synonymous with our control over them. Any relationship needs to be a positive choice for the people in the relationship in order for it to be healthy and happy. “Positive” meaning that it brings all involved more joy than pain and “choice” meaning it’s comprised of autonomous people choosing to commit to each other…continue reading…
