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I
am a 23-year-old male who has been in a relationship with
a great woman for four years now. She is an amazing person,
and we oftentimes talk about marriage. The issue is this:
I have a foot fetish and she is fully aware of it. She doesn’t
like the idea of me kissing her feet or indulging my fetish
in any way. We have sex quite often, and I’ve always let it
slide that she doesn’t want any part of my fetish. I don’t
know what to do, because I’m at a stage in my sexual growth
where I need to experience my fetish. I’m getting mixed advice
from different people and I just want a straight answer. The
sex we have is amazing, but I would enjoy it so much more
if I could act on my desires once in a while.
—Sexually
Frustrated Fetishist
Here’s
a straight answer: Your amazing girlfriend is an amazingly
selfish lover, and I’m amazed that you’ve put up with her
bullshit for as long as you have. A foot fetish is not uncommon
or outrageous; as fetishes go, SFF, yours is the least taxing
for a nonkinky partner. It’s not like you’re into shit or
choking or Christian side hugs. Any amazing woman who truly
loved you would regard indulging you as a no-brainer.
Share time: I have a good friend who’s not kinky at all—unless
you count being gay—and he’s a runner who goes for long runs
every Saturday morning. When he gets home, he handcuffs his
boyfriend to a chair in his kitchen, duct-tapes one of his
sweaty sneakers over the boyfriend’s face, and leaves him
there while he has breakfast. My friend—who came to me for
advice when his boyfriend confessed his fetish—isn’t really
into guys with sneakers duct-taped to their faces. But it
gets his lover off, and isn’t that what lovers are for?
Your lover has had things—she’s had you—on her terms for four
years, SFF, which means you’re going to have to play the breakup
card. It’s the only leverage you have. Tell her that if she
can indulge your fetish—happily and regularly—and take some
pleasure in giving you pleasure, she might be “the one.” If
she can’t or won’t, she obviously isn’t. (Not that “the one”
is anything other than a destructive myth, but for the sake
of winning this argument, go ahead and use it.)
Finally, SFF, don’t let the girlfriend—or anyone else—tell
you that you’re threatening to end this relationship over
something trivial. Sexual fulfillment is important, particularly
if your relationship is exclusive. And the “triviality” of
your kink cuts both ways: If your kink is so trivial, why
not just indulge you? And in a long-term relationship—or a
marriage—one partner’s sexual selfishness and another’s sexual
frustration rarely prove trivial over the long haul. They’re
more often grounds for divorce.
I am a 35-year-old partnered gay man, but I’ve been having
an online conversation with a married bisexual man that has
become an ongoing game of sexual dares. It’s a safe form of
sexual adventurism for both of us. None of our dares has involved
sexual contact with another person, but some of our dares
have begun to involve other people at the edges. For example,
we’ve posted ads to Craigslist as submissives and responded
to some of the replies from dominant men. None of these interactions
with third parties will result in actual contact. It feels
a little like we are exploiting the “flakes” aspect of Craigslist,
i.e., it’s common to hear from someone a few times after making
contact on Craigslist and then never hear from them again.
But it also feels a little like we are using these folks.
Is this expansion of our game to involve other people ethical?
—Concerned
About Harming Craigslist Fellas
P.S.
By the way, this letter is itself part of a dare. If you publish
it and include a dare in the published reply, I will have
to fulfill that dare.
The expansion of your game to Craigslist will annoy those
guys on CL who are looking for actual contact, CAHCF, but
as those guys amount to something less than 0.02 percent of
the men trawling Craigslist at any given moment, I wouldn’t
worry about it. Everyone knows that CL is overrun with flakes
and game players and picture collectors; the odds that the
“dominant men” you’ve chatted with on CL are interested in
actual contact are pretty damn slim. (Guys interested in real-time
BDSM play are likelier to be lurking on Recon.com or in your
local hardware store.) So post at will.
P.S. I dare you to go to tinyurl.com/ye3otsh and take the
pledge.
I’m a straight guy in my late 20s. I have a girlfriend
of several years whom I live with and I love very much. I
just read your most recent column, in which you used the acronyms
HND (honest nonmonogamous dude) and CPOS (cheating piece of
shit), and it struck a nerve. I have never been an HND; I
have in the past been a CPOS (though not in this relationship).
My girlfriend is lovely, supportive, and generally GGG, and
though the sex is good, I have a significantly higher libido
than she does and I would like to have a little more variety
in my sex life. I want to be an HND, but I don’t know how
to broach the subject with the girlfriend without ruining
our relationship. We are very open about our sex life and
our relationship in general, but I think this is probably
a “next level” topic that may not go over very well. How do
I bring this up without screwing up our relationship beyond
repair?
—Aspiring
Honest Nonmonogamous Dude
Based
on what you’ve learned about yourself in past relationships,
AHND, i.e., that you’re a CPOS waiting to happen, I would
encourage you to err on the side of screwing up your current
relationship with an honest conversation about your mismatched
libidos and your natural and normal desire for a little variety.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics all demonstrate that, in time,
one or the other or both of you will cheat. Better to toss
that out there now, even at the risk of calmly winding down
this relationship before you revert to form/CPOS, than to
see the relationship explode after someone, most likely you,
winds up cheating.
And while we’re on the subject of cheating . . .
I suppose I’m obligated to say a few words about Tiger Woods.
First, let’s pretend that Elin Nordegren cheated on Tiger
and that Tiger went after Elin with a golf club. Would Elin
be viewed as the sole transgressor in the marriage then? Probably
not. And second, daily papers and cable-news outfits reacted
to Tiger’s “transgressions” by changing the names in the same
“Why do powerful men cheat?” stories they’ve been pimping
since Bill Clinton blew a load on a White House intern. For
the millionth time: Men cheat for the same reasons women cheat,
i.e., because they’re bored or horny or unfulfilled or desperate
to see someone else naked for a change. People cheat because
monogamy isn’t natural and we are wired to cheat. That doesn’t
make cheating right, of course; people should honor their
commitments, and blah-de-nine-iron-blah. But we shouldn’t
encourage people to make commitments we all know they’re unlikely
to keep. The end.
AUCTION NOTICE: Want to answer a question or two in an
upcoming column? I’m auctioning off a chance to give advice
in this space to raise money for some worthy charities. Go
to tinyurl.com/SLauction for details and to bid.
Download
a new Savage Love podcast every Tuesday at www.thestranger.com/savage.
mail@savagelove.net
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