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 AjarDear 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.
In the words of Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert, authors of open relationship advice book More Than Two, “It can be difficult to shake the notion that commitment and exclusivity are the same thing.” Polyamory pros will be quick to tell you that you can be both committed to your partnerships and not be sexually/emotionally exclusive to them, but not without a lot of work and vulnerability from everyone involved.
When you ask your boyfriend if you can sleep with other women without him doing the same, you’re asking him to do some very vulnerable self-work and risk-taking that you’ve just said you’re unwilling to do yourself. You say you’re afraid that he’ll propose an open relationship when this is exactly what you’re doing when requesting this arrangement.
Further, you seem to be implying that same-sex/queer sexual interactions are somehow less valuable or real than heterosexual ones. Otherwise you wouldn’t find your own girl-on-girl dalliances so permissible and his boy-on-girl ones so objectionable.
Our culture says that men are entitled to their sexual desires while women’s are cast as selfish and slutty. So no, I don’t think you’re being selfish by stating and pursuing your desires to have sex with women or to open your relationship. But I do recommend some self-reflection about why you’d rather open this relationship than end it and that you practice the vulnerable bravery it takes to be in an open relationship by speaking honestly with yourself and your boyfriend.
To answer your last question: The Internet. But first things first.•
Yana Tallon-Hicks is a pleasure-positive writer and educator living in the Pioneer Valley. She has a website bursting with sex advice, resources, and workshops at yanatallonhicks.com.
