I visited Royal Oak, Michigan, for Savage Love Live at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. I didn’t get to all of the questions submitted by the large and tipsy crowd — a crowd that skipped the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes to spend the evening with me (so honored, you guys!) — so I’m going to race through as many of the unanswered questions as I can in this week’s column. Here we go…
Q: Is there a way of breaking my cycle of being totally sexual and into someone for the first six months and then shutting down to the point that I don’t want to be sexual with them at all? What’s wrong with me?
A: Breaking a long-established pattern may require the aid of a therapist who can help you unpack your damage — if, indeed, this is about damage. Because it’s possible this could be the way your libido works; you could be wired for a lifetime of loving, short-term relationships. While our culture reserves its praise for successful long-term relationships (think of those anniversary gifts that increase in value with each passing year), a short-term relationship can be a success. Everyone get out alive? No one traumatized? Were you able to pivot to friendship? Then you can regard that relationship as a success — or all those relationships as successes.
Q: How common a kink is it to enjoy seeing your significant other having sex with someone else?
A: Common enough to have numerous different ways of manifesting itself — swinging, hotwifing, cuckolding, stag-and-vixen play — and an entire porn genre dedicated to it.
Q: Cis, female, 33, poly, bi. I bruise easily, am into BDSM, and love to swim in my condo’s shared pool, where there are many seniors. Any advice for hiding bruises or getting over the embarrassment?
A: Don’t assume the senior citizens in the pool are as naive and/or easily shocked as our ageist assumptions would prompt us to believe. Someone who became a senior citizen today — who just turned 65 years old — was 35 in 1988. I happen to know for a fact that people were doing BDSM way, way back in 1988.
Q: My husband is a sweet guy who is very good to me. But he is also a gun-toting right-wing conservative, and these days that feels like an insurmountable difference. We have been together for seven years and married for two. No kids yet. I love him — and the thought of leaving him is terrifying — but I honestly don’t know if this is going to work.
A: If you’re afraid to leave him because of those guns, you need to get out. If you’re afraid to leave him because you love him and couldn’t live without him, you might be able to stay. I wouldn’t be able to stay, personally, but you might. Maybe if you make “no political discussions about anything, ever” a condition of remaining in the marriage.
Q: When you are entering into something new, how do you differentiate between infatuation and real feelings?
A: Infatuation is a real feeling. Only time will tell if the other real but more lasting feelings — like, like like, love, lasting love — will surface when those feelings of infatuation inevitably fade.
Q: I can easily have an orgasm with toys but I can’t have one with my boyfriend. What gives?
A: Your boyfriend could give you orgasms if you handed him one of those toys, showed him how you use it on yourself, and then guided his hands the first few times he used it on you.
Q: Why does my girlfriend enjoy anal sex more than I thought she would?
A: Because she does. Because anal is hot. Because the clit is a great big organ and most of it’s inside the body and anal penetration may stimulate the backside of your girlfriend’s great big clitoris in a way that’s new and different and highly pleasurable and — hey, wait a minute. You aren’t disappointed she’s enjoying anal more than you thought she would, are you?
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