Q: I need your advice. My partner of 27 years has been sleeping with my best friend. This has been going on for a year and a half. As far as I knew, we had a monogamous relationship, even if things had gotten stale between us in recent years. And my best friend is everything to me. I confide in him for a lot, including advice on my relationship. We spoke recently about how my partner wasn’t interested in sex. He looked me straight in the eye and said how his partner wasn’t interested in sex either. Little did I know that he was doing my partner. What is weird is that my friend isn’t even close to my partner’s “type.”
But you can’t stay with your partner just to prevent that outcome. You can’t stay in this relationship out of spite. Which is not to say you can’t stay in this relationship. You could stay . . . if you wanted to . . . and your partner wants to . . . but it’s going to be a very different relationship going forward.
Or not. Your partner could want out and the affair was his way of blowing it all up. But if he wants to stay in this relationship too, GUTTED, it would, again, be a different kind of partnership going forward. Perhaps a companionate one, perhaps one with a revived sexual connection. There’s definitely a path forward if you both want to be together. It’s a steep and a rocky path, GUTTED, but it’s one countless other couples have walked together. But navigating it would require a huge effort from both of you, sincere contrition from him, and heroic powers of forgiveness from you.
A: A few years back you couldn’t watch 30 minutes of basic cable without seeing three ads marketing “tingling” lubes to straight couples. These lubes were touted like they were a revolutionary new way, as one KY ad put it, “to turn up the heat” on your sex life. Yeah, no. First of all, I remember seeing bottles of “hot lube” in sex shops and on the nightstands of my first boyfriends back when I came out in the 1980s. And the effect was, well, let’s just say that most bottles of hot lube were disposed nearly full. Because while hot lubes do make you hole tingle, it’s true, it’s not like they do the work. A lousy lay with hot lube on his dick is still a lousy lay. And getting hot lube all over your hole doesn’t “enhance the experience,” per KY, it only makes more it difficult to move on from it; it’s impossible to fall asleep after sex—be it good or bad—when you’ve got a bad case of tinglehole.
