Q: I’m wondering if you can help me with some dream interpretation. If it helps for context, I’m a single 29-year-old gay man. For just about as long as I can remember, I’ve been having mildly unsatisfying sex dreams in that the dreams never seem to lead to sex itself. My dream partners range from people I work with to people from high school to celebrities I’ll never get the chance to meet. I never dream about someone I wouldn’t want to sleep with in the waking world, given the opportunity. The scenarios are generally different as well. Sometimes the sexual tension is palpable but we’re in a crowded room. Sometimes we get close enough to get started but the setting is off. Sometimes we start to get hot and heavy but the dream ends just prior to the sex. In each case I wake up frustrated and masturbate to finish the fantasy. I’ve been pretty sexually starved during the pandemic, so you can imagine my frustration when I woke up this morning having almost had dream sex with Andrew Rannells. Can you think of why this might be happening? Any advice would be appreciated! —Distancing Real Earnestly And Missing Erotic Romps
My two cents: perhaps these dreams are lingering evidence of some shame about your same-sex desires—which is why your dream universes conspire to prevent you from having gay sex—or perhaps the continued existence of bigots who would prevent gay men from having sex preys on your subconscious mind and manifests in the form of these frustrating/frustration dreams. Or maybe there’s no way of knowing what the hell is going on here and trying to attach meaning to something as random as a dream is a waste of time or a scam or both.
Q: I’m writing in response to WHY, the Italian fellow whose partner has a significantly lower libido than he does. I would like to share my perspective. I have a high libido and my partner of more than 20 years has a low libido. From the perspective of the person with the lower libido, there’s no problem to address. The person with the lower libido gets to have sex whenever they want. When they don’t want sex, it doesn’t happen. If WHY wants to engage his partner in a conversation about this he has to make it clear this is a make-or-break situation. Use very specific language like, “If we can’t talk about this, I’m leaving,” or, “If we don’t go to counseling, I can’t stay in this relationship.” In my case, I did not communicate how important the issue was and my partner did not think we needed to talk about it because it wasn’t a problem for her and she didn’t know—because I didn’t tell her—how much of a problem it was for me. Eventually I acted out and had a random hookup. We wound up in counseling, which got us talking, but nothing changed the fact that we have very different libidos. More than likely I am moving out when our youngest son goes to college. If I had to do it over again I would have let my partner know exactly how important it is to me that we have a healthy, robust sexual relationship. Having a difficult conversation is better than acting out in a way that puts everyone’s health at risk and damages trust. I have no idea if that would have changed things between us, but I would feel a whole lot better about how things went down. —One Man’s Opinion
