Saturday, March 29, 2014

Wherein I play Dan Savage

Both these questions are from this Savage Love column:
I have a slowly terminal disease and don't have more than five or six years left. I haven't told my wife, which brings me to my problem. We had lived together for seven years when she cheated on me the first time. We worked things out, we got back together, but we continued to live separately. Then I cheated on her. We got back together again but continued living apart. After a year of therapy, we got married, but again we kept our households separate. Fast-forward one eviction and three years of living in a studio driving each other crazy, and she cheated on me again—this time in our house. I moved out instantly. A few months and a terminal diagnosis later, I don't have the will to file the divorce paperwork. We've talked a few times about trying to figure out how to fix us, but I don't know if I can ride this messed-up roller coaster anymore. On the other hand, I don't want to waste the rest of my life being a divorced fortysomething, but I still feel idiotic trying to fix our fucked-up relationship. She reads your column every week, so if you publish this, I'll have to talk to her about my illness, so at least that won't be an issue. What should I do about us?

Something for LW to think about that Dan Savage didn't mention: who do you want to be your next of kin?

As you're dying, your next of kin will become relevant. They'll have to make decisions on your behalf when you're no longer able to, like whether to donate your organs and when to pull the plug. You'll have to trust them to understand and carry out your wishes.  If you don't designate someone else, they'll probably also have power of attorney and stand to inherit (depending on the laws where you live.)  Even if you make a will, it can be contested if it leaves out the person who's your clear next of kin.

If you're married to your wife, she's your next of kin. How do you feel about that?  Is she the best person for the job?  Or do you not want her doing this job under any circumstances?  Who would be your next of kin if your wife was no longer your wife?  Would that person be a better or worse candidate?  Do you have someone else in mind who would be better at the job?  Or are you just hoping you might find someone better in the next five years?  If you have a job with benefits and those benefits include a survivor's benefit or life insurance or something for your next of kin, how would you feel about your wife getting those things as opposed to your next closest relative?  If the survivor's benefits only go to your spouse, how would you feel about your wife getting them as opposed to nobody getting anything?

If your wife is a better candidate for next of kin than your next-closest relative, that weighs in favour of staying married - especially if you live apart.  If you don't want your wife involved in these things, that weighs very heavily in favour of divorce.  If you want your wife to have power of attorney or inherit but you divorce her, that increases the likelihood of your will being contested by other relatives.  Conversely, if you don't want her involved but stay married, that increases the likelihood of your will being contested by your wife.

This isn't the only factor, and obviously your wife gets a say too, but if you don't want her involved in your caregiving and your estate, you probably shouldn't stay married.  And if you do want her involved in your caregiving and your estate, you should probably consider staying married and perhaps coming to an arrangement of caregiving in exchange for inheritance and otherwise both living your lives as you please.

Are there kinky people interested in BDSM without sex? I'm an early-40s gal living in the Midwest. I'm in a decent-to-great marriage, have two kids, a good life. But my husband is not kinky, not at all. I feel like I've done all I can to get him comfortable with rough sex, power play, etc., but aside from some very reluctant spanking, hair pulling, and a few humiliating (not in a good way) attempts at bondage, our sex life is almost totally vanilla. I enjoy the sex we have, but not being all of who I am sexually is making me resentful, miserable, and desperate. At this point, I'm not even interested in trying to get my husband on board—it obviously makes him uncomfortable, and I think he's just been hoping my desires would go away. They have not, of course, and will not. But I can't see breaking up my marriage over this! My desires for intense physical play, D/s, role-play, etc. are only getting stronger. Is it even worth trying to find people to play with who would be okay with no sex? I think I could be happy staying monogamous if I could just get some of my needs met elsewhere. I'm going insane, but I don't know if this is a thing, and research online has not been helpful. Is there any hope?
LW doesn't say if she's dominant or submissive.  If she's dominant, nothing I have to say is relevant and there's no point in reading further.  But if she's submissive, I have a suggestion: as an experiment, try non-sexual (or vanilla-sexual) D/s, without the B or the S&M. 

My first thought on reading the letter, as someone whose preferences are strictly vanilla, is how much it would suck to have a partner who wants me to beat them and hurt them and humiliate them.  I don't want to do that!  I like my partner!

Then I thought how ironic it would be (if LW is in fact submissive) to have your allegedly submissive partner trying to get you to do stuff you don't want to do.  If they really are submissive, shouldn't they be doing what you want them to do, not vice versa?  There are things I want my partner to do, they just don't involve violence or pain or humiliation.


There must be something LW's husband wants her to do. It probably isn't painful or degrading. It might not even be sexual. So what if they try, as an experiment, making a rule that for a specific limited period of time (an hour or an afternoon) LW has to do whatever her husband tells her?  He might tell her to bake a cake.  He might tell her to do their taxes.  He might tell her verb his noun in that one particular way he likes best. 

This is a more emotionally safe way to experiment with the D/s dynamic, because the person who's less comfortable with the dynamic is in complete control over how far it goes. It's possible that the husband might enjoy it if he's actually in charge and they're doing things he actually enjoys, and it's possible that if he enjoys it he may develop an interest in pushing it further, or at least expanding it from a one-time experiment to something more frequent or maybe even a lifestyle. It's possible LW might find that being truly submissive to her husband's actual needs scratches that itch, or at least scratches it enough for the time being that she's okay with sticking with this for now and seeing whether it evolves.

Of course, it's also possible that LW needs physical pain to get off sexually, in which case this suggestion wouldn't work.  But they'd be no worse off than they are now.

1 comment:

laura k said...

It would be nice if your solution would work, but whether LW is dom or sub, those kinds of activities are unlikely to satisfy her need. These sitautions usually lead to either polyamory or cheating.