I’m a newly remarried 50-year-old man. My wife and I have settled into a comfortable vanilla-sex routine. I enjoy it. My problem is that I also enjoy kinky sex. When I was single I used to see pro-doms pretty regularly. I’ve tried to introduce BDSM to my wife gently but without much success. She’s obviously not interested in something that happens to interest me very much. I think I have three alternatives. One, feed my fetish in solitary ways (we’re both comfortable with each other masturbating). Two, see professionals on a limited basis, keeping it from her (I’m not comfortable with this). Three, find some way to help her enjoy BDSM, even if she’s not fully into it.
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It’s a sad fact that men are more likely to be kinky than women. One unhappy consequence of this disparity is that most kinky men wind up with women who aren’t kinky. (Happy consequence: Kinky women can have their pick of the kinky men.) A lot of women married to kinky men operate under the misconception that a fetish is something a person can walk away from, like a job, or flip a switch and turn off, like a lamp. I get letters every day from women who married men into cross-dressing, or BDSM, or water sports, or Maria Shriver–sometimes all four. After these women rebuff their kinky husbands, their husbands promise never to act on their kinky desires again. Then one day the wife comes home and–keeeeyrist!–her husband is tied up in the bathtub wearing one of her dresses while a pissing Maria Shriver look-alike squats over him.
What these women fail to understand (and what their kinky husbands fail to tell them) is that a lifelong kink (not to be confused with some sexually adventurous experimentation) is just as hardwired into a person’s sexuality as his sexual orientation. Asking a kinky person not to be kinky is like asking a gay person not to be gay; he can do it for a while, maybe, but he’ll be miserable and sooner or later he’s going to start messing around with other Maria Shriver look-alikes again.
Probably not, but I’m running your letter on the off chance that your ex will see it and forgive you. That said, if I were your ex I wouldn’t fall for that it-was-only-a-fantasy crap. Guys who go into chat rooms strictly to fantasize usually tell the most appalling lies. They’re all 22 years old, six-foot-two, 185 pounds, and college rowers into “hot cyber action.” (How we know they’re fibbing: the number of guys in gay chat rooms claiming to be college-age gay rowers exceeds by a factor of ten the number of college rowers, gay and straight, on planet earth; hot 22-year-olds can get blow jobs in person and rarely settle for virtual blow jobs at their computers.) Only people planning on meeting the people they’re chatting with tell the truth. So, MU, if it was just a fantasy, why weren’t you lying? That you included enough about what you actually look like that your boyfriend’s friends could recognize you is a pretty good sign that you intended to meet the people you were chatting with. Which is itself a pretty good sign that something was about to go down. Namely, you.
