OK, I just read the first post from that weird sex-advice website, and it’s even more disturbing than the second one. Do you think these letters are manufactured or do you believe real people write them? Because it’s the second letter in a row that makes zero sense. See here:
Question: My husband and I have had an open marriage for the last two years. Up until five months ago, it was working beautifully. At that point, however, I was sexually assaulted by a former partner. Since that incident, I cannot stand sex with my husband. I completely flip out when he tries to initiate sexual contact. My skin crawls. I become panicked and feel repulsed. I just cannot handle it. Those times when I go along with it anyway leave me feeling enraged and disgusted.
I don’t think this is completely unheard of for someone who was relatively recently assaulted, and I am considering therapy to help me work through it. The immediate “problem” is that I have no difficulty having sex with my boyfriend. In fact, the sex with him is amazing and leaves me feeling loved and whole and wonderful.
This is breaking my husband’s heart. He has become incredibly jealous of my relationship with my boyfriend. He’s depressed. He’s angry. He accuses me of no longer loving him, and he wants me to stop sleeping with my boyfriend until our marriage is back to normal. I feel like a horrible person, but I just can’t do that. I need that outlet. I need that support. And I admit I have a hard time believing that my husband and I will ever be able to go back to the way things were before.
I feel like I’ve already lost my former partner (fucked-up though that may seem) and my husband. It kills me to think about cutting out the one positive relationship remaining. On the other hand, I do love my husband—very much—and watching him suffer like this is unbearable.
I know this is longish and people hate long quotes. But just look at the underlined part. If “this” is breaking the husband’s heart, one has really got to ask, how is the husband discovering all “this.” Is this person actually telling him, “You know, sex with you is disgusting but sex with my boyfriend is amazing and leaves me feeling loved and whole and wonderful?” None of this makes sense.
This is the second advice-seeking letter in a row that is plagued with contradictions and makes zero sense whatsoever.
Do you think these letters are all fake?
Clarissa's Blog 
// how is the husband discovering all “this.”
Well, he knows she doesn’t want to sleep with him, and does want to sleep with the boyfriend. After all, she doesn’t meet the BF in secret. And, I suppose, she told him that the BF is supporting her a lot AND that she can’t have sex with him now.
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I’m still not getting how he knows she enjoys sex with the boyfriend. She tells him? That’s abusive and I’d advise that husband to get out of the abusive relatiobship immediately.
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What’s abusive? Very likely that the husband himself offered to make the relationship open, and then, after the attack, asked her whether she continues to have sex with a BF. (*) Should she have lied to him: “No, we stopped doing it, at the same time you and I did”? Obviously, if she has sex, any normal person would think she enjoys it.
(*) Supposedly, the husband continued to sleep with his GF(s), as all this was going on, but asked her to stop with the BF because of jealousy.
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You are using your imagination to transform this situation into something completely different. Let’s work with the text we have. 🙂 Look at the part I bolded and notice what the antecedent of “all this” is.
I’m in my teaching lit crit mode today. 🙂
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Letters sent for advice are often shortened and have details removed. There is no guarantee that the bolded bit was actually what the letter writer wrote, and a careless columnist could very well rewrite a letter in a way which would lose some of the finer meanings of the text and introduce new ones.
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Yes, this is what I suspected because the story isn’t making much sense. It seems like a bug chunk is missing.
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// You are using your imagination to transform this situation into something completely different.
No. It’s reading social clues. She isn’t a lawyer or a writer thinking about every word, and many people would understand the letter as I did. If she is at least somewhat close with her husband, he can’t help noticing the truth, without her being the first to make the revelation: “I enjoy sex with BF and it makes me feel better.”
Btw, here we probably learn something quite bad about him:
” I just cannot handle it. Those times when I go along with it anyway leave me feeling enraged and disgusted.”
How blind should the husband be not to notice she is “panicked and repulsed”?
He had sex with her despite seeing the reactions. Did he simply not care? Had sex, instead of sending her to a psychologist, because she doesn’t mention the husband asking / pressuring her to visit a professional. But, he feels OK to pressure her into sex, which makes her “feeling enraged and disgusted.”
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I have no idea how one can notice what happens during a sexual encounter that one didn’t witness. I can’t even imagine how such a feat could be performed.
As for the rest, the husband cannot be more responsible for her sexual decisions than she is. You seem to imagine a good husband as some sort of a father to a very small infant : constantly reading and deciphering clues of a non-verbal, extremely dependent creature.
But this position: “decipher my clues and react to them” IS THE DEFINITION of emotional abuse.
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From a purely formalistic pov, “This” refers to the entire situation, which the husband would be blind not to understand. Nowhere she says that she has told him in blunt words of the letter.
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The only thing the husband can be upset about is that she is enjoying sex with bf and not enjoying sex with him, right? And the only way the husband could discover this information is if she told him. How else could he possibly find out?
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The original (Dan Savage) column is here”
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=5253730
The blogger was so traumatized by his answer (over three years ago) that she started the blog and decided to give the (long, bad and boooring) advice she thought Savage should have given.
Honestly, it might make be a bad person but I think Savage’s original response was basically right. It’s more hostile than most people would respond but that’s part of his shtick
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I also liked his response to this particular query. I dont believe that any personal tragedy is an excuse to make other people miserable. I absolutely detest this kind of behavior.
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So no, I don’t think you are a bad person at all. Or maybe we both are. 🙂
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Every “open marriage” I’ve known of has ended in a wreck.
Why bother even getting married if both parties want to keep sleeping around?
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What this article describes certainly doesn’t sound like a marriage. It’s more like room-mating between two very immature, self-centered, cruel kids.
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@LS
How many actual open marriages that work would you know about? I can see how you would find out about the ones that dont. Oh, and its not “sleeping around”. Its partaking in a sexuality that both you and your partner enjoy and agree to.
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The openness has nothing to do with this article. In this instance it sounds like the wife is openly professing something extremely hurtful to the husband and thinks she can get away with it just because she was abused.
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“The openness has nothing to do with this article. In this instance it sounds like the wife is openly professing something extremely hurtful to the husband and thinks she can get away with it just because she was abused.”
– Exactly. Such people exist in all relational formats.
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Here’s something amusing for Clarissa to sink teeth into:
“So you see, its a game. It’s a racket. The house always wins. According to marketers and advertisers and capitalists: you must feel that you are not good enough. You must feel that something is missing. Why?
Because they want you to buy stuff.
You could say its sexist, and it probably is. There is certainly not this constant micromanaging of the appearance and behavior of men through every stage of their lives. They don’t get what I call The 24/7 Dogpile Special. But I think more than sexism, there is an economic motive that surpasses all ideological, sociological and scientific demands. The reason is we women are the ones who buy shit constantly. We shop. This is statistical truth. We are the consumers, the target audience. And so – marketers and advertisers and magazine editors will do everything they possibly can to grab a hold of us and make us want what they have to sell. It is unending: it started when we were born and they will keep barking and hounding us until we breathe our last breath.
You know what I call that? Stalking.”
http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/one-womans-mind-blowing-breakdown-why-internet-full-sht-about-womens-bodies?page=0%2C3
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Of course, one could turn off the TV and stop buying glossy magazines. But then there would be nobody to blame for their choices.
The most materialistic culture obsessed with purchasing and consuming was that of the USSR. The concept of advertising did not exist. And still. . .
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If she has had enough insight to write such an article, she ought to have had enough to turn the TV off all by herself. But, apparently, not. Women are children in her world, who need an adult to turn off the media for them, so they won’t be enticed.
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“The most materialistic culture obsessed with purchasing and consuming was that of the USSR”
Are you familiar with “Russian Journal” by Andrea Lee? Written when very few Americans had much of an idea of what was going on in the USSR at anything like ground level (nor any convenient way of finding out). It was fascinating at the time.
One of the small points I remembered was how weary she got of being accused of being materialistic (cause she was American) when she was constantly exposed to the grossest (in all meanings) and most grasping materialism she had ever encountered.
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“Are you familiar with “Russian Journal” by Andrea Lee? Written when very few Americans had much of an idea of what was going on in the USSR at anything like ground level (nor any convenient way of finding out). It was fascinating at the time.”
– No, I haven’t heard of it. And now I wish I had.
“One of the small points I remembered was how weary she got of being accused of being materialistic (cause she was American) when she was constantly exposed to the grossest (in all meanings) and most grasping materialism she had ever encountered.”
That’s exactly what I’m talking about!
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It sounds like garden variety polyamory woes to me. In every single polyamory advice book you buy, from the old classic, The Ethical Slut, to the more modern ones, “communication” is considered a cornerstone, and part of this “communication” is spilling the beans to your partner about every little detail, including the sex with other people.
The polyamory culture here in Victoria is full of conceited, backstabbing, manipulative people who weaponize every interaction with the people they’re sleeping with to hurt one another, and it’s not even the worst example of how badly it can go.
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The polyamory people are really weird. Convenient, I suppose, to have several affairs going on at once and run to the next person when things aren’t perfect with the one … and to do this saying you are “alternative”…
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Part of the point is that you don’t run.
Anyway, there does seem to be a misunderstanding of what communication means. Some people seem to act as if good communication is telling people each and every single detail of one’s life, whether those details are any of their business or not, rather than paying attention to what said people say or want – as if these details can take the place of a connection. You thus end with people who think quantity is a replacer for quality and spam the others around them incessantly with stuff that is often none of their business, excusing any manipulations with “but you have to say everything that’s on your mind or else bad communication”. Mix that with an attitude that one’s romantic arrangements automagically make one more enlightened relationship-wise and you risk getting some very oblivious people.
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I tend to think that maintaining a good relationship between two people is difficult enough, adding more long term partners (especially non-reciprocal ones in odd configurations) just seems to be asking for trouble. I suppose it can be done but it seems like too much work for too little gain.
I also don’t perceive what benefit going into every gruesome detail is supposed to bring. I would think such relationships work best with a minimum of details.
The more successful of the non-exclusively monogamous people I’ve known (as opposed to plain cheaters) made it work through plausibile deniability and very, very few details.
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“I also don’t perceive what benefit going into every gruesome detail is supposed to bring.”
– She is obviously trying to hurt the husband’s feelings, and this is the part of the story I believe is missing. Something has made her hate the husband, but there is no explanation.
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A possible explanation might be projecting the feelings she has towards her rapist (which she describes as an ex-partner) on her husband.
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Yes, I thought there might be something like that and it was excised from the letter.
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@Cliff
My experience with people who engage in this type of behaviour is that the ones who dont communicate are a train wreck waiting to happen. The best are the ones who actually like what they are doing and love sharing it with the primary individual in their life. And dont kid yourself, there are a lot more of those types than you might imagine. 🙂
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