Hey there, and welcome to your Savage Lovecast recap and review for the week of August 28. Let’s get right to it.
You can listen to this week’s episode and read this week’s Savage Love column.
Dan’s opening rant is about some personal news – he’s having surgery on his shoulder and will be out for the next couple of weeks. There will still be a show, because he’s banked a couple in advance. How can you help with his recovery? He’ll still be checking emails, so send him pictures of your boyfriend’s butt. Also buy merch at itmfa.com. All proceeds from merch sales go to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. Dan talks to his local bartender who wears an ITMFA button to work every day. Dan also talks about the time he got a free drink on a plane because he was wearing his ITMFA t-shirt. Dan declares October 6 ITMFA Day, where you wear your merch and post it to social media.
On to the calls! A bi woman and her husband have been hooking up with a woman for several months. Our caller and the other woman had hooked up on and off before he got involved. Our caller and her husband don’t want to tell people, especially their families and friends, about their situation. The other woman has told a few of her friends and has openly flirted with our caller in social settings, and our caller doesn’t want her telling any mutual friends about it. When our caller proposed that the other woman remain silent about the relationship to their mutual friends, the other woman proposed that they stop having sex and just be friends, which our caller refused. Should they break up? Are the caller and her husband being assholes? Can they break up and still be friends? Dan identifies the values at issue here: the caller’s right to want privacy versus the other woman’s right to her own experience and right to not feel like a dirty little secret. That said, a couple has a right to ask a third to be discreet if the couple is socially monogamous, and the open flirtation deserves some pushback. But the other woman has a right to confide in her own friends, and refusing to allow her to do so is fucked up. If this relationship ends, you don’t have to stay friends if you don’t want to. There is no way to roll that out without hurting her, though, so you just have to do it.
A man has been married for 12 years. The only complaint he has about their sex life is she doesn’t like giving blowjobs. She’s uncomfortable at the thought of the thing he pisses with going into her mouth. He’s tried suggesting things like only having blowjobs in the shower, but she still doesn’t like it. They are monogamous. Where do they go from here? Our caller has paid the price of admission, says Dan, and that means our caller might not get blown ever again. Our caller could point out that he goes down on her, where blood and piss come out of, if he does, but that wouldn’t make her any less squeamish. This is an impasse, and Dan can’t help. For once, Dan did not suggest nonmonogamy here, which I found somewhat surprising. Unilaterally opening the marriage at this point would probably do much more harm than good.
A 27-year-old woman’s father is 64 and dating a woman three days younger than our caller. She is not cool with it. Our caller and her father have never been particularly close, but since he started dating this woman, he has been trying to hang out with our caller more, presumably to show the girlfriend what a great father he is. Can our caller be shitty to him? Dan first points out that the father has a right to date this much younger woman – they are both consenting adults, after all. Dan thinks the girlfriend is encouraging the father to reach out to our caller. Our caller has a right to maintain the relationship as it was, if she wants, but she can ask dad why he’s reaching out now. Dan also plants the bug in the ear that maybe the girlfriend is trying to take advantage of the father and separate him from his money. Have a private conversation with him about that and his cognitive functioning. More likely, though, is that the girlfriend wants to maintain a relationship with our caller.
A 25-year-old straight woman wants to know how to remain emotionally unattached during the first few months of dating. The typical scenario is that she’ll see a guy casually for a month or so, he’ll stop seeing her, and she gets really upset. How does she pull out of this and manage her expectations? Dan says she needs to push back against this tendency to get carried away and fantasize about happily ever after. Dan encourages her to look at rejection as a perk, not a curse. They are telling you, in rejecting you, that they are not that person that you have been fantasizing about, and they are freeing you up to find that person. When dating, live in the moment.
A caller has advice for folks in open relationships who get accused of cheating – have a video recording of your partner saying who they are and that they have permission to do whatever until such and such date. Dan doesn’t think it’s a terrible idea, but doesn’t think it’s likely to convince someone who is convinced this married person is lying to them.
A woman’s daughter is dating a transitioning man. His parents are not cool with it. Can our caller sit down with his mother and help her through this? Dan tells the story of when his mother called the unhappy mother of a newly-out gay kid. The first conversation they had, Dan’s mom was blunt with the truth – if mom wanted her son to run away at 15, get AIDS at 18, and be dead at 20, then keep on doing what she was doing, which was threatening to pull the son out of school and move to Arizona and generally make the kid’s life miserable. Dan’s mom and the other mother became friends after that. Dan urges the caller to have coffee with her daughter’s boyfriend’s mother, and point out that trans folks are at exceptional risk for suicide and self-harm, but trans folks with accepting, if not entirely understanding, families are at much less risk. Our caller can connect, parent to parent, and model loving behavior. Don’t let the love for who you thought your kid was obscure your love for who your kid is.
A cis bi poly woman in her mid-30s goes to an LGBTQ medical practice, and she’s been getting weird vibes from some of the doctors. One of them said that her yeast infections would go away if she were monogamous. One of the notes in her file is “unresolved problem: high risk bisexual behavior.” Our caller has three partners, two men and one woman, who each have other partners. Our caller acknowledges that, even with strict condom use, she is at higher risk than monogamous folks, but she’s really bothered by the implication that being bisexual is risky. Is this common? Dan laments that there are doctors who know nothing about sex and treat it as an activity like smoking that you can simply quit and avoid the risks. Dan encourages continuing to see the doctor you feel comfortable with and pushing back against the doctors that don’t get it, by email if not face to face.
A woman lives with three roommates, another woman and a couple. Our caller brings home a decent amount of men. She leaves early for work and allows the men to sleep as long as they have to, then get dressed and leave. One of the roommates, a 19-year-old woman, said that this makes her uncomfortable, having strange men in the house without our caller. Our caller agreed to make the men leave when she leaves. The roommate and her 32-year-old boyfriend then made other demands: don’t let any men shower in our caller’s separate shower, and don’t give them tours of the house. Is this reasonable? Also, the boyfriend hates women and thinks our caller is a whore. How does our caller negotiate this at the next house meeting? The first roommate demand and solution was eminently reasonable, says Dan, but the further demands are not. The way to approach talking about this is to emphasize the reasonableness and inconsideration of the original situation. The boyfriend, though, is going to be the wrench in the works. Dan seems to think the boyfriend doesn’t live there, which isn’t true, so his insistence on a roommates-only meeting won’t help. You could try to have a meeting with just the women, but the boyfriend was listed as a roommate, which probably means he’s paying rent, which means he can insist on being in the meeting. In the runup to the meeting, start looking for other places to live, because there’s some crazy stuff here.
It’s time for Second Opinion, where Dan is joined by other advice columnists. This time it’s Thea Harding and Nadine Heidinger, authors of Rabbit Droppings, a column about urban rabbit care. A 30-year-old straight woman wants to settle down but doesn’t want kids. Unfortunately, all of the men she meets do want kids and seem to think she’ll change. How does she bring it up in dating? Nadine thinks it’s not like a kink that she has to be ashamed of. It’s another “price of admission” situation. Dan takes a cue from the rabbit rescue and suggests that our caller get her tubes tied. Then there’s nothing to debate.
A 26-year-old woman dated a guy very briefly a year ago. He just friended her on Snapchat and sent a dick pic out of the blue. How should she respond? Thea says let it go, because this guy sounds like a dick. Dan thinks she has an obligation to tell him off, not for him, but for other women. It doesn’t have to be much: “This was wrong. Stop doing this” followed by a block. Thea wants a dick pic of Marlon Bundo to see if he’s neutered.
A 33-year-old gay man has been with his husband for 10 years. Four months ago, on a trip home after seeing the caller’s family, the husband broke down and said he had been thinking of leaving for some time. The reason he hadn’t was because he would never see our caller’s family again. Our caller was surprised by this – although the relationship was a little stale, our caller didn’t think it was at crisis level. In the time since, the husband has not articulated why he wants to leave, despite encouragement to speak from our caller. Our caller loves his husband, and doesn’t know what to do. Dan doesn’t know why the husband wants to leave and say hurtful things either. The only next step is to get to a couples counselor – go together if you can, go alone if you must. If he refuses, our caller might have to pull the plug.
A 49-year-old heteroflexible woman has been with her partner for six years. They are openly kinky and nonmonogamous, though their sex life has slowed with age and they do not live together. A few weeks ago, our caller’s father came to her place. Her relationship with him is touch and go. When he came over, she let him sleep in her room. He discovered her spanking bench when he snooped in her room, blew up at her and called her a whore, and left three days ahead of schedule. What should she do? If she feels the need, Dan says, she can send him an email. She can point out that lots of people buy things to use in sex and that he’s an asshole for snooping. Dan does point out, though, that there may be an innocent explanation for why dear old dad opened the closet. Maybe he thought it was the bathroom in the middle of the night. But people also snoop, including you. Yes, you. Confess!
Caller feedback! No half measures – out the lying pastor to the police, the board, everyone. A burn victim who has 40% of his body covered in scars advises people with stretch marks to be confident. The bed-wetter never said whether she was going to pay the dry cleaning bill.
Thanks for reading.