After We Had Sex, My Boyfriend Made a Troubling Admission. I Can’t Stop Thinking About It.

How to Do It This feels wrong. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Nenad Cavoski/iStock/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous! Dear How to Do It, I’m 21 and a woman. My partner is an incredible, respectful, and loving guy. A couple of months ago, he said something that’s been weighing on me recently amid the increase in public discourse about coercion and consent. A few months back, after having sex, he admitted that he “hadn’t been fully into it” but did it anyway because we hadn’t for a bit and he wanted to make me happy because I really wanted to. He had asked me if I wanted it, and I said yes; he initiated and seemed into it, and didn’t express any hesitation until afterward, so I didn’t think to ask the same. (I’m autistic, so nonverbal cues are harder for me.) It makes me sick to think I took advantage of him. When he told me after, I felt horrible and told him to never do something he didn’t want to do for my sake, though he insisted that he “did want it, just not 100 percent” like I did. But that still feels wrong to me; if enthusiastic consent is the baseline, then I dropped the ball. When I brought it up again the other day because it’s been on my mind, he said the same thing and told me not to feel bad about it. But if the genders were flipped, it would almost certainly be viewed as a breach of consent, right? Did I coerce him by saying I wanted it? —Concerned About Coercion Dear Concerned About Coercion, A lawyer friend who has a dream of eventually being an ethics professor once allowed me to put them through about 20 hours of Socrates-level pain in the ass questioning around what ethics actually means and why it varies so much in individual definition and in various regions and professions. In the end, both of us were reasonably satisfied by the conclusion I arrived at, which is that “ethics” is, within a person, composed of an individual’s synthesis of the ethical norms of their nation, region, religion, family of origin, profession, and any other significant communities along the way, informed by other perspectives and their own lived experience that they then filter that stack of norms through. Therefore, “ethics” inherently varies among people and places, and may need to be applied in particular ways for certain situations but not in others. I bring this up because consent sits squarely within the field of ethics, which means my own biases are relevant to my answer, and also because I think you’d have a great time studying ethics and philosophy, whether that’s formally or through reading and watching lectures. To that end, when you’re asking whether what happened between you and your boyfriend would be viewed as a breach of consent if the genders were flipped, by whom is incredibly relevant. The world as a whole is too massive and contains too many different perspectives to fill that space—a large swath of it wouldn’t even entertain a scenario in which the genders were reversed, for various reasons, and another large swath gives nary a single passing care as to whether consent is present at all. You’re asking me, so clearly my perspective is relevant, but it is dependent on the perspectives of each of the people who were involved in the interaction. Your boyfriend’s perspective is that you should not feel bad, explicitly based on having wanted that sex to some degree, and shored up by the fact of his question (seemingly unprompted by you) as to whether you wanted to have sex and subsequent initiation of the act, implying that he does not see what happened as a breach of his consent. Your perspective is one of significant concern that you have harmed your partner, and a feeling that you have objectively done wrong because what occurred was not the definition of enthusiastic consent. Is enthusiastic consent the only acceptable standard for sexual consent? Your boyfriend seems to think not, and I agree to a certain degree. Your task is to answer that question for yourself. One glaring issue with enthusiastic consent as it plays out in the real world is that it can result in coercion to perform enthusiasm for sexual acts that a person either does not want or feels simply lukewarm about. Another is that “enthusiasm” in this phrase is usually defined as a direct erotic desire such as “horniness,” where quite often, especially among older adults or in longer-term relationships, the desire is to feel very close to someone and arousal is beside the point, or to have or give an orgasm to trigger the release of brain chemicals that help us or our partner get back to a point where we’re able to feel sexual enthusiasm, or to get semen close to the cervix at the time when it has a chance to fertilize an egg even though everyone is tired, and all of these reasons are often a healthy part of functional relationships. The deciding factor in each of these cases is whether both people are OK with it. So the follow-up questions for you to answer are whether enthusiastic consent is required for you to be OK with sex, and what exactly enthusiasm means for you in that context. My qualm in deeming this situation consensual and not coercive stems from the statement that your boyfriend wanted to make you happy because you really wanted to, and the two of you hadn’t had sex in a while. I’m wondering whether there’s a context of previous conversations about sex not being frequent enough for you, which could possibly have then put some pressure timing wise on your boyfriend that may count as coercion generated by you, or whether he’s got his own thoughts, worries, and hangups that have nothing to do with you but resulted in an internal pressure, that you had no role in creating, to propose and then initiate sex. In the latter case, your boyfriend would ideally sort through that, and it would be best for you to err on the side of caution during that process. There’s another issue here, between you and your boyfriend, which is that you have lots of thoughts and questions about this situation and the greater meanings of it all, and he doesn’t seem to want to engage with that. As important as sexual consent is, you also need to consider whether the ways that you think, move through the world, and extend and receive communication fit with the ways your boyfriend does. If you can believe and trust your boyfriend’s stance of “this was fine for me and I am unharmed,” and are satisfied by finding other outlets for the urge to consider these greater meanings at length, that may suffice. If he’s excited by and enjoys these sorts of conversations but is temporarily worried only about your worry, have a conversation about that so the two of you can have these larger talks with each other and better understand the nuance he brings to concepts like wanting and consenting. If you don’t want to live with that much nuance, that’s something to talk through as well, and if it’s more of a significant challenge than a distaste for you, there are specialists who work with autistic adults and can support you in developing proficiency with this degree of social complexity. And if you conclude that you need enthusiastic consent based in erotic desire to feel comfortable having sex with someone, that is a perfectly reasonable requirement and even common in some groups. Moving forward, do make a habit of verbal confirmation whenever you’re unclear about another person’s level of interest in an activity, whether it’s sexual or platonic. —Jessica More Advice From Slate My husband and I haven’t had intercourse in more than two years. When I first noticed our “slump,” he told me he was too busy and tired from work to have sex. After the first sexless year rolled by, he said he needed to lose weight to feel confident enough for sex. Since then, we moved to a new city last year, and he has indeed lost weight and gotten a job that requires much less take-home work. Now at least he’ll use a vibrator on me every few months, but it’s not enough… Advice Sex