I’ve Never Been Interested in Women. But My Friend’s Recent Revelation Is Making Me Reconsider.

How to Do It I’ve Never Cheated on My Husband. But My New Friend Is Really Making Me Reconsider. I’m picking up on some signals. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Deagreez/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, My husband, a 50-year-old man, and I, a 48-year-old woman, have been married for 27 years. He’s my third sex partner, and I haven’t had any others since we started dating. He hasn’t either, as far as I know at least. All three of my sex partners have been men. I’ve recently become much closer friends with a woman who I met almost a decade ago. I’ll call her “Liz” (she’s 56). She’s been married to Larry for around 15 years. Liz and I have hung out and done more things the past couple of years, so of course I’ve also gotten to know her better. One thing I’ve recently learned is that before she met Larry, she lived with a woman for several years and had a sexual/partner relationship with her. She says it was a phase she went through to try it out, but that she’s straight. People’s sexual orientations don’t matter to me, and I consider myself an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, so I was not triggered by this disclosure. It’s a little curious to me, though, that Liz says she and her former partner remain close and they occasionally go on trips alone together. Liz has never disclosed (to me, at least) that she and her ex hook up on these trips. So here’s the meat of the issue. It feels like Liz has been quietly getting more affectionate with me. Nothing too overt or forward, like hugs that last a beat too long, eye contact that lingers, adjusting my hair sometimes, and light touches on my arm and stuff like that. I can’t really tell if it’s real or if I’m just reading into things. And, honestly, I also can’t tell if I’m reading into things because I’m projecting either. I’ve started thinking about Liz in slightly sexual ways. I’ve never even kissed a girl before, so it’s not like I’m scratching a long untouched itch. But I’m starting to wonder what it would be like to kiss her. I’ve never cheated on my husband, although there were a couple of opportunities to do so over the years. Part of me just wants to better understand if this is something I’m really curious to explore or if it’s just a thought that needs proof for me to think, “No, that’s not for me, thanks.” I’m wondering if I should signal to her that I am open to something happening because I’m curious. Is that awful of me? And what happens if she gets the signal and something happens, and it leads to more exploring? Should I just nip that in the bud? —Curious Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Rich Juzwiak: I want to know from you what it’s like to have interactions like this with other women. For me, whenever there’s a question like, “Did he look at me like that? Is this what’s happening?” it almost always turns out to be the case if I’ve followed up on it. And I wonder if in your experience, that’s the same or if there’s a kind of baseline level of affection that women feel comfortable displaying without it turning sexual. Jessica Stoya: So the first thing is I have some social communication differences that were almost certainly exacerbated by significant amounts of homeschooling. Not in the more common, a bunch of parents got together and reinvented school kind of way, but in my primary caregiver and me alone with books. So, still quite often, I’m just talking to a person, and I’m interested in what they’re saying or them as a human, and I don’t care about anything below their collarbones, and they are completely convinced that I am flirting with them. And on the rare occasions that it has seemed reasonable or even safe to dig in, a lot of the reasons they think I’m flirting with them are behavioral cues that I am inadvertently sending off. Rich: Oh, I see. So actually, you might be the Liz here. Jessica: I might be the Liz, but I think that’s actually why you asked. Liz might be a me. We might be a similar archetype. The second thing is with me, I’m dealing with, depending on what people know, which may often be quite a bit, both the bisexual belief set and the former sex worker belief set, which involves a whole lot of biases. The only thing that we know is relevant to Liz’s situation is the assumption of bisexuality to mean perpetual openness to others. Women tend to be cozier on average with each other. Women do, compared to men, quite often, cuddle on the couch to watch a movie with someone’s pets piled around them, and there’s nothing sexual, flirtatious, or romantic about it at all. Legitimately, women do each other’s hair; they do each other’s makeup. It does not lead to a Penthouse Productions pillow fight scenario most of the time—sometimes it does. But there’s much more casual physical contact, non-sexual intimacy that involves physical contact, than between heterosexual men and women and between any type of man and another type of man when we’re just looking at broad strokes. I have no data except many, many years of observing and asking. But then the perception of perpetual availability, that ties back to this really gross belief that was prevalent in the ‘90s that was like, “Well, they’re not heterosexual, so they must be total sex hounds for any human of the appropriate gender, regardless of details of what they personally find attractive in a person.” Also, why are we phrasing it as Liz never having disclosed that she and her ex hook up while they’re on vacation? Why are we coming from a position of her having something to disclose that she has then not disclosed? The letter writer is making a lot of assumptions and getting way ahead of herself. Rich: Right. So I think that the important thing to establish here is that there is a kind of potential bias or influence from this revelation that may be coloring the situation. While at the same time, the writer, we can assume, has been going about the world, interacting with women, understanding this baseline of affection. And here it seems somehow more notable. Are you willing that to happen? Are you seeing the queerness? Are you reading attraction into a situation where it doesn’t exist? Or is it actually true this is something that you probably want to, I don’t know, maybe you want to sort it out, maybe you don’t. I’m glad that we had this part of the conversation because it’s my impulse to be like, if you’re feeling it, it’s probably there. But there’s a lot more going on in this situation that might not make that so. I wanted to establish that. Jessica: I can speak about myself within a context that is along similar lines to the letter writer and Liz, which is that they’re married to men, and nobody has given any indication that they have open marriages. Sometimes I do meet someone where I’m like, your body is attractive, and your mind is attractive, and we’re really vibing, and it has been several years now since I have had my face in a vulva at all, much less in an erotic context. Truly, were it not for what I value in my romantic commitments, I would go for it. But I’m not going to because I’m an adult human with self-control, and I value fidelity to my commitments and the emotional safety and security that my partner derives from both of us adhering to the boundaries we decided are OK for us more than a vulva in my face. Rich: Exactly. To that point, I don’t think that the letter writer should proceed at all without having that conversation with her husband. This is a whim. This isn’t even curiosity. This is curiosity about curiosity. So that seems like a lot to put your marriage on the line for. On top of the fact that if we’re talking about stereotypes and stigmas, you’re in luck here because the stereotype is that husbands are often very enthusiastic about their wife exploring sexually with other women, particularly when they’re involved. So I’m sure for plenty of people, that’s still a very difficult conversation to have that could go very, very badly, but there is a decent chance your husband will receive this information gladly. So that’s step number one, I think. Jessica: 100 percent agreed, and continuing to speak about stereotypes: Our writer has never even kissed a girl before. So from that, she is extrapolating that she is not scratching a long untouched itch. That itch can exist until you’re on your deathbed and never get scratched. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was never there. Rich: Right. If you’re just living your whole life with an itch and you don’t even realize what it feels like until it’s scratched, how could you even know for sure? Jessica: But it’s often that the itch remaining unacknowledged, much less touched, stems from people making choices in a very complex environment that support them having what is the best outcome out of everything available according to what they feel comfortable with, and what they were raised to understand is OK or not OK, or even an option. And so Liz, as much as Liz might be an accidental flirter, Liz might also feel what the writer thinks she’s feeling and have no intent to ever act on it. If there’s a conversation where the husband says, “Yeah, go for it.” And then the writer goes to Liz and is like, “Is what I’m perceiving; is that accurate?” And Liz is like, “Yes, and I cannot pursue that without blowing up my life.” You’re looking at two paths. One is a super dramatic plot porno, and the other is being a good friend. And the being a good friend path is to go, “OK, I respect that,” and then have a conversation about what kind of boundaries you’re going to put in place as a buffer. At that point, do not have three glasses of wine and then cuddle up to watch a movie. That’s setting yourself up to go for something that at least one of you is going to regret later. Rich: That’s right. To that point, this could be an outlet for Liz. This could be the amount of intimacy she can have in her life with this person without it getting overly complicated. In which case, it’s a matter, I think, of appreciating what you have. This is the way that we’re expressing this, and that’s all it is. To add anything more could be cataclysmic. Jessica: Who knows? I don’t think it’s awful to be curious or to ask and then consider if the option is there, whether you want to go further. I think that’s really great. But that second question, the part about something happens that leads to more exploring—no, you both have autonomy, and you have to respect each other’s autonomy and your own and make decisions. This is not a “Oops, all of my clothes fell off of my body, and then I slipped on my sweaty foot because I was so nervous because it was my first and just fell and all of a sudden we were scissoring” situation. No. Rich: Right. That’s being mindful. The stakes are a little bit too high to just lose yourself in the way that the writer envisions. It doesn’t have to be that way and shouldn’t. Jessica: Absolutely agreed. And avoiding romance novels and television shows like Bridgerton as you’re working through this would probably be wise. Not because they’re bad, but if you’re ingesting a lot of those examples, it can really cloud your thinking. Rich: So talk to your husband first and then talk to Liz, and accept where she is not as a reflection. Don’t take it personally. She’s your friend. So wherever she is with all of this, just accept that if you want to continue this friendship, which seems valuable. If you’re close enough, it can withstand this, even if this is an awkward situation and you completely misread the signs. This cannot become a motif in your friendship if Liz is not interested or otherwise unavailable. Jessica: Also, that conversation can look like asking why her physical affection is cozier than what the writer is used to between female friends, or, “Sometimes I wonder if you’re flirting with me; is that what’s going on?” Then go from there. It’s a direct but small step, and therefore, a lot less awkward than coming in with, “Hey, I’ve never kissed a girl before. And I just want to know if you’re interested…” Because then that will allow me to feel like there’s a real possibility that I am deciding whether I am interested in or not with regard to cheating on my husband. That can be much harder to recover from. More Advice From Slate I’m a woman and I’ve been with my boyfriend for a year. We’re both in our 30s. Our sex life is generally really good, but I have some reservations. The sex we do have is great and hot, but while we both enjoy some light kinks, some dirty talk, spanking, etc., we rarely have sex without these aspects, which isn’t my ideal. I enjoy kink, but I also want sex that has a different tone and is just about us. Not that kink isn’t or can’t be tender and loving, but I’d like to feel this minus the other elements. I’ve said this to him and he agrees, but when we start to have sex, he tends to slip into the dirty talk and the play dynamic, almost by default… Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Sex