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Dear Dr. NerdLove:
My boyfriend and I have been together for 2.5 years now and we are best friends, but we’ve had our rough patches. I cheated on him in the beginning with my ex, and we’ve worked past it and all is well. Again we’ve had rough patches, but we also live together so I feel like it’s bound to happen. He goes away every summer for work, and when I went to go visit him, I found out he had been sexting another guy he met at a bar. This threw me by surprise because he’s not the type of person to cheat and especially with a guy. They only sexted for about an hour and he was drunk, but he did start it all. He was very apologetic when he found out and he’s a genuinely great guy besides all that.
Anyway, this entire summer I’ve been extremely horny and I want to sleep with other men, more than anything. The sex between me and my boyfriend is okay, not really that special. Kinda boring. And I feel like after finding that on his phone, I am kind of thinking about breaking up and sleeping with other people, but we live together, we have a cat, we have a great home. If we broke up, I would lose all of it. I’m not sure what to do. I feel so trapped and I don’t really have any money (I’m a student and work a min wage job) and I am also scared that he may be the only person who will treat me right.
Help?
Is It Really Over
Let’s start with the obvious, IIRO: in all likelihood, one of the reasons why your sex life is just “ok” because it seems like your boyfriend has some needs and interests that aren’t getting met. It could well be that he’s bi or pansexual, or it could be that he met one guy who just flipped his switch. It could be something that’s been part of him for as long as you two have been together, or it could be something he’s only just discovered.
And trust me: the only thing the alcohol did was make it possible for your boyfriend to act on those interests. Alcohol doesn’t suddenly make you decide you’re into dudes, it just turns up the volume on the part of your brain that that says “hey, that guy looks hot…” which then turns into “you know, a blowj** would be nice tonight.”
However, I’m curious as to just why you’re suddenly ready to pull the plug on your relationship after having seen his sexts on his phone. The fact that he’s sexting someone else is justifiably upsetting… but honestly, this sounds less like you feel betrayed and more that you’re looking for an excuse to pull end things. And honestly, I suspect the issue is that you’re bored.
Now let’s talk a little about your wandering eye. You’re feeling the urge to get some strange; that’s perfectly normal. That’s part of being a primate with a libido. We are novelty-seeking creatures, and that includes who we sleep with. That, in and of itself, doesn’t say anything about the state of your relationship.
But boredom with your sex life does.
Sexual compatibility and sexual satisfaction is a crucial part of making a relationship work. It’s very easy to say that “a relationship is about more than sex” but the truth of the matter is, if the sex isn’t working then the relationship is heading to it’s inevitable collapse.
The big question here is whether this is a case of the spark fading over time – as it does in all relationships – or if it’s because your boyfriend needs things that you can’t give him. If it’s just boredom, there are many things you can do to reignite the spark and make sex hot again. But that’s if you want to actually fix things. If it’s the case that he’s been closing his eyes and picturing Michael B. Jordan while the two of you are together… well, he’s not exactly going to be motivated to be putting in more than a token effort into your sex life.
You and your boyfriend need to sit down and have a long and likely awkward conversation about the state of your relationship. There is a lot to talk about: your mutual satisfaction, his apparent attraction to other men and where you’re going from here. You have many different options besides breaking up and staying together – including potentially transitioning into a non-monogamous commitment.
But that’s assuming that staying together is the right choice for the two of you.
I get that you don’t necessarily want to give up the things that come with your relationship – the house, the cat, etc. – but those are bad reasons to stay in a relationship that isn’t working. Sticking in a relationship for the side-benefits is a great recipe to curdle the respect and affection you have for your partner and turn what might otherwise be a successful relationship into one of bitterness and rancor.
And believe me: he’s not the only guy out there, nor is he the only one who will treat you well. To steal a line from Tim Minchin:
“Your love is one in a million
You couldn’t buy it at any price
But of the nine-point-nine-nine-nine-hundred-thousand other possible loves
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice”
But you won’t know what the right choice is until the two of you talk it out.
Good luck.
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This article originally appeared on Doctor Nerd Love
Photo by Daria Litvinova on Unsplash