You're listening to the Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage's sex and relationship show for grownups. If you're under 18, get out of here, young man. on the Savage Lovecast. I promised you a sex scandal. Last week's intro was kind of a downer. So I promised to start this week's show with a good old fashioned sex scandal, something fun and juicy to distract us.
from the news, and I got nothing. I did find something scandalous this weekend by accident. I went to the website of the CDC, something I routinely do, or used to do. Went there to get current sex health information for my readers and found this at the top of the CDC's information page about DoxyPep. This website is being modified to comply with President Trump's executive orders.
And then I went over to look at the CDC's information page on PrEP, and it's gone. Scandalous, and about sex, but not a sex scandal, and not fun. The actual sex scandals in the news right now, as of this morning, also not fun. No politicians stepping on their own dicks. No moralizing scolds being exposed as hypocrites. Just... youth pastors and pastor pastors doing what youth pastors and pastor pastors do.
I'll say it again. For the record, if kids got raped by clowns, as often as kids get raped by preachers, it would be against the law to take your kids to the circus. While I couldn't find you a fun and juicy breaking sex scandal, I couldn't find you an actual sex scandal. Would you settle for a fun and juicy sex scandal that I predict that I have a hunch we will be enjoying at some point in the future?
Arizona Republican State Representative Nick Cupper, our surprise, his district is in the city of Surprise, Arizona. That's how he's named in the news. Rep. Nick Cupper, our surprise, introduced a bill. That bans the display of pride flags on state property in Arizona. And that bill has traction. Looks like it's going to pass. Only American flags, POW and MIA flags, the flag of Arizona, Arizona Indian Nations flags.
First responder flags and ahem, historic American flags, which includes flags that have been co-opted by right-wing fascists in this country. Only those listed flags could be displayed on state property. Podcasting is a visual medium. You can't see the face of Representative Nick Cupper, our surprise, but I can. I'm looking at his face right now. And all I'm going to say is...
I've sat on less gay faces. We put a link up to a story about Representative Nick Cupper, our surprise in the show notes. So you can go take a look too. Now. I want to be clear, just because someone sets your gaydar off doesn't mean they're gay. But gaydar is real. According to a mountain of research into gaydar summarized by the Kinsey Institute, gaydar works and the science is sound. Some people have better gaydar than others. Interestingly,
People who hold anti-gay views, like Dick Cupper here, typically perform worse in gaydar studies. By contrast, sexual minorities, gay men especially, quote, perform better. Which would explain why anti-gay bigots are often the last to know they're gay, even though they look in the mirror once in a while. When they do, they can't see what we can.
interestingly a little tangent here according to studies cited by the kinsey institute women's gaydar is more accurate when they're ovulating which is fascinating it points to some sort of evolutionary advantage to being able to spot the gay guys Think about it. Prehistoric humans struggling to survive in the grasslands, nomadic hunter-gatherers.
When ladies went looking for a mate, they didn't want to waste their time and their precious eggs and their scarce calories chasing a gay guy across the savanna who was chasing some other guy across the savanna. So our ancient ancestors with good gaydar. Likelier to have offspring, likelier to have their genes passed down to future generations. While ancient females with lousy gaydar, likelier to get a lot of invitations to hunter-gatherer brunch, but...
Not as likely to have offspring that survived. Natural selection at work. Gay men, though, at least according to the studies of gaydar, we must always be ovulating, I guess, because our gaydar is always at peak. functioning. But our gaydar can be tainted by dickful thinking. Basically when a guy is your type that can screw with your gaydar.
Timothy Chalamet, straight. I have no doubt that that man is straight. But when he hosted Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago, my gaydar malfunctioned for 90 straight minutes. I had to reboot it after the show. As for what... Nick Cupper is doing in Arizona. Nick Cupper, our surprise, removing pride flags from the state Capitol. I have complicated feelings. Part of me wishes they'd never gone up.
So assholes like Nick Cupper are surprised, didn't have the opportunity to grandstand about taking them down. And there's this other part of me. That part of me was waiting at a rainbow crosswalk here in Seattle earlier this year when a rainbow cop car with sirens blaring zoomed through a red light.
and made me miss the rainbow bus I was trying to catch on the other side of the street. I can see how all those rainbows might help someone who's just coming out. A kid might think, hey, my parents are disappointed, but the bus still loves me. But the rainbow striping of... everything in the last 20 years, smacks of overcompensation for all those years when straight people went out of their way to make gay people miserable, which is why I think, which is why the cynic in me thinks.
When I see all those rainbow flags everywhere, including on top of Arizona State Capitol, are they there to make gay people feel better about ourselves? Or are they there to make straight people feel better about themselves? And like a lot of things, probably a little bit of both. Which brings us back to Nick Cupper, our surprise.
Again, I am not saying he is gay. Gaydar isn't perfect. This could be a false positive. I have no inside dirt. Dude has never sucked my dick or the dick of anybody I know. I'm just saying I won't be surprised if it turns out he is. Won't be surprised. We'll be delighted. Because after decades of watching gay-faced, anti-gay religious bigots come tumbling out of the closet, yeah.
If, not when, not making any predictions here, but if the gentleman from Surprise, Arizona gets caught with a gay hooker, let's just say that I won't be our surprised. All right, coming up on today's show on the micro, tons of your Q's, lots of my A's. And on the micro and the magnum, we're sharing a quick snip from this week's Sex and Politics with Tim Miller of The Bulwark. The full Sex and Politics show will be available to our subs. On Thursday, Tim and I talk.
politics for a little bit before taking sex questions together, which I always enjoy doing with Tim. And we're sharing with micro listeners one of the sex questions I tackled with Tim on this week's Sex and Politics. Sex and Politics, of course, is an occasional bonus podcast we do. for our Magnum subs.
If you like what you hear and you want more Savage Love cast, more Savage Love, sex and politics and invites to Savage Love Live, become a Magnum subscriber today at savage.love. And our Magnum guest on today's show, film critic and culture writer. Manuel Betancourt. He was on the show a year and a half ago or so to talk about his first book, The Male Gazed.
He's back now to talk about his latest book, Hello Stranger, Musings on Modern Intimacies. Quickly before we start the show, Canada, I'm so sorry. Thank you for targeting your retaliatory tariffs at red states and Trump cronies. Noted. and appreciated. Terry and I ordered a case of wine from British Columbia today. We hate him too, and we are on your side. All right, let's get to the first call.
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slash savage and using code savage at checkout. Hi, Dan, Nancy, and the tech savvy at risk youth. My partner is a bisexual cisgendered woman. We had a conflict the other night. And I went into our bedroom to be alone and regulate my nervous system. We've talked about this process before, including with our couples counselor. She's done this many times herself.
And I've not always been respectful over boundaries, but I've gotten a lot better. I've often had weak boundaries myself, but I'm also getting better at standing my ground and not dissolving boundaries just to smooth things over. After shaking the door for a few minutes, she finally picked the lock and came in and laid on top of me and demanded that I love her and hug her and forget that we'd had any argument at all.
I just laid there and refused to give in and hug her and pretend everything was fine. Eventually she gathered herself and began to realize that she was behaving poorly. She left me alone for a few minutes and then decided that she was going to leave and go spend the night with her boyfriend. It feels like a bad idea to leave an unresolved conflict with one partner to go be with another.
I didn't need the house to myself for the night. I just needed 15 or 20 minutes of uninterrupted solitude. I was coming around, and then she was leaving. I told her that I didn't think it was a good idea and that I'd rather her stay and wait until I had regulated myself and then we could work on resolving our conflict and reconnecting.
She didn't seem to think that it was a bad idea or she figured she'd already done enough damage so why not just fan the flames? What do you think, Dan? Is it problematic to leave an unresolved conflict with a partner to go be with another? It's problematic to kick down a door. If somebody needs to retreat to another room to decompress, which is a kind of self-regulation that I think is healthy. Like if you...
potentially if you stay in a room and continue to fight and things continue to escalate, you aren't sure how you might react or where that might go. Learning to remove yourself from that situation and cool down and decompress, that's... That's good. And your partner should have respected your need for some space and time at that moment and not rattled the door and then picked the lock or kicked the door down.
And then crawled on top. That was not okay. This was like a series of implicit consent violations that she engaged in to do what? To demand from you a kind of emotional performance that. you didn't want to give her and that she didn't deserve and wasn't where you were the relationship out of that yeah fuck that and as to your question the question you actually asked is it a problem is it problematic to leave
An unresolved conflict with one partner, if you're in a poly relationship, to walk out on one partner and tell that partner you're going to hang out with your other partner and leave that unresolved conflict, you exited the room. You needed to withdraw. And then she decided that she needed to withdraw. Your decision to withdraw, perfectly valid. Her decision to withdraw, perfectly valid. She didn't need to tell you.
and she shouldn't have told you that, you know what, I'm going to head out. She didn't need to say, and see my other boyfriend. That, that was a kind of instrumentalization or weaponization of the other relationship in a way that was. disrespectful, just unnecessary, emotionally manipulative and shitty and retaliatory. She's retaliating against you for the conflict that you've had and not giving her what you needed at the exact precise moment that she felt she needed and deserved it.
by picking up her other boyfriend as if he's a stick to beat you with emotionally. And yeah, that seems shitty and maybe disqualifying. And maybe you should break up with somebody who, when you close the door and you need a minute, won't. respect that closed door or your request
Which you made quite clear by closing and locking that door for the minute that you needed to decompress and calm the fuck down. Maybe that's not somebody you're safe with in the relationship as she proved to you by kicking the door down and then proved to you again. by unnecessarily weaponizing your other relationship to punish you. Fuck that. Ugh, poly people, Jesus fucking Christ. I know, poly people who are, everything's going great, there's no problem, and everyone's...
Even if there are conflicts, emotionally healthy and well-regulated, they're not calling. They don't call like the people with problems always are overrepresented in the sample on the show. The people who had a three way and it blow up in their face and the relationship is over in danger. They call about that three way. The people had the three way and was awesome.
And everybody's happy and they want to have it again. They don't call. So I'm poly. I get it. Poly people call when they're having poly problems. They don't call when everything's poly perfect. But this is a problem. And it seems to me like it's a her problem. But generally. You don't have to resolve every, that old saw that you'd never go to bed angry and that you always have to work at and resolve the conflict. No, no, no, no, no. Sometimes.
you need to like go see a fucking movie. Sometimes you need to get the fuck away from each other and leave it alone. And sometimes that means going to bed.
ideally with each other angry and then waking up in the morning with hopefully a different perspective honestly there have been like whole days where terry and i didn't say a fucking word to each other because we were both mad And it would have been worse if we had forced each other at a moment when we were too angry to speak, to resolve the conflict that was so enormous we could barely look at each other because...
That's some principle, some ideal, that all conflicts should be resolved promptly, at least before bedtime. No, no. Sometimes you just got to get the fuck away. Sometimes you got to shut and lock a door. And sometimes you got to break up with somebody. You can't respect the shut door, the locked door, whether it's actually physically a door with a real lock that you locked or just the retreat where you're like, I don't want to talk right now. Let's talk later.
somebody can't hear that and respect that somebody's not mature enough to have one boyfriend let alone two hey dan long time listener i was raised mormon and many years ago my rebel sister thought i might be gay turns out i'm not gay Question is, I was accidentally paired with a gay trans man pre-op on a dating app. He was really pretty. And as an avid listener of your show, I think I'm pretty open-minded.
and thought I would give it a shot. But sadly, it didn't get out of the messaging phase. He lost interest when I told him I was straight. I started thinking about it and came to the conclusion that a gay pre-op trans man could potentially be the unicorn of straight man partners. Am I an asshole to think this way? If I'm lucky, this hypothetical individual has beautiful female anatomy.
But between the ears is a guy. Maybe even a gay guy. Gay guys are fun. Not only fun, but dear God, I wish women would get that excited about dick. Anyway, is this something I can pursue? without hurting the person in question? If so, how do I approach someone about this? When I go over it in my head, I just sound like a jerk. Maybe that means I am a jerk. I would rather not...
try to date someone before knowing if they are pre-op and if they plan to get opt. I readily await your thoughts. Hopefully not a rebuke. Oh my God, I'm supposed to tell you, you are an asshole. You were matched with a trans man, a pre-op gay trans man on a dating app because of some glitch or some bug and you were willing. To possibly have sex with this pre-op gay trans man because they were pre-op because they still had, I assume, breasts and a vagina and a vulva. And so you would be.
having straight sex in your fantasies, if they had happened, if you guys had met with this man. And when he found out that what you wanted from him was. Straight sex. It was his primary and secondary female sexual characteristics that were attracting you. That could have triggered his dysphoria. That could have been traumatizing for him. And what he wanted as a gay trans man pre-op or not was the sexual attentions and affections and affirmation of being desired by another.
man, gay or bi, as a man, and you couldn't offer that to him. I hear from some Gay trans guys, I know that there are a lot of straight men getting onto Grindr and other gay hookup apps looking for trans guys who haven't had bottom surgery because what they want is pussy. And they're willing to settle for it, even if it's attached to somebody or it comes bundled with somebody who is in every other way, mass presenting. There's something about male sexuality where there's this.
ability, generalizations, about 4 billion people, 4 billion other people, hundreds of millions of exceptions, but this ability in many men to compartmentalize, to partialize their partners. I'm an ass man. As long as there's a big ass, I don't care about any of the rest of it. Or I'm in defeat or...
And so just like, here's a pussy and I will take it and maybe it's easier to get gay trans guy pussy on Grindr than... woman pussy on okay cupid or field or anywhere else so i'm gonna go looking for pussy there but looking for it in a way that makes the gay trans men that you trick
into sleeping with you potentially feel lied to, misled, violated, which can be emotionally damaging. So you are an asshole. I have to say you are an asshole. And then I have to risk people calling me an asshole by saying they're are in this world, assigned female at birth persons who haven't gotten top surgery or bottom surgery, are not taking testosterone, still are mostly femme presenting in their attire, but are...
trans men and identify as gay. Who are they supposed to fuck? Because most gay men, cis and trans, don't want to have sex with an assigned female birthed person who still has boobs and a vagina and isn't on the testosterone and presents femme as some. So who's the ideal partner for that person? Cause gay and bi men.
Trans and cis, cis and trans aren't exactly going to blow that person's DMs up in hot pursuit because despite... who they are and how they identify they present as and physically manifest as all of their primary and secondary sex characteristics are female and so for the kind of trans guy you describe who is Female in every way, everywhere, except between the ears, like it's you or someone like you or nobody. And everybody would rather have somebody than nobody. So maybe, arguably, in theory.
There is a trans guy out there that would want to get with you and wouldn't mind or has accepted that if they want to have sex. At all, it's going to be with a person who is vibing on and attracted to their female body, even if they also intellectually, you know, from... the navel up, can recognize and accept that they are men or have men's souls or they're men between the ears, however you want to describe it. So, yeah.
I understand why the trans guy that you were flirting with, that the dating app matched you with, blocked you and bailed after you told him you were straight. Obviously, that's not a trans guy that wants to get with a guy. who is fucking him because what he wants or what he's vibing on is what's female about him still, or what appears to be female about him still. But I have to concede that there are the, what you described someone who's.
everything is female except what's going on between the ears those trans guys are out there too and they want love too and if they want love it's gonna be sorry to say it's gonna be with someone like you And so long as you aren't fetishizing them, so long as you treat them as a whole person and they want to be with you, I will allow it like it's up to me. No, it's going to happen.
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Let them know the Lovecast sent you, helixsleep.com slash savage. With Helix, better sleep starts now. Hey, Dan, I'm the tech savvy at risk youth. I'm a U.S. Marine, and before I enlisted, I had a... Rough life. Eventually I got sober about two years ago. When I was still using, I made some bad decisions and got into some pretty serious debt. Around the time I entered the Marines, I met this guy who I didn't get along with or...
particularly even like through a mutual friend. He had really different political views than me, and every time we'd be around each other, we'd just get into arguments. Our mutual friend eventually told me that this guy had an underlying medical condition that was entirely treatable but required super expensive medication.
We entered into a marriage of convenience in order for him to access the Marine's health insurance and for me to use the additional money that came from the Marine's special support to help me pay off my debts. Lo and behold, we fell completely in love. I'm sober, happy. Life is good. But I'm still so scared that the Marines are going to find out. And I'm also concerned that I did something immoral. How do you think I should proceed? You proceed by...
Thanking your lucky stars, not feeling the least bit guilty, and keeping your mouth shut. Look, throughout history, people got married for all sorts of reasons. Most of them, not particularly romantic. Marriages were property transactions. acquisitions and women were usually the property being acquired. People married to form alliances. People married for mutual benefit. All marriages were marriages of convenience and economic opportunity or leverage.
And today, most marriages, most marriages, most marriages, people marry for love. But a marriage is whatever the two people in it say that it is. It's whatever they... want it to be companionate marriages are real marriages marriages of convenience are real marriages marriages contracted by people purely
for financial reasons or to access health benefits, which is obscene, but that's one of the ways people can access health benefits in this country. Our healthcare system, broken as it is, incentivizes the kind of marriage. of convenience and also benevolence that you entered into with this man who needed access to medications that he couldn't get any other way. And you did a mitzvah here. And then the universe did you a mitzvah back and you guys fell in love. This is like...
That movie from 1990 starring Gerard Depardieu and Andy McDowell called Green Card, where an American woman marries a French chef, played by a man we now know to be a monster, but then was still considered a kind of... Gruff sex symbol. Now he's in Moscow sucking Putin's dick. Anyway. The movie's really good. And Andy McDowell's character marries Gerard Depardieu's character so that Gerard Depardieu can get a green card and stay in the United States. And then they fall in love.
Their love story is the marriage of convenience that becomes a romantic marriage, becomes a marriage as marriages are more commonly understood. And you got to live that rom-com. You won. Congrats on getting sober. Congrats on waking up one day and realizing that the man you were married to was the man you were in love with.
That usually works in the opposite direction for a lot of people. They wake up one day and realize that the man they're married to is the man they're no longer in love with. You're winning. You're winning. Stop. Let go of these. If you feel like you owe the Marine Corps an apology, you don't. Our healthcare system wronged the Marine Corps. If anyone wronged the Marine Corps, and you did not wrong.
the Marine Corps. So this is a win. Take the win. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. They make maintaining your website so easy a cavewoman like me can do it. Combining two decades of industry leading design expertise with cutting edge AI technology, you can unlock your strongest creative potential. Squarespace empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to your unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across your entire online presence.
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Okay, folks, what follows is a call I used in my sex and politics conversation with political commentator, bulwark host, and former Republican, now never Trumped, Tim Miller. We thought we'd give you a taste of what kind of hijinks we get up to on sex and politics. Here we go. Oh my god, Dan. Tech savvy at rescue with Nancy. Hello. Doesn't matter how old I am. Doesn't matter where I live. I am a male. I just discovered my butt. Not exactly how I thought I was going to come.
across this on the bingo card i have hemorrhoids and putting the cream on i never knew such a pleasure center existed i mean it hurts because the hemorrhoids don't get me wrong but i just i've never explored and i feel like i know myself in a new way anyway i have two problems one i have a girlfriend that doesn't want to go anywhere near my ass and two when i'm with just myself i haven't found a way to reliably
adequately predictively ensure that there's not going to be any m&ms present and by m&ms i mean a lot of poop like i didn't know that there could be this much poop inside of me Please help, answers, advice. I need to get back to my rectum immediately. Thank you.
All right, I don't blame his girlfriend for not wanting to get anywhere near his ass if it is covered with shit every single time he touches it. This is an indictment of the way, indictment, the word of the day. This calls to all those stories we've read about straight guys who don't practice. good personal hygiene where their asses are concerned. And how do straight women put up with this? And of course your girlfriend doesn't want to touch your butt if every time you touch it, there's an M&M.
Tim, what's your advice? Firstly, I'm mad at you, Dan, because I feel like on my past trips to the Lovecast. I've given really thoughtful advice to people going through serious problems and trying to navigate challenging scenarios, and this week you have left me. with Eminem ass, man. And so, you know, I guess, Ed, the problems come in all shapes and sizes. My advice for him is pretty brief. I'm assuming he doesn't shave his ass.
For starters, because if you're going to have little M&M balls, my guess is that they're affixing themselves to butt hair. So I think probably number one piece of advice would be to shave. shave your butt. And I think that's going to go a long way to solving this problem. In addition to that, you can Google douching, which is pretty
Pretty simple. You don't need to be an Eagle Scout to do it. You can just go to google.com. Don't need Dan Savage's advice here. Tutorial videos are out there. I don't have to explain it to people in my column anymore. I used to have to explain how to do things in my column. Now everything that you could possibly do has a YouTube video or a wiki page. Douching. Google it. If douching seems intimidating, you know, just going in the shower.
And really giving a strong clean with a washcloth might just be another, might be a more, you know, entry-level effort. This is why God put gay men on this planet. So we could tell straight men to take a shower before they touch their asses or ask somebody else to touch their asses. So there we go. You're a little nicer to the girlfriend.
the girlfriend i think the girlfriend should also should not be so scared of it i'm happy i'm happy to know that hemorrhoids aren't all bad in case i that ever becomes an issue for me that was the that was the only uh positive Years ago, somebody asked me if I was worried about getting hemorrhoids because I have butt sex and I get fucked. And I was like, uh...
My dad has hemorrhoids and I do not. That is the end of that study, that research study, the NIH grant done. Like if there was a positive association between getting fucked in the ass and having hemorrhoids, I would have them and he would not.
Good luck out there. I do have a final note. I have a final note, though, for straight men and gay men. Dan, you might disagree with this, but it's been a long-held comment that I've had about straights who've come to me for my guidance on this, and that's this. If you play in the junkyard, you're going to get bit from time to time. So, you know, there's no way to avoid that. Will happen from time to time. But I think if you take these other precautions first, you'll be in good shape.
If you want more like that, get yourself a Magnum subscription over at savage.love and you'll be able to listen to all of Sex and Politics with Tim Miller and others and enjoy all the other perks of Magnum membership. Again, subscribe at savage. This episode is sponsored by Foria, makers of Awaken Arousal Oil, Intimacy Melts, and Sex Oil. Sex Oil, it's fun to say, it's even more fun.
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slash Savage for 20% off your first order. I recommend trying their new massage oil combined with their Awaken Arousal Oil. You can and will thank me later. Hi, Dan. I'm a married poly 40-year-old on the East Coast, and I recently had an excellent threesome with my husband and his relatively new partner. The chemistry was great, and the sex was fun. One small problem...
The new partner has a baby face. She's 28, but just sort of has a terubic, even more young than she is face. So every time I opened my eyes, I had kind of a gut check.
Any advice for seeing my way through this to more sexy, fun times in the future where I can actually open my eyes? First, I want to say, so great to get your call. I have pointed out a hundred... a thousand million times in my column and on this podcast, that we have a really warped, distorted impression of how threesomes typically go because we hear about the disasters.
When a couple, opposite sex couple, has a threesome and leads to a crisis in their relationship or they break the fuck up, everybody hears about that threesome. A couple has a threesome and it goes great and they might want to...
have one again, or they just scratched that off their fuck it list and they're never going to do that again, but they're really glad they did it. Nobody hears about that threesome. So it's really good to get a call from someone who had a threesome. There were no problems. It went great. You had a good time.
Thank you. Thank you for adding that to the threesome discourse. We need to hear from more people like you and your husband who had the threesome that went really, really well. All right. On to the problem. With this three-way, which was not a problem with the three-way itself, your three-way partner, your very special guest star, had a bit of a baby face. That does not make your very special guest star... a baby, 28 years old. Some people who are 28 years old look like they're younger.
than their chronological age. Are those people never supposed to have three ways with hot couples in their 40s? I don't think so. And you just need to... When you look at her, when you open your eyes the next time you have a three-way, because definitely you should have a three-way with this woman. Again, you shouldn't penalize her for these intrusive thoughts that are a you problem, not a her problem. When you open your eyes.
and you see her cherubic face, you just need to pivot, gear shift, intentionally say to yourself, this is an adult. woman in my bed. This is a 28-year-old grown-ass adult woman with a very youthful appearance, Yahtzee, who isn't attracted. Well, some people are attracted to older people and daddies. Thank God for those people.
But some people, many of us, most of us look at who gets sent down the runways at fashion shows. Youthfulness is correlated very strongly with instilling or inspiring sexual attraction. in others and that's fine it's even fine for you to groove a little bit on how youthful this woman appears and to enjoy her for who she is and what she brings to the bedroom and not require her to
Slap half a pound of old age makeup on before she gets under your husband again or gets under you again. Just enjoy her. And you can look at her and when, is it your reptile brain? Is it your higher brain? Whatever part of your brain is going to. This is a child. You just need to argue with that part of your brain and say this is an adult. This is an adult woman who can consent to every adult thing.
that we've done and every adult thing we're planning to do the next time we three adults get together for a truly awesome threesome. But again, I really want to thank you for your call. And if there's anybody else out there who had a great threesome, your first threesome, it went amazing. And there's some sort of peripheral.
non-problem problem that you can share while also inserting into the discourse, injecting into the discourse another story about a great threesome, please give us a call with that problem. that you had at your last super successful threesome. We want to hear about it. Hi, Dan. I'm a 28-year-old woman from the UK, and I've been friends with another woman for about nine years now since we met in university.
The issue is that I feel oftentimes like she uses her poor mental health as an excuse for... poor behavior i guess um in the friendship and it's not malicious she's not a nasty person by any stretch of the imagination but i'm just having trouble with how to communicate to her that she's hurting me and that
Her mental health is not a good enough excuse for that. We have been drifting a bit over the last two years ever since I started setting a bit more boundaries about my time and availability because she'd want to talk about things in the evening. you know, the conversations would last hours and I'd be going to sleep really late. So I just had to say no, no, but, you know, try and let her know when, you know, other times I was available, but that didn't seem to work for her.
She just kind of stopped making an effort to talk to me very often at all. accumulating in sort of the last six months since June when I went down to visit her. She hadn't spoken to me, responded to any of my messages when I had tried to reach out. And then in December. She sort of ambushed me with an apology for all of that and said that she was ready to speak whenever I was and that we could...
talk things through. But then when I did kind of try and put a time in the diary, she then turned around and said that she actually didn't have capacity to talk to me about it for the rest of January. And that's just sort of left me feeling rather sour.
like to have these kinds of conversations over text but i did send her a text just sort of saying about where i was and um what i needed which was clarity on where we stand and in response uh she said that she tried to kill herself twice last year
And it's not about me. And that's why she just hasn't been able to talk to me. Now, I was aware of one attempt. And don't get me wrong, obviously, that's a really dark place to be in. And I completely understand that you don't necessarily have capacity. to be a great friend when you're dealing with such poor mental health but a courtesy text would have been nice and it's not the first time that she's done this kind of thing so I just don't know how to
move forward. So any advice would be appreciated. So your friend who's always in it, who's always going through something was demanding too much from you, was asking too much, too much of your time, too much emotional energy. You were hurt. therapist and she kept you on the phone all night and you had to set a boundary. And this person who was expecting too much from you reacted to you setting a boundary and saying, I can't talk till three o'clock in the morning.
four nights a week by entirely withdrawing from your life. And you didn't take the win. You didn't assume that maybe that she had other friends that she could rely on the way she had been relying on you, that she was maybe getting a. a shrink that she paid for her time rather than expecting friends to play that role in open-ended all night, dark night of the soul phone calls. Look.
You two sound emotionally codependent in a really unhealthy way. There's some part of you that misses this connection and her reliance on you, and you'd like to bring that back into your life, but in a more controlled way. And my question for you is, Why, why do you want to do that? Why do you now feel that after you set this boundary and she withdrew that she owes you an appointment phone call for you guys to process?
Your thoroughly processed relationship. Why? Just like go make some other friends. Let her go make other friends. Sometimes a friendship runs its course. You two can just look at this and say, guess we grew apart. And I hate to say this, but somebody who. perhaps has manipulated you emotionally in the past to get your attention and support.
Who tells you that after you stopped talking to them or after they withdrew, they attempted suicide a couple of times. They were a little too busy to return the text. Maybe they did attempt suicide a couple of times, or maybe that's just them. Attempting to manipulate you emotionally with a lie about having attempted. Maybe they contemplated it. Sometimes people round up contemplation to attempt, or maybe she did attempt suicide a couple of times, but she got through it without you.
Why is she dropping that bomb? Why is she dumping that trauma on you on this phone call or in this text message at that moment to make you feel guilty, to get you back on the phone until three o'clock in the morning, five nights a week? I don't know. But do you want to be that person again for her? And do you want her to be that person for you? There is something affirming sometimes to our own.
self-regard when an emotionally dependent person becomes emotionally dependent on us. We have the magic stuff. We have the secret sauce. We alone can fix them. And we can't, right? You can't fix her. She needs perhaps more help than you can give. And we all owe it to our lovers, our partners, our friends.
To be in good working order, to have our shit together to a certain extent, doesn't mean we can't need them. Doesn't mean we can't call in the cavalry when we need the cavalry to come. But if all we do is call in the cavalry, if that's the entire basis of our friendship. There are deeper problems at play, or that's what they want. They want that kind of attention.
And if somebody gets a lot of attention because they're on fire and they enjoy the attention that they get when they're on fire, that can incentivize setting yourself on fire or not putting the fucking fire out, not calling the actual fucking fire department. They're calling up your friends to say, hey, I'm on fire again. And you have to look at them and say, you need to call the fire department, not me. You need to call a shrink. You need to get some help or some meds maybe. But I can't.
obviously alone, fix this. So my advice to you is not to ask this person to make an appointment to have a phone call with you. To process the end of this friendship and just accept this friendship is at its end. And go make some other friends.
All right, time for our listener feedback segments of the show. First up, some of the comments left on last week's show in the very lively comment threads at savage.love. Says Cordelia, I thought about the married man wondering if OnlyFans is cheating. I agree. with Dan's verdict. However, the guy said he spends thousands of dollars on these interactions. I might be in a lower income bracket but I wouldn't spend that amount of money on something without consulting my partner.
In the caller's defense, he said he and his wife keep their finances separate. So this is his money he's spending on cam girls, not their money, but still. Yeah, thousands does seem like a lot. Says no cute name about the same caller. The cam girl's husband's wife may or may not regard his actions as cheating, but the bigger issue, so far as I'm concerned, is that he doesn't feel good about it.
People don't call. Sex advice shows if they don't think they have a problem. If it's bothering him, then maybe he should cut back. It's an interesting question. He knows that if his wife knew the extent of it, she might have a problem with it. And that seems to be the problem he has with it. But his wife clearly doesn't want to know the extent of it, which has me wondering.
where the problem here is exactly. And as a general rule, if you feel bad or even a little squicked out about something you're doing sexually, even for a minute, maybe that means you should stop. I guess is good, but sex shame and kink shame. are real and the impact of them have to be factored in. Feeling bad because it's bad and you shouldn't be doing it, that's one thing. But sometimes we feel bad because we've been told a decent person would feel bad and we all want to be...
decent people. So I just think it needs a little bit more scrutiny, a little more interrogation than just do you feel bad if you feel bad? Stop. And some advice for last week's Cut Queen Caller from Ted the Bellhop. Expanding on Dan's great advice. Maybe the caller could make an arbitrary rule. She could tell her new poly partner, you can have other partners, but no PIV with anyone but me. And then the next time you get together, he can tell you how great it was.
to be inside a different partner in spite of the rule. Ah, Ted, that was such great advice. It was the advice I was kind of struggling to give. It was... The transgression of cheating that turned her on when she was with her monogamous partner. Now that she's poly, it's not cheating when her partner is with somebody else. But if they made some rules that he could transgress against.
about the outside sexual contact that he's allowed to have rules he could break that could bring back that cheating vibe the caller enjoyed so much great advice ted all right for more listener feedback and more responses from me be sure to check out struggle session every Thursday at savage.love. And now, everyone's favorite part of the show, especially Nancy's, the part where I shut my big gay mouth and my listeners get the last word.
Hi there, Dan. This is a response to the caller from last week who was spending several thousand dollars a year on cam sessions in his telling of the matter because he was unable to access porn in the state that he is in. And here in the UK, we are about to be subjected to age verification on porn websites as well, which will require putting in credit card details with driver's license or passport or whatever.
Lots of people don't want to do this. I'm here to tell you that there is an easier way to get around porn site blockages and restrictions than spending several thousand dollars a year on campsites. I managed to use a VPN. The caller can, for a mere couple of dollars a month, find himself a VPN, a virtual private network service that will allow him to get around location-based restrictions on his porn website. Hopefully, this will...
saves him some money. Dan, I was surprised you went along with the guy who was spending all that time and money jacking off with cam girls. It seemed like he was just itching for you to tell him to knock it off. One of the savage credos is moderation and everything, including moderation. And I agree with that, but it just seems like you, Guy, have had your fill of non-moderation. I'm not remotely trying to be judgy here. There's nothing wrong with masturbation within a relationship.
But I just can't help but thinking there's something screwy going on here. You characterize your relationship as low sex. And then you also said you spend a few times a week with these cam girls. Yeah, no shit. It's low sex. You're plowing all your sexual energy into cam girls instead of your wife.
When a relationship has non-matching libidos, there's nothing wrong with the higher libido person taking matters into their own hands. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on here. It seems like you just prefer cam girls to intimacy with your wife. Is that what she prefers or is she just resigned to the situation? The other thing is the money, which it doesn't sound like you're made of. And yeah, that's a waste of fucking money mostly. And the other, other thing is your question of fidelity.
You said yourself that you at least semi-equate this activity with similar activity you had with your wife back in the day. So it's only logical that you might be wondering if a new real-life connection could actually be struck with one of these people. So, yeah, that kind of makes it cheating, man, unless, of course, your wife knew what you were doing and approved, which you hinted she actually would not.
So, yeah, for all these reasons, I would say to knock this shit off or at least scale it way back. Again, not at all coming from any kind of position of shame or judginess. It's just that it doesn't sound like a very healthy relationship in its present form. Hi, Dan, Nancy, and the tech savvy at Iris Youth. It's me again, the one that called about the stupid dude that ended up on the are we dating the same guy and can't be honest. I did DTMFA.
Love fuckers dumped, for sure. I got another message from another girl. So I did try and forgive him. He can't stop. It's who he is. You were right. I didn't get your advice in time because I called too late, an hour before my vacation. But I went anyway, and it was fun, and I had other friends there. It wasn't just the two of us.
So I had a great time, and I'm about to go on another vacation where I get to put my toes in the sand. Love all of you, and if anyone else needs to hear this, dump the motherfucker already. And we're going to leave it there. To get us a question or comment for a future show, go to savage.club slash askdan and you can record your question directly on Twitter.
website, or you can make a voice memo on your very own phone and email it to us at Q at savage.love, or you can call 206-302-2064 and leave us a message on our answer. Follow me at Blue Sky at Dan Savage. Follow me on Instagram and threads at Dan Savage. Follow Tim Miller on Twitter at TimODC. And you can get his daily podcast, The Bulwark, wherever you get your podcasts. And subs, watch for the full sex and politics.
episode with Tim coming this Thursday. Follow Manuel Betancourt on Blue Sky and Instagram and threads at bmanuel. For more about his books, go to his website, mbetancourt.com. The Savage Lovecast is produced every week by Nancy Hartounian. And me and Nancy and the tech savvy at-risk youth, we will all be back at you next week with another installment of the Savage Lovecast. Thank you for telling me.