Poly Love: The highs, lows and endless trade-offs of the group relationship

Clockwise from left: William Winters, Julie Barr, Joe Barr, Anna Hirsch, Shannyn DeBlaauw, Nini Banks, and James Starke.

Clockwise from left: William Winters, Julie Barr, Joe Barr, Anna…

This article originally appeared in the February issue of San Francisco Magazine.

“So are you guys in an equilateral triangle, or are you more of a V?” 

A dark-haired woman leans over to an eager-looking young couple seated next to her and holds up her thumb and forefinger. Each part of the V signifies a person; the fleshy connective tissue between them stands for the partner to whom they’re both sexually connected. Her hand gesture is intended as an icebreaker, but the couple pause awkwardly, as if they don’t know exactly how to answer.

In polyamorous relationships, knowing where you stand is crucial, but often hard to figure out. Whether you have 2 partners or 10, managing multiple liaisons can feel like walking a tightrope—which is perhaps why the perplexed couple have come to this unmarked warehouse on Mission Street that houses the Center for Sex and Culture. Tonight’s Open Relationship Discussion Group is exploring “Threesomes and Moresomes.” The attendees—a total of 22 men and women, a commendable turnout for a Monday night in November—sit in a neat circle, jittering with the same blend of excitement and anxiety that you might find in a roomful of people training for their first parachute jump.

Coats still on against the chill of the unheated room, the gathered polyamorists try not to stare too obviously at the painted nudes on the wall, rendered in various poses of masturbation and frottage. It’s a hip-looking crowd, mostly in their 30s and 40s, white, and flying solo, though there are a few couples and one triad: two women and a man who stroke each other’s hands and listen, but never speak.

Read more: The pin-ups, porn stars, and provocateurs of San Francisco’s sexual heyday

When Marcia Baczynski, a relationship coach and tonight’s discussion leader, asks how many people are new to the group, nearly half raise their hands. Some of them are new to poly altogether, including one smartly dressed woman who met the love of her life—a married man—on OkCupid six months ago. With his wife’s consent, she and the man started a passionate affair. Little by little, the two women grew to care for each other as well, to the point that the three of them now sleep in the same bed.

“If I hadn’t fallen in love with him,” the woman says, “I wouldn’t have been able to develop feelings for her. They’ve been together 17 years, and sometimes I see them as the same person.” She gestures toward the man on her left, who smiles and takes her hand. Then her face falls: The wife, who is not present tonight, is pregnant. “There’s this other large need that I have,” the woman confesses, “to get married and have kids. There’s a huge guilt in me for wanting to date other men. I’m afraid I’ll hurt him if I do.” She starts to cry. The room is silent until the man speaks up: “I’ve told her that the last time I loved someone this much, I married her. I don’t know what to do with this.”

Someone asks whether the two of them have talked about having a child together. They have, and they may. “But that’s the hard part for me,” the woman says. “It’s so not what my parents wanted for me. It’s not the social norm.” Everyone nods.

“Jealousy, time management, and lack of clarity around what you’re doing.” Baczynski ticks off the three most common pitfalls that beset practitioners of poly. We’re seated close together on a lipstick-red velvet chaise at Wicked Grounds, a kink-friendly café on Eighth Street where you can purchasee hand-carved rosewood butt paddles with your peppermint tea. Curly-headed and bright-eyed, Baczynski exudes friendliness that inspires a tangible intimacy. A decade ago, she gained fame in the alt-sex community as the coinventor of cuddle parties, which began in 2004 with clothed strangers caressing each other in her Manhattan apartment and have spread to thousands of living rooms across the United States and Canada. Now she’s one of the Bay Area’s most sought-after relationship coaches in the poly sphere, thanks in part to the prominence of her online curriculum, Successful Nonmonogamy, which helps couples open up their relationships without imploding them.

Read More: “I left my marriage in San Francisco” – One woman’s search for lasting love in a promiscious city

Twenty-four years after Sonoma County pagan priestess Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart conceived the word “polyamory” (meaning “many loves”), the Bay Area poly scene is still the biggest in the country and very much in the vanguard of a movement to disrupt monogamy. Many of its members are more aptly described as “monogamish,” Dan Savage’s term for couples who stay committed to each other while having sex on the side. (Polyamory also extends to couples who date each other and single people who date around a lot—although poly types tend to dismiss cruisers and commitment-phobes as not part of their tribe.) But the variations only spin out from there. The aforementioned V becomes an equilateral triangle when a threesome commits to sharing sex, love, and face time among all three partners. Two couples, or a couple and two singles, make a quad. If a fivesome is connected via a common partner, that’s a W. Partners may be primary, secondary, or tertiary, though some polys reject those terms as too determinative. A distinction is made between lovers and metamours (a partner’s partner), the latter often a close friend who steps in to resolve conflicts, cook dinner for everyone, and help raise the kids.

The concepts behind these words are constantly being hashed out in homes throughout the Bay Area, long known as polyamory’s petri dish. New additions to the vocabulary often bubble up here before filtering out to polyamorists in the rest of the country. “Compersion,” for example, defined as taking pleasure in your partner’s pleasure with another person (the opposite of jealousy), emerged in the Kerista Commune, a Haight-Ashbury “polyfidelitous” social experiment that used a rotating schedule to assign bed partners.

Dossie Easton, a Bay Area therapist who wrote the landmark poly bible, The Ethical Slut, in 1997, gets emotional when she talks about how far the poly world has come since her arrival here as a sexual revolutionary in 1967. “I see people who start out where I fought for years and years to get to. They think that they should be able to come out to their families, that their parents should accept them and welcome all their various partners and their various partners’ children for Thanksgiving.”

This isn’t the polyamory of your imagination, filled with ’70s swinger parties and spouse swapping in the hot tub. In fact, the reality of polyamory is much more muted, cerebral, and, well, unsexy. Generally speaking, self-identified poly types aren’t looking for free love; they’re in search of the expensive kind, paid for with generous allotments of time and emotional energy invested in their various partners—and their partners’ children and families. All of that entails a lot of heavy lifting, and a lot of time-consuming sharing. “There’s a joke,” Baczynski says, laughing: “Swingers have sex, and poly people talk about having sex.”

If it all sounds inordinately complicated, that’s because it is. What do you do when your partner vetoes a potential lover? How do you handle it when your spouse starts dating your ex? To cope with jealousy and the thorny subject of sexual boundaries, the poly community relies on an excess of communication—hence, discussion groups like tonight’s. The community calendar offers nonstop opportunities for support, conversation, and debate, including potlucks, workshops, coffeehouse socials, political discussions, and book readings. As one woman tells me, people here like to geek out on relationship philosophy as much as they like to geek out on software (and, in fact, the polyamory world has considerable overlap with the tech community).

Read more: Going in blind – An experiment in sight-unseen dating

In the poly world, uncoupling monogamy and sex leads not only to casual sex but also to uncasual sex and, sometimes, uncasual unsex (that is, ritualized cuddling). “I have the freedom to do whatever I want—and what I want includes taking on a lot of responsibility,” says Baczynski, who is in long-term relationships with one woman and two men. Polyamory isn’t about destroying a beloved institution, she argues. Instead, it’s about casting people in the roles that they actually want to play. “There’s an assumption in our dominant culture that the person you’re having sex with is the person who has all the status and has the mortgage with you, too,” she says. “Why do sex and mortgages go together? I’m not sure.”

But freedom comes with a multitude of challenges, many of which were voiced by the following sampling of local poly practitioners. Collectively they provide a glimpse of what it’s really like to be “open.”

Gloria and Alex and Luna and Joe

Gloria Schoenfeldt wasn’t particularly drawn to polyamory, just to people who happened to be polyamorous. First the 31-year-old school-teacher got used to having a polyamorous best friend in Luna Murray, a 25-year-old event planner. Hearing of Luna’s sexual adventures may have made it easier for Gloria to open her heart to a man named Alex, a 45-year-old photographer and relationship coach who identifies as not only poly but also pansexual.

At first, Gloria didn’t want to know about Alex’s other liaisons, other than their names—she couldn’t take the details creeping into her imagination. But that changed when she realized that she wanted to be a part of his “joys and sadnesses,” even if they weren’t with her. “It’s always worse in my head than it is in real life. It’s always bigger and scarier and more intense and more likely to cause the end of our relationship,” Gloria says. Now she comforts Alex through breakups and heartaches—and enjoys dating other men as well.

When Gloria introduced Alex to Luna, she was happy to see that they hit it off. The couple also got along well with Luna’s boyfriend Joe. So well, in fact, that eventually they all became lovers. Last February, the two couples decided to cohabitate, renting a two-bedroom apartment in Berkeley. For the first time in her 31 years, Gloria tried on the poly lifestyle in earnest, taking care to schedule her dates at the same time as Alex’s so as not to feel abandoned. She shares an occasional sexual four-way with her husband and housemates (they call their state of emotional intimacy a “quasi-quad”). Most of the time, though, they’re plain old housemates, two linked couples who pool money for groceries and get into tiffs over keeping the house tidy. “We live together, we have this loving family connection, and I don’t know what to call that,” says Alex.

Does it work? It does for now—one year in is too soon to declare it a permanent success, although the couples are talking about having children of their own. And both couples married last July, in jubilant back-to-back weddings in Orinda and Berkeley (they served as each others’ witnesses). What keep things stable are the poly-relationship standbys: limits and communication. While they sometimes couple off or have collective sex in the same room, it’s not an orgiastic free-for-all. There are boundaries. Gloria’s never had one-on-one sex with either Luna or Joe. When dating outside their marriage, Alex and Gloria only have protected sex. Luna and Joe won’t bring home a date who hasn’t been vetted by their respective spouse, as well as by Alex and Gloria. Everyone keeps a lid on when Alex’s 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship comes to stay, although she knows that her dad is poly and has seen him kissing his housemates in a non-housemate-like way.

Still, the arrangement has its challenges. Joe, a 25-year-old server at an upscale Berkeley restaurant, used to get so jealous of his wife’s lovers that they developed a system: Before she left on a date, she would sit him down and tell him all the things that she loved about him and promise him that she was coming home. Over time, “it got easier and easier,” says Joe. Now the tables have turned. Joe has several lovers, while Luna’s sex drive has plummeted. It’s made her insecure and sad. “I used to be this sexual beast, and I’m feeling very fragile about my sexuality and my body…. He’ll talk about how much he loves his partner’s body, and I’ll start crying,” she says.

But as far as Gloria’s personal plunge into poly goes, she considers it a success. She was skeptical of monogamy prior to meeting Alex (“It doesn’t provide the security it claims to, because it can’t”), but had questioned whether she had the emotional capacity for an open marriage. Seven months in, the answer is yes, this is a good life. So far.

“The abandonment stuff still comes up,” Gloria says. “When that happens, I cry. And we talk. And he holds me and he reassures me.”

Ian

Ian Baker became a practicing polyamorist the hard way: He fell in love with a girl who told him that she didn’t want to be monogamous—and then slept with his housemate. “I freaked out,” recalls Baker, but he wanted to be with her nevertheless. “I had to do a lot of work for it to be OK,” he says, “for my particular psyche to be OK with it.”

That he faced such a difficult adjustment was surprising to Baker, for whom polyamory was hardly a new concept: He’d grown up in a poly family with three parents—his dad, his mom, and his dad’s girlfriend—who bedded down together every night. They were poor, living in a small cottage in the woods in Sonoma County. Baker, who believes that the arrangement helped keep them all housed and fed, likes to use his story to counter the perception of poly as the domain of oversexed, affluent people with way too much time on their hands. “When I was a kid, my parents’ relationship made perfect sense,” he says. “Whatever situation you grow up in is the situation that makes sense.”

Baker, a developer and CEO of the Y Combinator–backed startup Threadable, describes his younger self as an insecure fellow who looked to his girlfriends for validation. He started reading books about jealousy, and slowly it dawned on him that polyamory could help him outgrow his core anxiety. And so he tapped into the poly community for emotional support. “The only reason that I ever wanted monogamy,” he says now, “was because I was insecure.”

Baker is in love with Lydia (not her real name), his partner of four years. He doesn’t date much outside the relationship, he says, because he’s basically fulfilled. “But that doesn’t mean I want to be monogamous,” he quickly adds. “I like the connections that exploring sexuality brings to my life.”

Lydia, on the other hand, does have other lovers. “She wants to see other people, and I want her to have what she wants,” Baker says. But every time she takes a new lover, he admits, “I have some anxiety. So when that’s the case, I have to do a little work. I’ll call someone and chat with them about it for a few minutes, and then I’ll feel better. It’s not a big deal.”

For poly practitioners like Baker, self-improvement and sexual exploration are overlapping preoccupations. It’s well-nigh impossible to handle the emotional agitation of concurrent relationships without facing one’s own self-relationship, they say—your resilience must be equal to the task. “There’s a bunch of different ways that you can learn to be emotionally self-sufficient, and it happens that I learned those lessons by having my girlfriend sleep with my friends,” says Baker, chuckling. “But since then, it’s been wonderful.”

Sherry

Bespectacled and wearing pink yoga pants, her hair wet after a shower, Sherry Froman leads me up the rainbow staircase to her bedroom and stretches out on her cozy sheepskin rug like a cat in the sun. She has hosted play parties—featuring touching and, sometimes, sex—for years on these sensuous carpets, beneath tapestry-draped ceilings that evoke four-poster beds. Some of the parties begin with an opening ceremony that resembles a personal-growth workshop: Participants practice communicating boundaries and desires, gaze into each other’s eyes, reveal the body part that they want to be touched, practice saying yes and no, explore the mattresses laid out on the floor. But, Froman hastens to add, “not everything is like that—New Age, woo-woo spirituality. The poly scene is very diverse.”

When Froman falls for someone new, someone she wants to date for a while, she skips the elaborate lingerie and whips out her calendar—not because she wants to keep her multiple suitors from colliding, but because she wants them to meet. If they form a copacetic bond, she believes, someday they all might cohabitate in the big house that, for now, resides solely in her imagination. That dream was a reality once, 20 years ago at Harbin Hot Springs, just north of Napa Valley—Froman would walk from house to house visiting friends and lovers who were studying tantric techniques and the full-body orgasm. “I was 23, and all these older men wanted to pleasure me and were fine with me not giving anything back,” she says. “I thought, that’s different from college boys.”

Since then, Froman has dated her share of supposed polys who hypocritically wanted their women to be monogamous with them. “I think a lot of men have a difficult time with polyamory, because the fantasy looks nothing like the reality,” she says. “Because if a man has several female lovers in his life, chances are that the women are going to talk about him to each other. And they’re all going to want him to be comfortable talking about his feelings.”

In the two decades since her time at the hot springs, Froman has learned to resist the pull of NRE—that’s “new relationship energy,” a poly term for the fizzy bubble of endorphins that envelops the newly besotted. While NRE feels great, she says, the high highs usually lead to the opposite. “You’ve got to think sustainably,” she says. “How is this person going to work for you over a period of time?”

Froman describes herself as having been a “very” sexual person since puberty. (When she decided to lose her virginity at age 16, her mother reserved a honeymoon suite with a heart-shaped Jacuzzi for the occasion and took her lingerie shopping.) After years of casual encounters, she stumbled onto the poly world and started choosing partners for different reasons—love, friendship, community. But lately she has again been hankering for more male partners in addition to the long-term beau with whom she shares this four-bedroom in Glen Park—it’s called “adding on.”

Froman, who met her live-in boyfriend on OkCupid (where users can self-identify as nonmonogamous) more than five years ago, believes that her schedule could support three other live-in men. But how to find them? She used to make promising friends by hosting Open Relationship Community potlucks at her house, but now she’s trying to explore new social venues to unearth men. “Once I find them,” she says, “then all of us being in the same bubble with each other is going to be a lot easier. It’s like having a family.”

William and Anna

Anna Hirsch thought that William Winters was going to be her first one-night stand. She ended up marrying him. When they met in Baton Rouge, their relationship styles—his casual connections, her commitment to monogamy—seemed as mismatched as their temperaments. Then they discovered poly, which squared their deep, if idiosyncratic, love with their desire to avoid the mistakes of relationships past. They agreed to experiment, and when Hirsch left town for several weeks, Winters slept with someone else. He didn’t tell Hirsch until she got back.

“She cried for two consecutive weeks,” recalls Winters. “It was totally fucking horrible. I remember saying, ‘Anna, if it is this hard, we do not have to do this.’ It was she who said, ‘No. There is something in this for me. I’m choosing this. But we cannot do it your way.’”

Eight years later, Hirsch, a writer and editor, and Winters, a progressive activist and organizer, are one of the most socially conspicuous poly couples in the Bay Area. In honor of the poly potlucks that they organized for a time, the Chronicle went so far as to dub Winters the “de facto king of the East Bay poly scene”—if you ask, he’ll show you a playing card, designed by his friends as a joke, that depicts him as the king of hearts.

Hirsch and Winters live in the Oakland Hills, in a studio apartment attached to a house occupied by several other poly couples. These days, Winters hosts private play parties and enjoys mingling with women. Hirsch is in a four-year relationship with a married couple (she’s more serious with the husband than with the wife) and has a boyfriend as well. Doing things Hirsch’s way means that Winters has the freedom he needs to play, while she puts down roots with the people she loves. Although she’s legally married to Winters, she likes to “propose” to her partners as a way of acknowledging their importance to her. When she mock-married a platonic friend back in Baton Rouge, Winters was her date to the wedding. “I have this whimsical image of myself old on a porch somewhere, someday,” Hirsch says. “And I would like William to be on that porch. And I think it would be amazing if there were other people on that porch, too.” This process—fitting together relationships without elevating them or putting them in special categories—is described by the couple as “integrating.”

So why did they marry at all? Winters frowns. “I feel like that question itself comes from a scarcity model that says we only have time for one major relationship. That kind of underlies the dominance of monogamy.” Hirsch has a more practical answer: They were in love, and she needed health insurance. “But what do I care about what marriage means?” she says. “It’s not a promise. It’s a celebration of what’s possible.” On their wedding day, she and Winters nixed vows and simply made a toast.

On the poly success scale, Winters rates their relationship as a 9.8 out of 10. Jealousy? Never a problem. Boundaries? The couple’s only rules concern safe sex and date disclosures (each a must). Even so, their marriage has been shaken this past year by the same temperament and communication problems that have plagued them since they got together—at one point, they put their chances of splitting up at 50-50. For all its laboriousness, polyamory is a deeply gratifying lifestyle for Winters and Hirsch, and the effort that it requires—the sometimes Augean task of maintaining multiple messy arrangements all at once—is more than paid off by the emotional rewards. Still, the day-to-day upkeep of a relationship can test anyone’s fortitude. “The poly stuff? So easy,” Winters says. “And the rest of it is like, sometimes, why does it have to be so fucking hard?”

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My Boyfriend Won’t Have Sex With Me

I have been dating my boyfriend for nine months and we haven’t been intimate yet. I am a pretty sexual person, so I’ve asked him a few times why he doesn’t want to move further in our relationship. In the beginning, he told me that his last relationship ended badly and that he hasn’t had sex in four years, so he feels uncomfortable. I understood and didn’t bring it up again for a few months. When I asked him again, he said that he’s uncomfortable with sex. I asked him what he was uncomfortable with and he didn’t have an answer other than “I don’t know.” I, once again, let the issue go unanswered for a little while. In our nine months together, we kiss every time we see each other, but we’ve only made out twice. That’s the furthest we’ve gone. When I go to kiss him more than just once or twice, he stops me. He sleeps over my apartment anytime he can, but we just sleep and sometimes cuddle. The most recent time I asked him about our lack of intimacy, I made an assumption about why he doesn’t want to have sex with me, and he didn’t disagree. I had weight loss surgery a few years ago, and am still working very hard at tightening up and meeting my goal weight/body. My assumption was that it was me, that he didn’t find me attractive enough. I was heartbroken and cried myself to sleep. He slept over, and in the morning told me that it was my decision where we should go from here. I decided that we would stay together and that he would be my support system in attaining my goals. I’m not entirely happy because now I feel like I’m not reaching for my goals just for me … it’s for him too, along with our intimate life. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to lose him, but I just don’t know how to move forward and keep my self-confidence high. Do you think I can continue to be with him? How can I express how hurt I feel?

It’s not you.
It’s not you.
It’s not you.

He’s not communicating. He’s making you feel miserable. And your mind is running wild with theories as you try to blame yourself for his coldness and remoteness. But it’s not you.

He told you he hasn’t had sex for four years. You’ve only been dating him for nine months. His lack of sexual desire does not have anything to do with you. It’s not because you’re not attractive enough. I’m sure you are. And this is his problem.

This guy needs therapy. There’s clearly something deep-seated that’s causing this problem. I can’t begin to speculate about what that may be. But it’s unfair and dishonest of him to know himself and not tell you when you’re feeling insecure, “No, it’s not you. It’s me.” He’s not taking responsibility for himself — and that’s manipulative.

You’re with the wrong guy for you. As you say, you have goals and you deserve the right to chase them with all the self-confidence in the world. He has no right to hold you back.

He gave you an out. He told you it was your “decision where we should go from here.” Take him up on it. Tell him that you deserve to be with someone who loves you and wants you. Tell him that you want to be with someone who is open to love and affection, and who can communicate better. Then break up with him. Because that person is out there.

You’re worthy of love and desire and respect. It doesn’t have to be this hard.

I want to preface this by saying I love my boyfriend very much, and we have a lot of fun together. We have been together for 3.5 years and living together for about a year. I do like living with him; however, I never got a chance to live with my best friend and we had always talked about doing that. It didn’t happen because she was living alone and her lease wasn’t up by the time I had to move, so I also moved to a one-bedroom apartment. Eventually my boyfriend moved in, and it’s been good, besides a few fights, of course. My question is: Is it wrong or does it make me a bad girlfriend for wanting to move with my best friend when this lease is up? She and I have been talking about it at length and we are both really into it, and we have been planning to do this since we both turned 18 but just never had the opportunity until now. Do you think it’s an OK idea for me to live with her for a bit, or do you think it’ll hurt my relationship more than it’s worth?
You should do what makes you happy. If you’d rather live with your best friend than your boyfriend, by all means, live with your friend. It seems like it’s worth a shot, because the only other option is to stay put — and it seems clear that you’d rather not. Obviously, it’s a risk because it will hurt your boyfriend’s feelings and may damage the trust you’ve built. But it sounds like it’s a risk that you feel is worth taking. And there are some things you can do to soften the blow.

Even if you’re fairly sure that you would like to move out — and it sounds like you are — you can’t just announce your decision. If you want to keep dating him, you need to make him feel like this is a decision that the two of you are making together. You need to talk it out, and you obviously need to handle that conversation delicately. Otherwise, he’s just going to feel like you’re moving out on him.

Think about what you’re going to say — maybe even rehearse it a bit with your friend — and think hard about why you want this so badly. How will you explain why you still want to date him, but would rather not live with him? Tell him that you’ve been planning this since you were 18 and it’s always been a dream. And tell him why this could be good for your relationship — which is basically because you want to be in a relationship where you support each other’s happiness and trust each other, even if your short-term goals don’t align.

No matter what you say, he’s going to take this personally. He’s likely going to feel upset and rejected. He’s going to feel that you’re choosing your friend over him. And he’s probably going to feel embarrassed and nervous about explaining this to his friends too. That’s all to say his ego is going to be bruised and you’re really going to need to remind him of how much you love him.

If the idea is to spend a year or so living with your best friend before settling down with your boyfriend, tell him that. But if that’s not the truth — if you’re really just looking for a way out of a relationship that got too serious, too fast — tell him that too. Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be. Don’t lie when the truth would do. If you really want space and time to be young and single, without a boyfriend, be honest about that too.

My fianceé and I recently got engaged after having dated for six years (three years of college followed by three years of graduate school). We have a great sex life and, more often than not, she is the one introducing newer or “kinkier” things. However, there is one aspect of my sexuality that I have heretofore felt uncomfortable opening up about. For as long as I can remember, I have had a bit of a thing (maybe “fetish” is the word) for full-back satin panties. I do not sniff them or anything creepy like that. I simply like how the soft material feels up against the boys and find the visual of a satin bikini-clad female very arousing. I’ve already made up my mind that I’m going to tell her before we move in together. I don’t want to start off our marriage on a lie only to have her discover this on her own (which, let’s be honest, is inevitable). So, my question is twofold: (1) How common is it for a straight male to fetishize such a specific and uniquely feminine item as full-back satin panties? (2) How should I bring this up or phrase it so she doesn’t think I’m some kind of creepy pervert? I am concerned my fianceé will think I’m either a cross dresser, pervert, latent homosexual, or some combination of the above. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Relax. This is not a big deal. In answer to your first question: No, it’s not at all unusual for a straight guy to have a fetish for lingerie. Lots of guys love garters and corsets; other guys get turned on by thongs and booty shorts. Everyone gets turned on by something. As such fetishes go, a preference for black satin panties is positively classy.

If anything, I bet your girlfriend will be relieved to discover something that turns you on so much, since, as you say, she usually bears the responsibility of introducing “newer or kinkier things.” People like to know how to make their partners happy. It’s hot when you tell someone what you crave — and it’s something they can do for you.

So don’t worry. Go buy her the pair you’ve been dreaming about. Or 10 pairs. The only thing that will change about your relationship is that you’ll be happier — and she’ll have to think a little less the next time she goes shopping.

By the way, since you wrote “bikini-clad female,” I replied assuming that you don’t like wearing them yourself. But since you mentioned cross-dressing, I’ll just add that, even if you do like to wear them, it’s not the craziest thing to do — and it wouldn’t be hurting anyone in any way. Your fiancée may well think it’s odd, but she loves you and could probably come to understand. Most turn-ons aren’t exactly rational — in fact, that’s part of what makes them hot.

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