Nu-uh!
I'm a lady in the same position--
I'm still attracted to him (very attracted!) and sex life is great (still, very attracted) but there is an undeniable interest in women mounting.
It is possible to be BI-sexual, right?
Your answer was a little quick, Savage.
My boyfriend understands, and has let me have a female make out buddy. He knows I want to marry him eventually so the make out buddy is not perceived as a threat and having her around is really exciting and hits the right spot for me!
Maybe just talk to him about it? Introduce it slowly... that's what worked for me.

Really? The scope of sexual orientation is only limited to being straight or being a lesbian? What about being bisexual and wanting to explore?

For shit's sake, Dan. Stop being cranky and get back to being constructively critical.

Lazy answer. If you're going to post a "Savage Love Letter of the Day," you've got to give us more than that. How did you arrive at that answer? What tipped you off? What sort of external information / experience informs your thinking?

Oh, the sad plight of bicurious women. It's a terrible shame that no man would ever be okay with the idea of his girlfriend messing around with another woman.

Threesome.

Don Rickles!

OMG I HATE BULLET POINTS! I think this person must work for Microsoft.

And if you can't stand to hurt him, go ahead and marry him, then divorce him when push comes to shove. That is the logical extension of this false compassion. Trust me, I know.

Oh Dan's right; the gal's a lesbian. Read the letter a little more carefully and imagine if a man in a hetero relationship were saying all the same things about other men. In addition, she's begging Dan for the answer he gave: permission to follow her desire even though "I'm really just worried I'm going to hurt him," even though "he's far too good to me." It's not that she can't function as bi, it's that right now in this stage of life she's leaning a leetle more than a leetle toward gay.

What Savage said. Also, please don't turn into a fucking bitch.

Well, if you sneak around you'll probably get caught. Then the issue will be trust. If he's all you say he is, tell him you have an attraction to women and you love him and don't want to go behind his back. Seek his permission first. You clearly need to talk. If he says no, then you decide if you can live without trying it out. If you can't, then tell him that. It might be a choice between hurting him or living your life feeling unfulfilled. Sometimes we just outgrow the people we love. Just don't turn to alcohol to numb yourself instead.

Come on Dan... don't post a letter if you're not going to invest five minutes in answering it...

I love the way she says he would NEVER be interested in a threesome. REALLY? Maybe he's gay.

There is no such thing as a "common law boyfriend". "Boyfriend" is not a legal status.

I totally thought that this was written by a man until the end. That would have made this scenario way more interesting than "inexperienced bi-curious girl seeks validation."

I totally know where you're coming from, letter writer. My girlfriend is everything I've ever wanted in a woman, and that makes me want a man to shove his cock up my ass.

How does she know what she has with her boyfriend is "perfect"? She has nothing to compare it to.

As a man who's been on the other side of this, I should urge you to try to at least have a couple threesomes with your boy before you dump him, because otherwise you will be doing nothing but hurting him.

I need to write a blog for the business...I looked here to see how it was done!! I get it now. This brightened my day! I read the letter of the day twice before I looked at the comments. I ASSUMED "Stuck and Pleading" was a guy!!!
My heart was going out to his boyfriend who is definitely going to get hurt.
I miss seeing you , Dan.

"He's not into threesomes [with two women] or anything beyond traditional....the thought of me being with another [girl] only cripples him."
Something is really wrong with him. Sounds like either a control freak or very insecure.

@16 Me too, but the end didn't clue me in either. I still think it was written by a man-? What did I miss? It's a good thing a professional is answering these things!

SAP

Try hiding your feelings and not talking about it. You'll be miserable, but at least you'll spare your boyfriend from having to talk about his feelings. Totally worth the sacrifice on your part. The best part is when your repressed feelings turn to resentment and you subconsciously sabotage your relationship - its awesome.

Or, if that doesn't sound good to you, find a copy of "The Ethical Slut" by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt. Amazon would be a good place to look. Its a great starting point for the conversations you need to have with your boyfriend.

" He's not into threesomes or anything beyond traditional."

Translation:

He would never indicate interest in a 3-some, because to do so would make him a total bastard in the eyes of many. Also, I want penis-free lesbo sex.

What's with this bisexual shit. Either you eat pussy or your don't eat pussy. Their ain't no in between.

I TOTALLY read this as a gay man talking about his boyfriend and his potential interest in women. I like it way better that way. It also made Dan's answer funny. How do we know the letter writer is female?

How do we know it is a girl?

Bullet point # -

I'm extremely curious about dating other people, especially women. I'm finding myself to be attracted to women more so than men nowadays and

I'm a little concerned. Not about the possibility about being gay or bi, but because I fear I may hurt him in the future.

38

@35: That's a great "Post hoc ergo propter hoc," argument, and thanks for reminding me of "The West Wing."

But you keep conflating the relationship angle with the orientation angle.

"The repetition, the self-loathing, the worrying about "his feelings" over and over and over . . . this woman is trying to bring this to it's logical conclusion. No where in this letter did she say SHE would be torn apart by the relationship ending. She only feared HIM being torn up over it. Which would logically lead one to assume that the most this girl would feel is residual guilt born out of being the one to hurt someone she cares about- not any pain about the relationship ending itself."

How, exactly, does any of that have anything to do with orientation? Everything described could apply to *any* relationship, regardless of the plumbing of the participants.

@34: Wondering what you mean by my lack of experience? I've been the don't-want-to-hurt-the-guy writer-girl, I've been the first girl she found to try (also the second and third), I've been the partner that got left for another gender . . . . I also know well-adjusted bisexual women aplenty (okay, well-adjusted bisexual men not so much; there you may have me).

I've also been 26 (24 years ago).

Now you have the reasons I felt qualified to opine. Somehow, somewhere, I had always hoped my PhD in bisexual triangles would be of use. Don't take that away, @34!

girl needs to DTMFA (okay, minus the "MF" part because she didn't give any indication that he was an asshole or anything). but they've only been serious with each other so that means for most of her adult life thus far she's only been with him. he sounds nice but i have to agree with #21, he's got issues and they're rubbing off on her.

if he doesn't want to bring in a woman for her then she should get over her fear of hurting him because in the end she'll be miserable and feel stuck.

woman needs to explore!!!!!!!!!! eat some pussy, suck some cock, get eaten and stuffed with cock ...whatever. just do it. and it's quite possible she will enjoy both. it's the complete package. she's young and won't know for sure until she has more experience.

I don't think there's anything right or wrong with a partner's willingness (or lack thereof) to let you bang chicks with or without his involvement. What's ALWAYS wrong is staying in a relationship with someone who wants different things than you do. If you want to play with girls and he doesn't want any part of it, break up. If he wants to try it with boundaries, you've got a workable situation. But you never know until you try...

SAP: PLEASE be honest with your BF. Completely honest. NOW. Trust me, "it" never goes away. Eventually, you will cheat, and then you turn an inevitable painful break up into a fucking disaster. You think you'll feel guilty about dumping him now? Think about how shitty you'll feel when he busts you.

Besides, you really never know how he will react. If he really is worth his salt, he will at least try to work through it with you. Who knows, he may even surprise you. But for the love of christmas, FIND OUT.

Also, are we still debating the validity of bisexuality? Still?

If I were SAP, I'd trust Lara's advice. She's seriously the wisest, most sexually-mature 21-year-old (or 20-something, for that matter) I've ever met.

Why thank you, madam!

When I commented "Threesome" I must have glossed over the part where she said he wasn't into it. I don't buy that for a second. She has never had the guts to ask him. And if she did, most guys would think it was a trap. Watch a threesome porn with your video and just say "I'd like to try that sometime."

Perhaps the "he isn't into it" is more of a "I don't want him touching another girl, but I want to."

I think that whatever she decides to do, she should do it in a series of videos.

I love this letter. She's all over the place, because she's a lesbian working up to saying so.

Here's the big give away that nobody's talked about yet. The subject of her letter is, how to date other people without killing my man, whom I still love? (No good answer, which is why Dan didn't bother.) She explicitly says that her man won't care which gender she gets with, he'll be "crippled" either way. So why does she fixate on the gender she's attracted to, when that really doesn't affect how she'll "hurt him in the future."

Because what she really wants to talk about are her feelings for women, and how strong and shocking they are. Why are they so shocking? Because, short answer, she loves this guy and he's wonderful and sweet in bed and out, but she's never had an attraction like this for him.

I know she doesn't say it, but it's right there on the page. She's worried that her attraction to women specifically may be relevant to how "she hurts him in the future" because, she fears that he'll somehow know what she already knows: her attraction to women is of a different order than her attraction to men, and that, in patricular, makes her feel guilty.

It's the only way to make sense of the letters confusion between its ostensible purpose -- minimizing her boyfriend's hurt -- and an apparently unrelated, but in reality very significant factor: her much stronger attraction to women than men in general.

As to her being poly, where did that come from? She says that she worries about experimenting and leaving him if something "unfolds" with someone else. That's a one-at-a-time situation, in terms of serious intimacies.

This is all right on the page, people. Read.

Help.. I'm being sockpuppeted..

Ignore Dan. When pushed, he'll claim to believe in bisexuality, but he doesn't really. Those monosexuals are so closed-minded.

Anyway: you might be a lesbian.

But you might also be bisexual. And you're definitely not cut out for strict monogamy, at least under the circumstances. So if this guy won't cut you some slack (threesomes, or open things up), you have to dump him. I know it's horrible, but this won't go away until you figure it out. And you owe it to him to do it before you get married or have kids or something totally stupid like that.

Stuck and Pleading,
what do you want? A blessing? Acknowledgement? Stop waiting. Bless and acknowledge your own feelings for fuck sake. Life is too fucking short to be so afraid. Fuck.

As a bi woman, I can completely sympathize with the idea of being fulfilled by your male partner and thus, largely only being interested in women on the side. I'm definitely more hetero than homo in my bi-ness, but the fact that I currently have an awesome male body to fuck nightly means that I find women catching my eye a lot more often than other men. At times when I'm single, this is not the case and I'm much more often interested in men.

Like Dan often says, female sexuality can be a lot more fluid. There's not enough here to say that she's a lesbian for sure, just enough to say that she and her boyfriend definitely don't have very good communication.

I think Dan is right.

But she might just be an 8 on the 1 Hetero 10 Lesbian scale.

Violet, no. Bisexuals are attracted to men and women. That's got nothing to do with an unstoppable desire to sleep with the same sex, even if it means ending your relationship.

Imagine if straight men said that. Well, yeah, I knew I wanted to leave my blonde girlfriend to start fucking the redhead I'm with now, but it had nothing to do with the blonde as a person -- I just need to sleep with redheads sometimes! It's my sexual orientation. Or, "hey, honey, I'd like open our relationship -- I'm happy and i love you perfectly just the way you are because you're super, but I like small breasts AND big breasts, so I'm unhappy having to choose one right now."

The guy would look like a douche, which is why bisexuals who talk like that often look like douches. I just can't have one or the other. Because I like both, I must have both!

Fine, have both. But that's not the definition of bisexual.

Aww. I'm disappointed in the answer. It's funny, but not helpful. There's a B in LGBT. It's always disappointing when it seems like people want to cut it down to LGT or LG. Or just G.

First of all, Stuck and Pleading needs to do some serious thinking. Is this about sex and having some variety (i.e. I want to have a threesome with my boyfriend but don't know how to ask him!), or wanting a relationship with another person? You said dating. As in dating other people. Not just women. But dating other people in general. Note the use of DATING. This has me thinking that it's the latter or both. It's hard and confusing because you have been with your boyfriend so long and you know nothing else. But sometimes the "perfect" relationship turns out to be not so satisfying and not meant to be. People grow apart. Don't stay in the relationship just because it's your first and afraid. If you actually want to date other people and have a non-monogamous relationship when you know for sure that he doesn't, it's time to end it. No one can define your identity but you, but either way it sounds like you want more than this relationship.

I'm kind of in her situation. Except I identified as bisexual when I got into the relationship (also for 5 years, but I'm currently 20), and was always open about my attraction to women the whole time.

It wasn't really a big deal until recently when a couple that I know and like started hitting on me. And me, having never been able to scratch that itch before... I wanted to.

So I told the boyfriend. It hurt him. We compromised: I can explore, but it's something we do together as a couple; we can bring people in, but I can't go off on my own.

Stuck and Pleading: tell him how you feel. Tell him now before an opportunity to explore arises. I can only imagine how much worse it would've been to bring up the possibility of an open relationship with my boyfriend and let him know, "Hey, I like to eat pussy, too!" at the same time.

If you can't reach a compromise, you need to start preparing yourself for the breakup process.

As for the commenters saying that there's something wrong with her boyfriend because he doesn't want a threesome, that's a pretty ridiculous and sexist double standard. Are all women expected to want MMF threesomes? Everyone is turned on by different things.

sweetie, Dan is distracted and did you a disservice.
You're not a lesbian.
You're a slut.

Stuck & Pleading, you are living my life. Think hard about it now because one day you will wake up after 14 years of marriage, have 2 kids, a great husband that you love but aren't attracted to. You will have slept with only one person, and you will have too much on the line to go and check out if the grass is really any greener on the other side. I am guessing that you are not just after a quick fuck but want to experience a relationship with a women. Maybe I am a lesbian too....how will I ever really know without destroying a family.

Lost, you're breaking my heart. Talk to your husband. Talk to a therapist. You deserve sexual satisfaction.

@54

My point wasn't that bisexuals need to fuck both genders.

My point is that, as long as she doesn't KNOW, as long as she doesn't understand her own desires, she's always gonna burn to find out. She's always gonna wonder if the pussy is wetter on the other side of the fence.

My comment about her non-monogamy is based on the fact that she claims to be madly in love with, and hot for, this guy. And it doesn't keep her from actively wanting other people. I realize that, by this definition, most people are not cut out for strict monogamy. And that is, in fact, my opinion. :)