I need your help. I used to have an awesome adventurous sex life with my partner, which has slowly devolved into really, really terrible sex as of late.

I’m 30-year-old woman and have been with my partner for the last 4 years. We got together through a mutual interest in pegging. I love guys who crossdress, and while this was new to him, he really got into it. We shared fantasies about threesomes of various kinds, though nothing has eventuated yet. We’ve done lots of light bondage and S&M.

In the last year he went through a rough patch and put on some weight. He pretty much stopped dressing up, because while it used to make him feel sexy now it just makes him feel bad about his weight. Picking up people for threesomes is off the table because he wants to lose weight and feel more confident first. We are having a lot less sex because he doesn’t feel sexy. He told me that while he was happy with the kinky stuff in the past, but now it makes him feel bad. Like he’s not enough for me as he is, because there’s always some element of fantasy in the stuff that gets me off.

So he wants to have only vanilla sex for a while, to prove that I can be just as attracted to him without any of the kinky stuff. I enjoy vanilla sex with him but the crossdressing stuff gets me noticeably more hot and bothered than the other stuff. I can’t change that. So I’m unhappy because the things I enjoy are being phased out, he’s unhappy because with all this extra pressure the vanilla sex isn’t working, and it makes him feel worse about himself, and the sex is getting progressively worse and worse.

Can you help me find a way out of this mess Dan? Apart from “he should lose weight,” which he is but progress is slow. It makes me feel awful that what I want makes my partner feel worse about himself, but I really miss taking him out dancing in a cute dress, then coming home and fucking his ass, and just generally being adventurous and having heaps of fun sex.

Depression Ruins Erotic Success Story

My response after the jump…

First, a confession: your letter made “SL Letter of the Day,” DRESS, due to the suggestion, made in response to yesterday's SLLOTD, that only gay people are kinky. Crossdressing, bondage, S&M, pegging—not too shabby, DRESS, not too shabby.

But it seems clear that your particular needs, and how you’ve gone about getting them met, wound up making your boyfriend feel like an object. He feels less like your lover and your sex partner, DRESS, and more like a doll that you play dress up (and buttfuck) with. And being objectified worked for him, DRESS, and he got off on it, so long as he was confident about his body and felt good about how he looked with a dress on or his ass in the air. But when he become depressed and gained that weight and suddenly didn’t feel so confident, well, whatever qualms and doubts he had about your true feelings for him came to the surface, and it turns out that he was less comfortable what you two were getting up to, DRESS, than either of you were aware.

So now he's left wondering... do you really love him? Or do you love what he allows you do with and to him?

And that question prompted his vanilla-sex-only shakedown/ultimatum, DRESS. It sounds like you weren't having much vanilla sex up to now and, well, that was a mistake. Perhaps if you hadn't have been neglecting vanilla sex over the last four years he wouldn’t now be attaching so much symbolic importance to its absence.

So what do you do? I think you suck it up for six months, DRESS. You've had everything your way for four years—dressing up, going out, hunting for a third, fucking his ass—and six months of vanilla sex (which, unlike a dude in a pretty dress, you can appreciate with the lights off) and some decent home cooking and a little hitting the gym together isn't too much to ask. If you are generally and genuinely compatible, and if he honestly enjoys your kinks when he's up for 'em, you would be foolish not to invest six months in demonstrating to him that he’s not just an object, that you love him as much as you enjoy your sexual adventures, and… with any luck (and maybe with a little sex-positive therapy), your depressed boyfriend will kick back into gear and the sexual adventures will take off again. Be cheerful about it, be upbeat, be what he's been all along—namely, indulgent.

Make sure he understands that you won't be able to remain in a relationship if it's not meeting your sexual needs; tell him that you expect the adventures to resume at some point. But for now, DRESS, for the next six months or so, you're going to focus on his needs and interests.