Q I consider myself a straight guy—but for the last four years, I’ve been having an affair with “Connie,” a trans girl I met online. It was just casual at first, but over time we developed a deeper personal relationship but kept it hidden. At some point, I figured out she was in love with me. I love her too, but I don’t think I am “in love” with her. Several weeks ago, I went on a couple of dates with a girl I met on Match.com. The new girl posted about our dates on Facebook, Connie saw it and was upset, and then Connie outed me to the new girl. The new girl and I weren’t dating anymore, but it still was a betrayal that Connie told her—told anyone—about our relationship and my kink. Right now, I can’t look at or speak to Connie, but her friends tell me that she is despondent. I can’t get past my anger. I’d like to keep her as a friend, but can I trust her? She reached out to me recently, but I told her to just leave me alone. —Secret Telling Unnerves Nice Guy
Vocabulary lesson’s over, STUNG. Now the advice . . .
“And I don’t think STUNG is a bad guy,” said Jay. “His attitude toward trans women was shaped by a culture that treats trans women as either fetishes or punch lines. I am a transgender woman, and I have my own internalized transphobia that I’ve had to navigate around. So while I can dissect and analyze STUNG, I can hardly vilify him.”
Being GGG doesn’t require people to do whatever the hell their partners want. Remember what GGG stands for: “Good in bed (work on those skills), giving of pleasure (without always expecting immediate reciprocation), and game for anything—within reason.” It’s unreasonable of your partner to ask you to continue engaging in diaper play when it leaves you feeling violated. You gave it a shot, it’s not working for you, and you have to be able to discuss your feelings—and your limits—without him playing mad and/or hurt. Right now, you’re engaging in diaper play not out of a GGG desire to meet his needs, ADULT, but because you’re afraid of upsetting him. So you’re not consenting from a place of honest desire (a desire to do a particular thing, a desire to please your partner) but from a place of fear—you don’t fear him, but you fear hurting him. No wonder it leaves you feeling like shit.
