Suspicious relationships

I recently discovered that a colleague of mine had shacked up with someone new. When I saw her last, she was engaged to someone she'd been dating for five years (but wasn't living with because they lived slightly far apart and she was in school). The someone new turns out to be... a preceptor from her rotations as a student. They've been dating for a few months and she's looking at selling her condo to move in with him and he's going to refinance his mortgage to help out with her debt. Apparently none of this started until after her rotations ended, but still. She's an adult and can make her own decisions and I sincerely doubt she's being taken advantage of, but it just doesn't pass the Globe and Mail test.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading advice columns. I came across this gem today:

My fraternal twin and I (both men) are in our late 30s. We were always extremely close and shared a bedroom growing up. When we were 12 we gradually started experimenting sexually with each other. After a couple of years, we realized we had fallen in love. Of course we felt guilty and ashamed, and we didn't dare tell anyone what we were doing. We hoped it was "just a phase" that we’d grow out of, but we wound up sleeping together until we left for college. We knew this could ruin our lives, so we made a pact to end it. We attended schools far apart and limited our contact to family holidays. But we never fell out of love with each other, so after graduation we moved in together and have been living very discreetly as a monogamous couple ever since. I'm not writing to you to pass moral judgment on our relationship—we're at peace and very happy. Our dilemma is how to deal with our increasingly nosy family and friends. They know we’re gay, and we live in a state where same-sex marriage is legal, so we’re getting pressure to settle down. I feel we should continue being discreet for the rest of our lives and blow off their questions. It's nobody's business, and I fear they would find our relationship shocking and disgusting. My brother, though, is exhausted with this charade. He thinks that if we get the family together with a therapist to talk through the issues, they'll eventually accept it. I think he's out of his mind, but I also want to make him happy. Is this one of those times when honesty is not the best policy? If so, how do we get everyone to stop worrying we will die alone? I'm also concerned about the legal implications of this—would the therapist be required to report us to the authorities? Could we go to prison?

I have no idea what the hell to say about this.

Focus 1: Ever engage in or see a relationship that would raise a skeptical eyebrow? Age difference, banging your TA, banging your optometrist, banging your TA sister, whatever.
Focus 2: What should Sigmund and Sieglinde do in this situation?

 

Focus 1: I get paid to do BDSM stuff fairly regularly and I've been involved with a couple of escorts, one in a fairly long term relationship basis. I know a lot of my friends absolutely wouldn't get falling in love with a whore. Even some of the people who do kink events that I'm friendly with would be weird about it.

I think the weirdest ever was just the other day, when my dad sent me a text message asking me to run demos on stage at a gay BDSM club. It just got weirder when I hooked an ex boyfriend up with a job at the club that is explicitly being a 'model' but implicitly seems to be making sure that everyone who wants a blow job on the night, gets one. I made sure he knows that that's what I believe is involved - but I also made it clear that if that is the deal, I don't want to know.

Focus 2: What should Sigmund and Sieglinde do in this situation?

I feel we should continue being discreet for the rest of our lives and blow off their questions.

Go with the feeling. Good god, go with the feeling.

He thinks that if we get the family together with a therapist to talk through the issues, they'll eventually accept it. I think he's out of his mind

You're so very right. He's flipped his biscuits if he thinks any vaguely healthy and functional western family will accept this situation.

how do we get everyone to stop worrying we will die alone?

It's not like getting a beard to shut your family up should be a new concept for gay men. Alternately, next time they ask act real exasperated and tell them that you don't see any reason to be monogamous when you can enjoy safe sex orgies with close friends and other patrons of the men's spa down town any time you feel like it. Watch them shut the fuck up about marriage.

I'm an only child. I don't really get the famillial taboo's around siblings as long as they're not breeding. And I don't expect their situation will lead to any accidental pregancies... But exclusively monogamous long term twincest just seems... unlikely to lead to a healthy place. I mean if they were hot, and having threesomes, that'd be different. That'd be like a community service.

 

This combined with your avatar caused me to take a second to realize what you actually meant.

 

Focus 1: I had this FWB that I worked with. She was a ginger, a water aerobics instructor and a freak. Oh, she was also 13 years older than me. I couldn't have given a fuck. It was fun, it had no drama, she taught me a lot I dug her. We're still on good terms.

At the time my dad and my step mother were living with me (don't ask). Because of this I could never really bring her back to my place but we stopped there one day to get some things on the way to dinner. She met them and all my step mother could say was how old she was. I was 25 at the time, having sex with this woman who bragged about me to all of her friends. This bitch had the body of a 20 year old and the sex drive of no one I have met since. I could not have given less of a fuck about what my dad's toothless wife had to say

Focus 2: I have nothing to say about this. I ... I just... come on son.

...


Wait. I do have something to say. I get falling in love with someone that you may be close to, but there has to be some sort of line, right? Maybe not. If there is no line and you can love whoever you want as long as you don't hurt anyone, I guess its okay. But on the real, why do you need your family to approve of it one way or the other? Why are you going to force them to accept it? The need for them to accept it makes me wonder if in some space of your heart you feel like its wrong, not because of any expectation or pressure but because seriously, its fucking unhealthy and wrong. I think that 'loving' your brother this way has made it so that you've never had to go out in to the real world, risk your heart and really try with anyone because you've had this back up dick your whole life. The back up dick can be made into anything you want, fill any hole (no pun intended, but a good one nonetheless), and kill any need to explore outside of what is comfortable.

 

I was dating a stripper when I was barely 19 (she 25) and kept her career secret from my family entirely. Maybe not a big deal to most of you, but you have to understand what a HUGE deal that would have been to my very conservative folks.

I learned after that that you shouldn't date strippers, because they are usually made up of at least 50% contempt and 25% excess.

 

Not a huge deal if the excess is in their bra.

 

Therapy? Yes. But leave mom and dad home. I can't imagine any parent taking this well and just accepting it. Avoiding the harm it would do to them trumps the principle of honesty.

 

Focus:I'm going to tell this story, but I want to preface it by saying I am fully aware how horrible this makes me as a person. I could blame it on the fact that I was 19 and very few people had shown me romantic affection before this, but in reality I just used to be a bad person. I'm only telling this story because I have never told anyone before and I need to get it out.

I once slept with a married man while his wife was at the hospital with their newborn, premature baby. He was a friend of a friend and the two of us ended up at this friend's house to keep her abusive boyfriend out of the apartment while the police investigated the report. We ended up having sex the first time while my friend and her daughter were asleep in the next room. The affair went on for three weeks, until my friend caught us. She immediately called the guy's wife and told her what was going on.

At first, I was really pissed at my friend. But eventually I thank her because I grew the fuck up and realized what I did.

 

I dated a girl freshman year, and things didn't work out. She was older, and I wasn't quite ready to match her maturity level, and we accepted that. But there was a TA of a class we shared that was obsessed with her, going as far as to ask her out in front of me. He was like, 6-7 years older than her.

So they started dating several months later. She and I were still on good terms, so we talked kinda regularly on the phone. She mentioned a lot of strange things that he did, like saying things that were seeming as though they were designed to start fights. Like she wore a copy of her brother's dog tags around her neck because he was deployed in Iraq. He said that "she was wearing the noose of the black man around her neck" (he was a short, bald white guy). He would stay over, but he would leave very early to "go to the gym" I told her these were odd things, like he was looking to get an out from the relationship whenever he needed.

So flash forward to my senior year, 3 years later. I was in my section for a lecture, and he was the TA leading it. We were sitting in a circle, introducing ourselves, and just before me, the student asked the TA to talk about himself. He began:

"Blah blah, went to school here and there. I like to do this. I have been married 7 years, and my wife has been living in Japan 3/4th of the year for for the past several years doing research, but we would talk early in the morning here."

He then looked at me, and realized who I was, and his eyes went wide, as he recognized who I was, and that I now knew his secret that he had been fucking a student while his wife was in Japan. I did next to no work in that class and still came out with an A.

 

What an interesting question. All societal taboos around incest are based around the possibility of pregnancy or at least began that way, and there's obviously no chance of that here. Whathasbeenseen mentioned that he thought it was to avoid the risk of getting your heart hurt out there in the world, but I have to disagree - I think you're looking at it wrong, it's not like that. I had a childhood sweetheart that began with 5-year olds kissing to imitate the grown ups and playing together constantly and didn't end until I was 18 (she died), and I think we would've spent the rest of our lives together happily. If it had gone that way, people would call it beautiful and romantic, but in the end isn't it pretty freaking close to siblings falling in love?
The more two people know each other, the deeper their understanding of the other, the safer they feel. The level of trust a pair of twins in romantic love with each other must feel has got to be incredible. To be honest - put aside the issues of acceptance in society, I don't there's a person in the world who wouldn't kill to have a love like that, given a taste of it.
And I can even understand their desire to be able to relax and enjoy that love without hiding or fear of judgment or whatever, but yeah - it would take a pretty enlightened bunch of folks to feel okay about their twin offspring mating for life, even if it didn't involve the possibility of three-legged children. Wait until the Parents die, one of you change your name, live happily ever after.

As for the other focus - boy, I learned a few things as a professor. You take a bunch of kids fresh out of their Parent's control and throw them all together in a "free-thinking" and "experimental" environment, it's going to get messy. They are forward and shameless and brazen, and they have absolutely NO idea what they're doing. In those cases where a professor is in some kind of relationship with a student, it's pretty clearly because the professor was weak or didn't take their responsibility seriously, or because they're predatory and uncaring. College students are some of the most vulnerable creatures I've ever come across, and they are eager to fuck shit up, including lives. I never expected the level to which I had to be constantly aware of my responsibility to protect these people from themselves.

 

Is safer better? When I first read your post, and saw "safer", it had a negative context for me. Lately, I'm realizing how much human behavior is motivated by things like having control and feeling safe...it's like we all spend over half the day self-soothing. To take your point further, towards deeper understanding and level of knowledge, wouldn't the ultimate love then generally be with a/the parent(s)? Why not remain at mom's breast, where it's most safe and wonderful? There's a fine line in there somewhere between doing what feels right and feels good versus self-soothing in a non-productive way that doesn't address core issues. Do what you love and feels right, but I think we can all agree dudes shouldn't spend hours and days on end playing videogames in the basement. So that's what I wonder with these twins, and other relationships out there, are they so close because the world outside is equally too scary and horrible to them both, or is it really a healthy, productive relationship?

 

Yeah, I'm afraid you're putting your own negative spin on the word. I'm not talking about "safe" as in womb-like, I mean it more like absolute trust in the strengths and weaknesses, integrity and honesty of the person - I can live my life and count on you to have my back, no matter what. And I don't think the ultimate would be with a Parent because that's an entirely different relationship - one of nurturing and teaching, vulnerable and protector.

 

How's "safe as in womb-like" different than "safe" as you go onto describe? And how does your description of parent-child relationships differ from many romantic relationships (say, an older woman having an affair with a young dude)? We're talking about a situation (twincest) where relationship roles are skewed...sibling-sibling relationships are also generally defined as being "entirely different" from romantic relationships. My point is, the positive highlights you're describing of the twincest situation can be found in other relationships that aren't the norm (incest), so where is that line that shouldn't be crossed then? And again, where do you draw the line between healthy/productive and unhealthy/self-soothing?

 

Maybe its my own pre-conceived notions of closeness, perhaps societal norms are influencing my thought process or perhaps its this annoyingly loud Bangladeshi sitting next to me at work... I'd have to take more time to truly consider it. On the surface though, the idea of someone knowing you really well is of course appealing. The closest person to me from childhood is probably my cousin who is 6 weeks younger than me. I'm not gay (that I know of) so I can't relate to this dude. I can understand the love and closeness but its not as if I didn't make other friends than my cousin, or that I didn't branch out from that relationship.

I think its a fucking cop out to just stick with what you're comfortable with. I think there is something desperately sad about that. You should leave your mom's tit. You should leave your home town, you should leave your birth country, you should leave your comfort zone. Maybe you come back home with a bit more to give to that world but you should leave. Or maybe we should all still live in Africa, have big booties, throw spears, have bones through our noses and never see the ocean. After all, that would be more comfortable.

 

I just re-read the focus, and without knowing more, the twins sounds like they're engaged in an equivalent of nook-nooking at mommy's sexualized breast. For whatever reason, they're climbing back into bed like when they were babies and feeling the safest of all. There was a documentary a while, back, My Brother's Keeper I think, that calls to mind. It must feel wonderful and comfortable, but is it healthy...I don't think I'm thinking too much inside the box when I'm guessing that it's probably not. And again, if we can explore and be open to how wonderful their relationship might be, then I think parent-child relationships have to be open game too.

Also, Soupy, are you ever wrong? (I won't insert a cutesie emoticon to let you know I"m joking, but I am)

 

I'm not sure I see where in the original letter you guys are seeing some avoidance of the world, I don't see it. I think it becomes a matter of interpretation based on our own lives, maybe? It never even occurred to me that "getting out of your comfort zone and seeing the world" isn't a given, regardless - could it be because I grew up in a large city, or because I had a childhood sweetheart that didn't prevent those things? Or maybe I just think it didn't prevent those things because it ended so young and in so classically romantic a fashion? I don't know - I'd had a pretty outside the box and full life by the time I was 18, and I've had almost 30 years since to romanticize it.

In any case, I still disagree that sibling love and parental/child love are similar when compared to romantic love, but that's a pretty complex argument I don't have the energy to make. I'd rather just agree to disagree on that one. I do know that many (if not most) relationships with wildly different ages are transparently unhealthy in a Parent/Child way. I'm 46, and while I'd love to spend a few hours trying to hurt my back with a beautiful 22 year old, I have zero interest in attempting a relationship with one.

Regardless, I don't really understand what this "self-soothing" concept you're talking about is. You clearly have a negative association with it, but I don't quite follow it - soothing one's own wounds seems entirely positive to me. I recently heard the question, "does a day spent doing absolutely nothing sound positive or negative to you?" And I thought that if I was in a period where I was working my ass off and getting a lot done, it would sound like heaven, but that if I was struggling to be productive and had a day like that, it would be very very depressing. I suspect there's something like that at work here in our various interpretations of the situation.

And for the record, just because I'm sure of my own ways of looking at the world and confident in my questions about it, it doesn't mean I don't constantly adjust my views to new information and ideas. I'm never right or wrong, but I am either educated or learning, or shutting the fuck up.

I read that original letter and to me the guy sounded totally well adjusted and happy with his own decisions, and at peace with his love. His only concern was how to live in a society that has ancient taboos about it that don't really account for homosexuality.

 

On the real, I don't care what flavor of anal banditry this dude wants to subscribe to. If he's happy, more power to him. I just think its unfair for him to try and impose that banditry on anyone else in his family in the guise of 'Well they should accept me because we came from a mutual pussy or married that pussy no matter what sort of faggotry I'm interested in pursuing'. I say faggotry not in a homosex way but in a 'Come on, you know you're writing to ask about this because even with the love stink on you in some way its just not on'

 

Yes, I'm not being clear, for lack of a better term. I mean addressing the short term symptoms without addressing the cause.

And incest. Fathers aren't supposed to fuck sons or daughters, brothers aren't supposed to fuck brothers or sisters. I'd say the taboos against incest run deeper than the taboos again homosexuality, and I think what I'm taking from this is that there a ancient, longheld reasons why they exist that don't have to just do with genetics. I think your pro homosexuality views are skewing your perspective. I'd like to think that I love gays too (again, joking with no emoticon), and if I were one of their family that they came out to, that I'd be supportive but worried for them based on the fact that they're crossing the boundaries of familial roles.

 

...aaaaand, I'm out.

You're an ignorant piece of shit. And this time, yes - I'm right.

Um, incest is the only taboo I was talking about. And the history of taboos about incest are entirely based on genetics, even before we had an understanding about what "genetics" are.

My "pro homosexuality views" are only so for people who think of homosexuals as some kind of "other." I don't think anything about homosexuality except that it is none of anyone's business who a person chooses to love, and if you look down at someone based on that or look at someone as outside of your bullshit hetero-normative life because of who they love, you're fucking ignorant.