Your Boyfriend Thinks My Pussy Is a Loophole

Your boyfriend wants me to stand over him and squirt.

Those were his words, not my interpretation of a suggestive emoji or an innocent remark distorted by a dirty mind. He wanted me above his face, pussy positioned with purpose, while he waited underneath for weather. I read the message twice because it was filthy, specific, and delivered with the confidence of a man requesting something already available to him. Somewhere, a woman was calling this man her boyfriend while he was privately submitting plans for an unauthorized water feature.

Girl, I am embarrassed for you.

I am non-monogamous, which men often hear as an announcement that my pussy is operating in international waters. No laws. No treaties. Pirates welcome. I do not believe people own their romantic partners, and I do not think attraction disappears when a relationship begins. Saying yes to one person means saying no to possibilities you have not encountered yet. You may love someone faithfully and still meet a person who makes your body behave like it has retained separate counsel.

Men tend to understand only the convenient half of this philosophy. They hear that I reject sexual ownership and assume I must also reject boundaries and concern for other women. Some have referred their married friends to me, as though my non-monogamy is an underground service they generously shared with the boys. Nobody asks whether I am interested. My availability is treated as a natural resource.

Just because I don’t think she owns you doesn’t mean I’m going to take a swing at it.

I love sex, I enjoy being wanted, and an indecent proposition can be delicious under the right circumstances. Another woman’s boyfriend does not become physically invisible because he is unavailable. Some men are fine enough to make restraint feel unnecessarily bureaucratic. I understand the appeal of forbidden pleasure, the fantasy of knowing you shouldn’t and might anyway. I am no saint, and sainthood has never looked particularly orgasmic.

But another woman’s heartbreak doesn’t make the sex any better.

You know what’s more fun than the thrill of trying not to get caught? The thrill of everybody knowing about it. Everybody informed, everybody consenting, everybody free to decide whether the proposed debauchery sounds exciting or exhausting. I don’t need a girlfriend’s ignorance to season my sex.

Mentioning the girlfriend is usually when the mood changes. Your boyfriend is mad because I called you his girlfriend. Until that moment, he was perfectly comfortable requesting access to my body. Now he resents my interest in nouns. Suddenly, the relationship is complicated. She is barely his girlfriend, although he accepts the love, loyalty, sex, and comfort associated with being her boyfriend. He would leave if he could, he insists, as though she keeps him chained beneath the sink and releases him only long enough to send dick pictures.

Leave. Go ahead.

You don’t want to.

He has enough freedom to pursue women, conceal messages, and negotiate encounters. What he lacks is the courage to tell his girlfriend that the terms of their relationship have become inconvenient. He wants the comfort of being loved and the thrill of behaving like nobody loves him. Then he asks me to honor the complexity of a predicament created almost entirely by his appetite.

His desire does not flatter me because his willingness to deceive you is not a compliment. I don’t imagine that he approached me because I am prettier, smarter, freakier, or more deserving. I don’t believe my pussy contains an ingredient yours forgot. Attraction is not a pageant in which one woman receives a crown and the other goes home wondering whether she should have worn better lingerie. He wants me because human beings want people. The desire may be innocent. What he chooses to do with it is not.

The cruelty is that you may be participating in a relationship that no longer exists under the terms you accepted. You may be loving him, defending him, and making plans with him while he tells strangers that things are complicated. You’re making decisions with information he has deliberately withheld, and the consequences may arrive as a humiliation you did nothing to deserve.

And I know how that feels.

There is a particular sickness in discovering that other people knew something about your relationship that you didn’t. You wonder who knew, whether they pitied you, whether they laughed while you were busy being happy. You begin examining ordinary memories for evidence, trying to find the moment when trust became foolishness. A man behaves disgracefully, and the woman who believed him is left questioning her intelligence and desirability.

His dishonesty becomes her embarrassment.

I am not laughing at you. I’m not celebrating because your boyfriend wanted me. I’m embarrassed for you because I recognize the indignity of being unknowingly represented by somebody else’s behavior. You deserve to know what relationship you’re actually in and decide what you can forgive. I don’t have to agree with your rules to respect your right to make them.

I generally don’t tell the girlfriend. I’ve watched women blame the messenger, accuse her of plotting against the relationship, or decide she must want the man for herself. A malicious stranger may be easier to imagine than a dishonest partner. Still, I don’t want to become the enemy in a fight I never agreed to enter while the man responsible stands aside.

My silence is not heroic. Sometimes it’s self-protection, and sometimes I wonder whether protecting myself leaves another woman unprotected. I can’t make that contradiction disappear by declaring myself a girl’s girl. I don’t want to hurt her, but I also don’t want to become responsible for supervising the fidelity of every man who mistakes my non-monogamy for an invitation.

But I see her differently afterward. Not with contempt. With tenderness. I don’t think she’s foolish, and I don’t think I’m better. I think she’s a woman trusting a man who may not deserve that trust.

Your boyfriend doesn’t have to belong to you for me to care about you.

That’s where my non-monogamy and solidarity with other women meet. I can understand his attraction, even share it, without turning your ignorance into part of our pleasure. His body belongs to him. His choices belong to him. So does the responsibility for whatever those choices destroy.

I’m not standing outside your relationship with a crowbar. I didn’t come to pry him loose or collect some ridiculous trophy for being desirable. I was minding my business when your boyfriend arrived with an unsolicited fantasy and the expectation that I would help him keep you conveniently absent from the conversation. I can appreciate imagination. I cannot admire cowardice.

And girl, I wish I could tell you that his request was the most embarrassing thing about him. It wasn’t. The truly embarrassing part was his confidence that I would be impressed by a man willing to make a fool of the woman who loves him. I wasn’t impressed. I was thinking about you.

Having a boyfriend is not embarrassing. Loving someone is not embarrassing. Trusting someone is not embarrassing.

But somewhere, you are calling that man the love of your life, and he is asking another woman to squirt on his face.

Girl, I wish I were making this shit up.