By Tom Moon, MFT–
(Editor’s Note: Tom Moon is on hiatus. This is one of his more popular past columns.”
Q: I’m a 31-year-old guy who has fallen in love with a man in another state. He also loves me, and wants me to move there and live with him. I’ve never had a long-term relationship before, and I really want it to work with him. He also wants us to work professionally together, which would be a great opportunity for me. Our sex is passionate and hot, and we both really like it, but it’s what you’d call vanilla. And that brings me to my problem.
For the last five years I’ve been getting more and more into my dark side. I have a lot of sex buddies for rough daddy/boy s/m sex and raunch. Last year I did scenes in a couple of porn movies. My boyfriend doesn’t know about any of this, and I can’t tell him because he doesn’t like that kind of sex and I’m afraid he’ll reject me if he finds out. And anyway, I want to give it all up. I’d like to have a more mature life and put all of this wild sex behind me, but I’m afraid he’ll find out about my past, or someone he knows will recognize me from the porn, and it’ll all blow up in my face. What do I do?
A: Well, don’t do what you’re planning to do. Think about it: you’re about to start a whole new life, new career direction, and new commitment, all based on the foundation of a complete lack of integrity. You’re denying your boyfriend any possibility of loving you as you really are and yourself any chance of being both known and loved simultaneously. Instead of a real relationship, you’re opting for impression management. And when you deceive him based on the fear of what you might lose, you’re not acting from love but from opportunism.
You sound as if you’re hoping you’ll be able to jettison your “dark side” by making this move. Here’s a more likely scenario: everything will go fine for a while, but once the newness wears off your “wild” side will reassert itself and you’ll start finding ways to have kinky sex behind his back. Maybe you’ll tell yourself that “what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” but that rationalization will be naïve. You’ll be poisoning your relationship by creating an atmosphere of secrecy and duplicity, and this will hurt both of you, even in the unlikely event that he doesn’t discover what you’re doing.
I suspect that the deeper issue here is that you’re in conflict with your sexuality. You describe it as divided into light and dark, mature and immature. But this mental map is just one of many ways of understanding it. Many people have multi-faceted sex lives, and there are people who enjoy “vanilla” and “kink” with the same person without seeing their desires as divided or in conflict with one another. That may not be your choice, and deciding not to act on some of your sexual impulses can be an honest and self-affirming choice. But you’re never going to be able to make an authentic decision from a position of shame, self-deception, and secrecy.
An old friend once gave me this piece of advice: “Don’t practice what you preach. Preach what you practice. It’ll keep you honest and it’ll make for better practice.” What I think he was trying to teach me was not to try to mold my life to match some abstract ideal about how I’m supposed to live, but rather to let my direction emerge from the lived reality of my actual day to day life. You’ll have more integrity in your sexual life if you let your conduct reflect what you actually feel, rather than trying to make it conform to judgments about how a “mature” person lives.
Get honest with yourself first, and then get honest with your boyfriend. The next time you’re together, sit him down and tell him everything you’ve told me. It’s possible that, as you fear, that will be the end of your relationship. That can be one of the costs of integrity. When you choose to tell your truth, not everyone is automatically going to stand up and cheer. But don’t make his decision for him. It may just be that you don’t know him as well as you think you do, and that the two of you can work out some accommodation with each other based on who you both really are.
You may fear that the potential costs of integrity are too great to risk in the short run. But in the long run, you’ll never find what you want with any partner until you find the courage to let the other man know you.
Tom Moon is a psychotherapist in San Francisco. For more information, please visit his website http://tommoon.net/
Published on November 14, 2019
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