Go Ahead... Open It!

Open Relationships… 

I personally would not want to be in one.  Maybe I’m greedy, maybe I’m old fashion (Funny, if you go back far enough, polygamy was a lot more common; being old fashion is relative), maybe I’m afraid of the notion. 

What I would like to know is a casual sexual encounter outside the relationship just that “casual sex” and when is it cheating?

So, maybe I’m greedy or selfish and I want someone all to myself.  I could also say, if my potential partner wanted an open relationship, that that is greedy too.  I have known a few mixed HIV status couples who have open relationships that each partner could still have a certain type of sex that they could not have with their lover.  I have also met monogamous couples, of mixed status, that say that have great safer-sex and don’t see any reason to go outside of the relationship.  I ask, if your lover is not giving you what you want, then why are you together?  Is one just in love with the fact they can say to someone that they have a boyfriend or girlfriend; a lover? 

Maybe a little old fashioned; I do love the idea of courtship, falling in-love, growing old together.  Yeah, I know, it’s almost 2013 and relationship dynamics have changed greatly.  The ways that we find true love has changed since World Wide Web came into the fold.  Hey, whatever works for you!  Give me the corny, romantic, make me swoon prose and verses any day.  I don’t see how, for myself, discussing having an open relationship with a partner would keep me weak in the knees but, that’s just me.

If I were in an open relationship, I believe that I would live in fear of the other man, or men.  What if my lover leaves for one of them? What if I find myself falling for someone that I have hooked-up with a few times?  What are terms of an open relationship anyway?  Having an a lovers’ quarrel at home and storming out, then finding a someone to have sex with - is that cheating? Sounds like one is having make-up sex with wrong person.  That’s just my opinion.  

Hey, I am sure open relationships work for many couples and I am all for whatever makes you a happy couple; keyword: HAPPY.   I’m just putting down some thoughts; comments are welcomed below.

It Doesn't Matter Who You Love: Perfect Relationship →

gaythisway:

I want a guy that I can see, who makes me feel like I’m the only person in the world. I want his eyes to light up when he sees me, and I want fireworks when we kiss. I want to fall head over heels in love and not care what anyone else thinks. I want to be able to walk through a crowd of people holding hands with him, all of them staring and giving us disapproving looks, and neither of us caring, because we’re happy together. I want to know what true love feels like. I want to have a fight where we completely blow up at each other and start yelling and screaming about something stupid, just so I can go to bed with him and kiss him goodnight, showing that I love him, no matter what we may fight about. I want to know that every morning, he’ll be the one I wake up next to, and he’ll be the one I cook breakfast for, and he’ll be the one I stand with while we shave. I want the feeling that only true love can bring, and most of all, I want a man that will look at me everyday without saying any words, and yet I can see in his eyes that he loves me. Is that too much to ask for?

Homophobic Men Most Aroused by Gay Male Porn | Psychology Today →

Even a man who thought that women want to have sex with their fathers and that women spend much of their lives distraught because they lack a penis is right sometimes. This person, the legend that is Sigmund Freud, theorized that people often have the most hateful and negative attitudes towards things they secretly crave, but feel that they shouldn’t have.

If Freud is right, then perhaps men who are the most opposed to male homosexuality have particularly strong  homosexual urges for other men.

One study asked heterosexal men how comfortable and anxious they are around gay men. Based on these scores, they then divided these men into two groups: men that are homophobic, and men who are not. These men were then shown three, four minute videos. One video depicted straight sex, one depicted lesbian sex and one depicted gay male sex. While this was happening, a device was attached to the male participant's penises. This device has been found to be triggered by sexual arousal, but not other types of arousal (such as nervousness, or fear - arousal often has a very different meaning in psychology than in popular usage).

When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.

Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

Covering AIDS in America: a NY Times analysis →

gaywrites:

Where are we in the struggle to end AIDS? How far have we come?

A piece in the New York Times today explores these questions and more, exemplifying the huge amount of work that must go into accurately covering a topic as significant as the AIDS crisis. 

It turns out we’ve come a long way in the AIDS epidemic, and much of our generation has no idea how different things were 30-odd years ago. The writer of this article, linked above, also wrote the first New York Times piece about AIDS, when it was thought to be strongly tied to homosexual men. 

This piece speaks volumes to journalists’ role in uncovering AIDS. My favorite section:

The epidemic has brought a new focus on the power of epidemiology to identify a disease’s transmission patterns long before discovery of its cause. In the early days, epidemiologists provided the evidence to show that AIDS could be transmitted through contaminated blood transfusions, a fact many blood bank officials initially refused to accept. Later, lessons learned from AIDS were instrumental in helping control tuberculosis and curbing the spread of SARS.

Yet AIDS still presents extraordinary challenges — not least to journalists trying to chronicle the epidemic’s unfolding story, to remind a new generation of the importance of safe sex, and to follow the sometimes halting effort to make effective drugs available to all who need them.

Read the article above to brush up on the history of AIDS and get a feel for what we’re hoping to accomplish soon. This is extremely important work and we need to recognize it. 

To think, they called it GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) is appalling.  I remember, as kid, that it was also referred to as the Gay Cancer.