Love And Marriage

I am a married man. My wife left me one year ago and we are not in touch. We are in the process of finalizing our divorce but this process going to take a lot of time. Can you please tell me how I can get a girl who will wait for me to get my divorce and marry me when the process is done? She has to stay with me starting now. I really need someone because I am very alone. Please help.
–Waiting For The Papers

I wish I could do something to help you but I don’t exactly have a list of available women who satisfy your conditions sitting around. It’s definitely tough to go through a divorce and I understand how lonely the process can be. Breakups are always difficult. However, you’re not going to be able make yourself feel better by finding a new girlfriend, at least not in the long run. First of all, many people are understandably reluctant to get involved with men or women who are going through a divorce. People who are in the process of finalizing a divorce often carry a lot of emotional baggage that a new girlfriend or boyfriend may not feel equipped to deal with. And it’s not realistic to expect someone to jump right into a relationship with you before the separation is even complete—whoever it is you eventually start dating is going to have needs and expectations of her own, and supporting you through the breakup of your marriage may not be high on her list of priorities. It certainly wouldn’t be on mine.

My advice? Start therapy if you can, and more than anything else, try to get comfortable with the fact of being alone. Not to get philosophical on you, but there’s great value in being alone for a while. I know it seems like an abyss: making your meals and eating them by yourself, coming home to an empty house, trying to fill your weekends with activities. It’s daunting. However, it can also be a really important time to process the breakup of your marriage and come to peace with it without the distraction of a new relationship—and distraction is all a girlfriend would be at this point. Take the vacation you always wanted to take, read the books you haven’t gotten around to yet. Organize your time the way you want to. Enjoy the silence and the peace of being on your own. And when you’ve had your fill of all that, then start the process of meeting new people and searching for a relationship. What you find at the end of that road will be a lot more meaningful than anything you jump into right now out of fear and loneliness, and you’ll have a lot more to give to your new partner, emotionally speaking. Good luck.

Scared To Ask

I am a 15-year-old lesbian. I love a girl who is a class senior to me. The girl doesn’t know about me. How do I approach her? I really love her and I think she likes me, but I am dead scared to talk to her about it.
–Scared To Ask

If I were anywhere else in the world, I would tell you to go for it and let her how you feel. Maybe she’ll reciprocate. But this is India, where even lesbian-identified women who are of age can find themselves thrown out of school, placed under house arrest by their families, forced into marriage (possibly to some joker like the guy in the letter above), thrown into jail, or involuntarily committed to psychiatric care for expressing their desire for other women. You’re not legally an adult, so the risks are even greater for you. Now, I have no idea what your family or her family is like. Maybe everyone is loving and supportive or maybe they’re all monsters. Who’s to say? But I’ll tell you this: you do not want to have the full machinery of family pressure, social censure, and state-sanctioned collusion crashing down on your head at this time. You’re too young and vulnerable. Don’t tell this girl about your feelings right now.

Instead, I suggest you get in touch with a good therapist or one of the counselors at an LGBTQ support organization. Sangama, in Bangalore, is a great place to start. Talk through your options with them and start building a support network for yourself. Nothing is ever accomplished by being hasty, so make a plan for finishing your education and becoming financially independent as soon as possible. At least then you’ll have resources you can access when you’re an adult and your parents hit the roof about you being a lesbian. It’s a tough world we live in and you’ve gotta be savvy if you want to get through it reasonably unscathed. Don’t get carried away by your feelings in the moment and start planning for your future as a strong, proud lesbian woman. Good luck!

What Happened To My Girlfriend?

I am 25 and I am in love with a teenage girl who is eight years younger than me. We went to my friend’s home and had sex at least four or five times over the course of our relationship. Initially she promised to talk to her parents and marry me. After eight months of being together she visited her uncle’s village for a few months. When she came back from her uncle’s house she said we could still remain friends but that we had to break up as boyfriend and girlfriend. She kept telling me that I am eight years older than her and should forget about her. I have come to know that she is a liar and a traitor, but I cannot forget her and cannot spend a single day without talking to her on the phone. Please tell me what to do?
–In Love and Losing

Oh brother. There’s a lot of information that you seem to have excluded from your letter, but using my spidey-sense, I get the feeling that this girl’s parents found out about your relationship, packed her off to her uncle’s place for a while to get her away from you, and she has now come back and decided that this thing with you isn’t really worth all the trouble.

And you know, rightly so. I get so many letters that look just like yours, letters from men in their mid-twenties who have “fallen in love” with teenage girls and want to get married to them. This is all wrong, my friend. There are some basic parameters when it comes to dating younger people: you should treat your younger partner with respect, teach them the ropes about sex and relationships with kindness and tenderness, don’t break their heart if you meet someone else, and unobtrusively withdraw from the scene when they start eying their more age-appropriate peers as potential dating partners. In general, don’t leave them more damaged than you found them.

You do not do any of the things that you have done, ILAL: demanding a promise to get married when you know the girl has the rest of her life in front of her, calling her a liar and a traitor, failing to find out if she’s under any parental pressure to end things, calling her on the phone every day after she’s broken things off, or generally acting like a psycho. You messed up in this situation, ILAL, and the best thing you can do now is apologize to her for being so crazy about the break up (apologies are key), end contact with her, and find another woman to date who is closer to your age and independent of her folks. In other words, be the grown-up here.

Baby, I Need Your Lovin’

I am 17, and I have recently fallen in love with a man 5 years older than me. We have a great time with each other. One day he came to my city and we went to a hotel and had relations. In the beginning he promised to talk to my parents and marry me. But after one month he said we can still have the same fun but we can’t get married. He suggested that we should remain friends. Moreover, I can’t spend a single day without talking to him on the phone. Please tell me what I should do now.
–What Happened?

Forget this fool. Even if he was serious about marrying you in the beginning (and I kind of doubt it), he clearly isn’t now. Stop calling this guy and try to have a sharper eye for identifying losers who’ll say anything to get in your pants. I know the ending of this relationship seems like the end of the world, but it really isn’t. Crying into your pillow at night over this person is a waste of angst. As you get older you’ll find plenty of other men and women to date out there who respect you and want to treat you well. Go out with those folks, and not with chumps like this dude. (Hint: you can usually tell that someone is a jerk if he’s five years older than you and trying to propose to you when you’re only 17. Just a thought.)

It Takes Two To Make It Outta Sight

I’m writing this on a problem that my friend is facing. I’m changing her name and the location so that the secrecy is maintained. My friend has been married for the last 10 years and she has two young children. She is now seeking a divorce because her hubby is not interested in her and has another woman. Bu this is the very peculiar thing: my friend’s hubby has developed an interest in sexual entry through the anus because of his addiction to pornography. He and my friend have not had sex in 4 years because of this. He says he does not enjoy biological courting. They tried having sex in this way twice but failed because the pain suffered by my friend was unbearable. Why has his desire changed to unnatural sex after so many years of a normal marriage? Is this something he learned from the Internet websites? Is this because the other woman accommodates him this way? He refuses to leave the other woman, saying that she is the suitable partner and not his legally wedded wife. Is it possible that he have normal sex with medical treatment? He only gets full satisfaction from this anus sex, not even when my friend tried doing oral. There are fights and quarrels every day. They are finally getting a divorce in order to protect the children from their fighting. Will you please help her with some suggestions?
–Friend’s Problem-Solver

Your “friend” is having this problem? Girl, please. Let’s cut the crap and acknowledge that you’re writing about yourself and so that we can move on. Now, you’ve got two problems here: one, that your husband is apparently so hung up on anal sex that he can’t get his rocks off any other way; two, that he’s having an affair and that you two don’t want to stay married. Those two issues may be related, but they’re not the same thing. If your husband is having an affair with someone else and it’s clear that neither of you want to remain married, then obviously getting a divorce is the best course of action to take. As you yourself pointed out, there’s no purpose to exposing your children to all that anger and resentment, and provided you can make the divorce proceedings as amicable as possible, then I say go for it.

But there’s this other issue of anal sex that you’ve brought up that I want to address in more detail, because it’s related to queer rights and discrimination against gay and lesbian people, in its own weird way. Now, I have no idea whether your husband developed his insatiable taste for butt love by watching porn, nor do I particularly care. And granted, he definitely sounds like a jerk if he wasn’t able to take his time, go carefully, and make it pleasurable and painless for you during the two times you tried it. Failing grade for him. However, there is nothing unnatural about anal sex and nothing particularly normal about vaginal sex, either. One of the major arguments in favor of keeping Section 377 as it stands is that anal sex (or any form of non-procreative sex) is “against the order of nature”, and this reasoning has been used to harass and oppress gay, lesbian, and transgender people since the law was enacted since anal sex is a act that has been commonly (and wrongly) associate exclusively with them. So it becomes a vicious, self-justifying cycle: anal sex is bad because it’s what gay people do, and gay people are unnatural because they have anal sex.

But clearly this is not a sexual desire that is restricted to queer people: your husband wants to have anal sex with women. (As far as you know—he might be getting it on with men as well.) Thinking about any sexual act in terms of normal or unnatural is really discriminatory because it closes off the possibility of experiencing and exploring pleasure to all people, and justifies the specific targeting of marginalized communities in the bargain. And that’s, well, crappy. (Yes, pun intended.) There’s no such thing as an unnatural sex act, only an unpleasurable or non-consensual one—and anal sex (like any other sex act) can be intensely pleasurable for both partners. If you can get around your prejudice and your husband can stop being a fool, you might be able to work your way having one last between-the-sheets blowout before you sign the divorce papers. But let me tell you one thing: both of you (or whoever your next partner is) need to make the effort, both to set and respect boundaries and also to explore each others’ sexual desires. Love’s a two-way street, baby.