So I was talking to my wife and she said there’s a girl-girl exception to monogamy: if a the female half of a (heterosexual) couple is with another girl, it isn’t really cheating.
I mean, I know it’s not like if she was with another man, or something, but I thought it was still adultery.
So I asked my friends about it, and they all agreed with her - to the point of being mildly incredulous of my ignorance.
So I’m asking IMHO: is it cheating, or not.
In my defense I offer Jill Sobule:
And then I looked at you
You had guilt in your eyes
But it only lasted a little while
And then I felt your hand above my knee
And Ani Defranco:
yeah i’d rather have these things weighing on my mind
and at the end of this tunnel of guilt and shame
there must be a light of some kind
So has pop music misled me, or iis there a exception, for girls?
Whether it’s cheating or not is up to their partner, and their partner is less likely to have a problem with it if their wife has sex with another woman, for a variety of reasons. A lesbian tryst isn’t going to get her pregnant and risk having some judge declare that you have to support the kid, the other woman is offering something different rather than something better, so it doesn’t carry the same implied insult, and men like lesbian sex.
Pretty much my observations, with an addendum that I think a lot of guys figure (probably mostly incorrectly) if their wife is into that sort of thing, it’s not far from there to being able to have a threesome* with their wife and her female friend.
If you’re in a monogamous relationship, having sex or getting intimate with another person regardless of gender is in my opinion considered cheating.What else would you call it? Curiosity? Variety? If that’s the case then anyone you feel curious about or want to “experiment” with should be fair game. I have a friend who was married for 28 years. His wife had a couple of affairs with women during their marriage. He didn’t like it, but he decided to live with it and continue raising their family. Five years ago she left him - for a woman who is now her partner. I understand that she may have known that she was a lesbian for a long time, but was that not cheating? Of course it was.
I’ve been on various ends of different types of relationships. My first husband cheated on me and I have also cheated. Time, age and maturity has taught me some good lessons.
I’d say that people should have whatever kind of relationship works for them, but in my opinion, monogamy is monogamy. And gender, when it comes to being faithful, has nothing to do with it.
What is considered cheating is up to the people in the relationship, but if no explicit arrangement has been made, girl-girl action seems to me just as bad as any other gender combo.
What if it was her best friend and there was an emotional component to the sex? Surely if she ends up leaving you for the woman, in hindsight that initial sexual encounter was not innocent fun but rather an act of infidelity.
What I’m getting at is that there can’t be a blanket exemption because there are more factors to consider than simply “Did the other person have a vagina as well?”
But then you risk the Ross Geller counter-exception to the girl-girl exception. That’s the one where your wife engages in sex with another woman - which “doesn’t count” - as a means of discovering she’s actually a lesbian - which leads to a divorce.
I don’t think there’s a universal rule about this. Every couple is different.
I’m not surprised some people think there’s a universal rule, though. In my own case, for example, for whatever reason, if I consider the prospect of my wife having fun, no-emotion sex with a guy, I feel she is cheating, while if I consider the prospect of her having fun, no-emotion sex with a girl, I’m just like, “well I hope she’s enjoying herself.”
I can’t make sense of it and it’s probably wrong, but there it is.
That was what I was getting at with the “(probably mostly incorrectly)” thing.
Pretty much every guy I know who’s been in the OP-discussed situation (wife/gf wants to hook up with other women whilst still in a relationship or married), they’ve either been swingers/in an open marriage and it’s been fine, or the guy has said he’s OK with it because he hopes there’ll be a threesome - which never happens because either his wife/gf leaves him for the other woman, or it turns out she’s just not into threesomes and won’t do it and he ends up unhappy and resentful as a result.
Or she’s okay with the threesome with another woman and the guy thinks he’s just won the jackpot. And then afterwards, his wife says now it’s her turn and she wants a threesome with her husband and another man.
That is, until the wife leaves them for a woman…
Is it adultery? Yes.
Is it cheating? Depends on whether the other partner is ok with it or not and on whether things have been agreed upon beforehand or it’s been a matter of “getting home early and finding your supposedly-monogamous partner having too much fun with someone else”.
I’ve heard the same thing expressed by various people of both genders. Not just towards girl/girl sex, but boy/boy sex too. I think that a fair number of hetero/bisexual people are just wired so that they don’t really feel sexual jealousy at the thought of their partner with someone of the same gender.
And the “no-emotion sex” thing makes perfect sense actually. If she’s with another woman as said upthread there’s no risk of pregnancy, which negates that motivation for jealousy. And if there’s no emotional connection then that eliminates another major source of jealousy, since she’s not going to leave you for someone she feels no attachment to.
It was the opposite with my ex. I said *hell *no about a threesome with another woman, and 99.9% no with another man. So he focused on getting me to agree to a MMF threesome and if we had done it, I’m sure I know what the next step would have been. Oh, plus he asked me if I know any guy I’d want to have one with. Hahaha…nice try! Not walking into that trap.
Are you having sex with someone outside your monogamous relationship? It’s cheating.
(The only exception is if you’re in a polyamorous relationship and the additional fling occurs within the rules of that relationship - it’s still possible to cheat in polyamory but that would be a tangent to the topic)
Saying girl-on-girl doesn’t count is also tantamount to saying homosexual sex doesn’t count, which is a slap in the face to those who have that as their primary orientation.
I would think it’s obvious that whether or not it counts as cheating depends on whether the person has permission from their partner to do it. A woman is just way more likely to get that permission if it’s with another woman.
But would anyone heterosexual consider it exactly the same if their partner cheated with someone of the same sex? If my partner cheated with another man, I wouldn’t be jealous like I would if it was another woman. I’d be upset and grossed out (I have nothing against homosexuality, but it would be gross to me for my boyfriend to be with another man) but not jealous and it would be easy not to take it personally because obviously if someone wants a man I can’t compete with that.