How much sexual attraction and/or flirtation is OK for your SO?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was recently at a party talking to what appeared to be a socially conservative religious couple. We were talking movies and at the mention of some popular actor (I honestly can’t remember who) the wife says “I could do him in a second.” Now, I know she (probably) didn’t mean it literally. It was probably just a figure of speech for “He’s sexually attractive.” But I was still a little taken aback.

And from time to time someone will mention that they, or their SO, has a “crush” on someone. Most recently it was a woman complaining about the frequency of crushes that her husband has. It seems that one crush, or maybe even one crush a year, was OK. Again, I was a bit surprised.

So, how much sexual attraction and/or flirtation is OK for your SO?

I’ll throw out a few questions:

  1. What about attractions to celebrities?
  2. What about real actions based on attractions to celebrities? For instance, buying People Magazine whenever there is are pictures of a certain star.
  3. What about attractions to a real person, like your best friend?
  4. What about actions based on attractions to real people, like flirting with your best friend?

And a few additional questions:
How does your SO feel about you and the above?
What about dancing? Is club dancing to loud music OK? What about slow dancing?
Any exemptions or special circumstances? Bachelor or bachelorette parties? Under the influence? First time it happened?

For any of the above how much is OK and how much is too much? And feel free to comment on past relationships too.

Also, if you don’t mind, could you state some background: gender, married or single, years together, etc.

2

Attraction to celebs I have no issue with, I consider that harmless. I have some moderate jealousy issues with attractions to real people that we know.

He on the other hand would be fine with me sleeping with someone else.

we’re both male, been together 7 years.

3

My husband of 12 years is insanely jealous when I say that State Attorney General Patrick Lynch (D, RI) is handsome, okay? We just had a fight about it. And he was snippy about Denzel Washington for years after I commented that he was a handsome man.

It’s all ridiculous, I know, but I did tease him that I was going to ask my boss to pass a note to the Hon. Mr. Lynch one time when she had a meeting with him. Nobody had a meeting with Denzel. I do see Patrick around sometimes since he works about two blocks from me and I have to walk past his office to get to my car. Otherwise, he’s as much a celebrity to me as Denzel. But, he’s a big source of tension sometimes. It’s so stupid.

My husband never comments that anyone is attractive at all.

4

My wife bases things on potential. For example, “I lust for that actress” is fine, because I’m never going to meet that actress. “I lust for your sister” would not be fine. As for simply pointing out sexy people, neither of us are threatened by that. She’ll point out an attractive woman to me on the street, and I’ll point out a good-looking guy to her. It’s just looking. No biggie.

5

My husband isn’t a flirty person by nature, so it’s not something I worry about. Sometimes waitresses or bartenders will flirt with him and he doesn’t even realize it. It’s kind of cute.

But if he was that type I wouldn’t care about celebrities and people that he couldn’t have. I would not be ok with him having crushes on my sister or friends. I can’t imagine who would be ok with that. That’s one of those things that does not need to be said out loud. Fine if you think someone is hot, but keep it to yourself, you know? And I would do the same for him.

6

When it came to celebs, there was no issue. Though he knew the type of men I was attracted to (ie: a guy with a shaved head)… and when he saw one he would automatically get defensive. At one point wanting me to quit my job because a co-worker had a shaved head. Crazy. He had trust issues.

Him on the other hand, I would have cared less if he was attracted and flirted with a slender girl with big boobs. I trusted him. I even told him he could hang out with a bunch of cheerleaders for all I cared… I trusted him enough to know that he wouldn’t do anything.

So it all boils down to trust… he could flirt all he wanted… keep it in his pants and we’re great. :slight_smile:

7
  1. What about attractions to celebrities?

Harmless, I have a few of my own too!

  1. What about real actions based on attractions to celebrities? For instance, buying People Magazine whenever there is are pictures of a certain star.

Can we say ‘psycho’? Will there be a shrine as well? (damnit - so that’s where all my candles went!)

  1. What about attractions to a real person, like your best friend?
    Dont make me chose between you and my bff because you won’t win. And if I feel you are more smitten with my bff, you just lost us both.

  2. What about actions based on attractions to real people, like flirting with your best friend?

My female best friend is beautiful and she has a way with men… if he was being obvious about it, I’d tell him he was embarassing himself and to knock it off (not to mention that I’d be heartbroken).
And a few additional questions:
How does your SO feel about you and the above?

Well… he doesnt like it when I stay at my rental because I share the place with my best male friend whom i did have a very short lived moment. i was honest about it from the start - and the funny thing of it is, my bmf is now like a brother to me (so yeah, sometimes i get weirded out that there was even a thing). So, I’m sure if I flirted with him my SO would get jealous.
As for other men, I dont know because I only have eyes for him so I dont flirt with anyone else.

What about dancing? Is club dancing to loud music OK? What about slow dancing?
My SO doesnt dance =( But if he did, I would be ok with it. I dont know how he’d feel about me dancing with someone else, he’s never seen me dance.

Any exemptions or special circumstances? Bachelor or bachelorette parties? Under the influence? First time it happened?
No exemptions. Under the influence or not - and vice versa. Wait. One exception, we have a mutual gay friend that really likes my SO and those two flirt to the point where if I didnt know better…

For any of the above how much is OK and how much is too much? And feel free to comment on past relationships too.

Well, i’m really not that much of a hard ass - i dont mind a little harmless flirtation. SO flirted with Nene Thomas’ sister at Scarborough Faire but since I couldnt get any free pics out of it I dragged him out of there… it was amusing because it was geek-flirting started by one word: Stargate.
But if you get sloppy with it, yuck. Only one thing worse than a sloppy drunk is a sloppy flirt. =P Yes, I’m very protective and can get jealous.

I read a saying today something about being married and how your partner could’ve chosen better. Damn, wish I could remember it.

F, almost living together, less than a year.

8

1. What about attractions to celebrities?
We both have that. We’re constantly commenting to each other about the other’s “TV boyfriends” or “girlfriends.” This has never been a threat to either of us.

2. What about real actions based on attractions to celebrities? For instance, buying People Magazine whenever there is are pictures of a certain star.
I don’t think either of us really take any action based on our celebrity crushes. I have a couple of movie star crushes, but I’ve seen almost none of their films because the movies don’t interest me. I think my wife is probably less inclined than I am to take any action based on a celebrity crush.

3. What about attractions to a real person, like your best friend?
I’m thinking this would be a lot more threatening. Well, let me take that back. I don’t really know. I have male friends that I know are good looking and cool guys, and I wouldn’t have a problem with her acknowledging that. I’m not sure this particular issue has ever been a topic of discussion, though, so I honestly don’t know how she’d feel about me being attracted to her friends.

4. What about actions based on attractions to real people, like flirting with your best friend?
I’m a pretty shameless flirt, so I don’t think that my wife would take it seriously if I flirted with a friend of hers. I think it would be the same in reverse, but knowing my wife’s personality, I’d probably be more surprised than anything if she were flirting with a (male) friend of mine. Maybe she does and I just don’t notice it. We’re not very paranoid about each other’s interactions with the opposite sex. :slight_smile:

And a few additional questions:
How does your SO feel about you and the above?
I tried to cover that in my answers already.

What about dancing? Is club dancing to loud music OK? What about slow dancing?
Any exemptions or special circumstances? Bachelor or bachelorette parties? Under the influence? First time it happened?
Hmm…well, I’ve been to a strip club a couple of times without her, but with her knowledge, and she certainly hasn’t cared. No lap dances, though. And I’m not all that fond of dancing, so the club thing really doesn’t come up.

Also, if you don’t mind, could you state some background: gender, married or single, years together, etc.
I’m male, obviously married. We’ve been married for 9 years and dating for 11.

9

I used to be (read: as a teenager) incredibly jealous when my girlfriend would flirt with another guy, or if I didn’t feel as if I was getting as much attention as she was giving to someone else. As I grew up and then fell in love with the woman I married, I became much more secure and lost all sense of jealousy.

I know that any attraction my wife has to another person is just that- an attraction, and she’d never act on it. Consequently I have no reason to be jealous because while she may find someone else attractive, or flirt with somebody, we share so much more than that and our commitment to each other is absolute.

We’ve been married 10 years this summer and have known each other for over 20 years.

I guess the answer to the OP is, any amount of sexual attraction and/or flirtation is OK with us, since it will never go beyond that to anything physical with the other person. We channel the sexual energy into our own lustful activities with each other.

10

<hand up in the back of the room>

Male, 30 years old, married, bearing down on 7-year married anniversary and 10 years together this July.

I’d be OK with my wife having a crush on just about anybody (well, there are a few exceptions, but those mostly in cases where the person in question seems to me to be a genuinely bad person, such that if she had a crush on him I’d question her sanity). Why wouldn’t I be? I never expected her to magically stop thinking anyone but me was attractive when we were married. “Getting a crush” isn’t really a conscious act. I mean, I fairly recently made a new friend, a married guy. He and I are bizarrely alike as people, in ways ranging from the exact style of our senses of humor to our food preferences. Here is a man who is essentially my doppleganger. My wife has a crush on him. Should I be surprised by this? She has a rather large ongoing crush on me. Bothered? She’s not going to do anything about it, so why be bothered?

She feels the same way. Comments on the relative attractiveness of folks outside our marriage happen from time to time, coming from both of us, and neither of us is bothered by them. I still can’t figure out why either of us should be. Honestly, if I thought my wife was with me because there was literally no one else on earth to whom she could ever be attracted, I think the fact that she chose me would be a little less powerful.

11

Female, married 30 years.

I do not control the level of attraction/flirtation of my spouse, nor do I generally let it make me nervous or insecure. I was only once a little taken aback when, while drunk, he laid a kind of questionable kiss on one of my friends (who was also drunk) (so was I–this was at a New Year’s Eve party). I was mostly afraid my friend would think my husband was some kind of sexual predator/dirty old man (he was not that old at the time) who was taking unfair advantage, which he was.

Almost immediately he apologized profusely, and blushed. (He doesn’t blush, so maybe it was some variation of gin blossoms.) Both the pass and the blush I attributed pretty directly to the amount of alcohol consumed, which was a lot.

We were all pretty drunk, and we don’t do that anymore.

12

I’m not sure how to quantify such a thing.

Not threatening at all. I get a little annoyed when he rewinds the Victoria’s Secret commercials, but that’s because I have I have conflicting feelings about pornography.

I don’t think he’s ever done this. In theory, I’d be slightly weirded out if he wasn’t at least a little interested in the articles. But I wouldn’t forbid it or anything.

My actual best friend? Not a chance. I’m more sexually attracted to her than he is! But in theory, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

He has been sexually involved with a few women who are my close friends, and they’ve all been okay. I reserve the theoretical right to ask him not to sleep with a particular person, for any reason, but I’ve never done it.

Pretty much the same way. What he’s not okay with is seeing me be intimate with anyone else, and that’s taking some discussion and mistakes to work out exactly what “intimate” means to him. I’ve stepped on his boundaries a couple of times before he was able to articulate what those boundaries were. For example, when he said “I don’t like to see you making out with someone in front of me, it feels disrespectful.” I was terribly confused, because I didn’t think I had done that. Turns out he categorizes any kiss with longer contact than a Grandma peck as “making out”, so a lingering slight tongue kiss while my husband was across the bonfire bothered him. Once we worked that out, I chose to respect that, and it’s been fine ever since.

Nope, all of those are fine.

This I would have a problem with, if it’s the first time he’s intimate with someone. Navigating an open relationship is difficult enough when everyone is sober and communicating clearly. When people are under the influence, I’d be afraid that what felt perfectly consensual and appropriate in the moment would be reinterpreted as sleazy and predatory or otherwise bad the next day. Haven’t experienced it first hand, but I’ve observed the fallout in other people’s relationships and been hit by the shrapnel.

If he’s in a relationship with someone and they want to get drunk and screw, then I’m okay with that, as long as he remains sober enough to put on a condom.

My past relationships were fine with attraction, but officially not fine with acting on it. In my heart, I didn’t really see acting on it as a big deal, but I played the roles of Outraged Girlfriend Who’s Been Cheated On and Contrite Girlfriend Who Cheated as I’d learned they ought to be played. When I met the guy who was to become my husband, we admitted that before we started dating, and decided to skip that part.

Female, 33, married for 8 years, together for…9.5?

13

1. What about attractions to celebrities?

Neither my wife nor I could care less. I’m going to meet Scarlett Johanssen or Maria Sharapova?

2. What about real actions based on attractions to celebrities? For instance, buying People Magazine whenever there is are pictures of a certain star.

I don’t think either of us care. My wife actually bought me a copy of Maxim that had a very nice pictorial of Christina Aguilera, once, as a present.

3. What about attractions to a real person, like your best friend?

Simply acknowledging my friend’s looks is fine. But to have a “crush” would be not good. We both know that about each other.

4. What about actions based on attractions to real people, like flirting with your best friend?

That would be right out

Also, if you don’t mind, could you state some background: gender, married or single, years together, etc.

Male, hetero, both white, married 9 years.

Joe

14

Sure.

I guess doing that because you’re obsessed with their looks is no weirder than doing it because you’re obsessed with their music.

A real person? Sure. My best friend? Okay, sure, but we all have to live with each other.

Again, just fine (I only have open relationships) with the caveat that we all have to live with each other afterwards. i.e. Do it with a bit of tact and concern for everyone’s comfort, as I’d hope they and I and everyone else would conduct all other parts of our sex lives.

15

I’m in kind of an odd situation - intellectually speaking, I’ve never had a problem with a partner’s unrealized attraction to anybody else. There are obviously certain exceptions - I’d have a problem if a SO were all giddy over a guy that she worked with directly on a regular basis, especially if the guy were single and appeared likely to take advantage of the situation - but in general, I don’t really attach any meaning to attraction or flirting without consummation.

My wife, on the other hand, tends to get insanely jealous if I even mention another woman’s looks, in any context, attractive or not.

I’ve spent so many years being so careful of her feelings that the jealousy has rubbed off on me a bit.

We’ve been having problems lately, and she made a new supposedly platonic male friend during one of the periods when we were especially acrimonious. It’s all I can do to keep myself from demanding that she stop speaking to him.

Problems. Yeah.

16

I tell my wife which of her friends I would like to have sex with. I mean it literally - given the chance, I would like to have sex with these women. She doesn’t mind because she knows that I won’t have sex with them and that I don’t even fantasize about them. It’s purely academic. She finds it interesting because it’s sort of a game. She tries to guess which women turn me on and which ones don’t. She often comes home after meeting someone new at church or the playground and says, “You’d like her. She’s a MILF.” However, she’s wrong about 90% of the time.

My wife has no interest in having sex with other men (she has little interest in sex in general). She sometimes tells me when she thinks a man is good looking. This is useless information so it gets discarded, but I don’t mind that she tells me.

17

My girlfriend says George Clooney is her husband. I think it’s hilarious. I tell her I have Carla Gugino on the side. She rolls her eyes. Neither of us has a problem with any of this.

In terms of real life people, neither of us is jealous at all, though we make fun of each other a bit. Over New Years, I got invited to a party by a female friend of a male friend, after being told by the male friend that the female friend had been inquiring for some time about my dating status and whether or not he’d set her up with me. I told my girlfriend that I’d been invited to a party by a woman who wanted to have sex with me. She said, “Okay, let me know how it is.” (For the record, I went to a different party.)

Just this weekend, my girlfriend was in New York at a going-away party for a male friend. It wasn’t just any going-away event; he was being deployed to Iraq. She warned me in advance, “If he wants to kiss me, I’ll kiss him. And if he tries to cop a feel, I’ll let him.” Fine, I said, I understand. She texts me later: “No kissing, just a long hug.” My response: “Too bad for both of you.” :slight_smile:
Edit to add: On review of other replies, I should mention that the only thing my girlfriend has a problem with is that I don’t have a problem with porn. I mean, at least in the abstract; I know there are skeevy people in the industry and there are stories of some performers getting in trouble. But as a concept, sexual imagery for personal gratification is entirely acceptable to me, whereas she’s troubled by it. So that’s a (minor) point of disagreement.

18

I missed that question when I first responded.

We both feel that alcohol doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for your actions. I have never understood (and probably never will understand) people who get a pass on inappropriate behavior because they were drunk. Sorry. You chose to get drunk, you live with the consequences.

19

I think that for me, the answer to all of these questions depends on many circumstances, especially the level of openness/secrecy surrounding the attraction and the likelihood of reciprocation by the crush in question.

Celebrity crushes don’t bother me terribly. I have a little bit of a complex about it only because of my own body insecurity and the fact that I look absolutely nothing like the women my SO crushes on, but not so much that we can’t talk or tease each other about our favorites. I doubt my celeb crushes affect her at all.

Real-life crushes, I honestly don’t know, because we’ve never discussed any… we both comment on the attractiveness of random strangers and/or distant acquaintances with no problems, but I think if it came to people we actually regularly interacted with, it might get complicated. If I suspected she had a crush she was trying to hide from me, I’d be irritated, and probably mention it. If she said something to me about one, I think I’d be a little jealous, but I doubt I’d act on it unless she started talking incessantly about it. If it were somebody I found attractive too, we might have something interesting to talk about. I have no idea how she’d react if she thought I had a crush on someone; I don’t tell her about mine, because I assume she probably doesn’t wanna know, but if she asked, I’d tell her.

My reaction to a crush would also depend on what kind of crush I perceived it to be… purely physical would be far less threatening to me than the all-encompassing kind. A verifiable “crush” of that sort on someone close to either of us might be a deal-breaker, secret or not, as that’s basically what it is to be in love.

Actions are tricky. Again, depends on a lot of things.

Buying magazines and going to movies, not gonna contribute in any way to a consummation of the attraction, so therefore I don’t care (though I will tease her about it and tell her she’s weird). I don’t do this sort of thing at all-- I think Jenna Fischer is cute as hell, but I’ll still probably never watch Walk Hard, because it looks horrible-- but even if I did, she’d just laugh at me.

Flirting, well, it depends on the frequency, intensity, secrecy, and relationship to the other person involved. And, yes, a little bit on intoxication. I donno, basically if I can’t tell she’s joking, it’s going too far. I think she would feel the same way. Dancing is physical, so that gets even more complicated, but basically, if it actually looks sensual and not just-for-fun, and we haven’t come to some prior agreement, that’s when I get upset. Slow dancing, booty dancing, doesn’t matter; standards are the same either way.

We’ve been dating around 3 1/2 years, and AFAIK we don’t have hard-and-fast rules for this kind of stuff, just feelings. We make shit up as we go along, and we talk about it, and make adjustments if we need to. As nebulous as all this is, I guess we’re pretty much on the same wavelength about it, since we haven’t run into many problems in this area yet. :slight_smile:

20

I think my SO and I are both a little insecure about things like this. He’s probably more insecure than I am, though.

1. What about attractions to celebrities?
I don’t care; it’s not like he’s ever going to get a chance to be with them. I’m not sure how he would feel as I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned to him that I found a celebrity attractive. I suspect it’s information he’d rather not have.

2. What about real actions based on attractions to celebrities? For instance, buying People Magazine whenever there is are pictures of a certain star.
Again, I wouldn’t care about this. He might feel slightly threatened by it.

3. What about attractions to a real person, like your best friend?
He could tell me he thought she was attractive (as long as he doesn’t think she’s hotter than me :eek: ), but I wouldn’t like it if he had an actual crush on someone else we knew in real life. In his case I think he’d rather not hear about it. I actually sort of did have a crush on someone last year, but I didn’t talk to him about it because I knew it would make him uncomfortable. I think crushes are perfectly normal in a relationship, BTW.

4. What about actions based on attractions to real people, like flirting with your best friend?
I think we’d both be uncomfortable with the other person flirting with someone else. But I suck at flirting, so he at least has nothing to worry about. Anything beyond that is definitely off limits.

Female, 20, together 1.5 years (living together 9 months so far).