My God! Think of the poor Gay guy… If I had a woman friend over, I would NOT want her in my bed… It’s a sacred male space! (I would have said a Gay male space, but cute married MEN are always welcome…) 
So speaking as a Gay man, I don’t think your husband should worry… Now if your husband wants to go sleep in the same bed as a Gay man…
Oh wait - probably safe too - the ones who are going to play around are usually doing it behind her back on the Down Low.
I might be okay with it. But that’s a big, uncomfortable might. I think I would be really disappointed that she would ask that of me. I mean, no matter how much you trust someone, laying in bed alone that night, the mind is gonna start to wander. Hmmm, I wonder…
Don’t you think I would have done something about it by now? Been friends with the guy for 18 years, more than half our lives. No fantasies, no need to get closer than normal. Just… not wanting anyone to have to sleep on the floor in a room with no A/C in the middle of summer. Really, that’s all. If anything was going to happen, I think it would have in the last 2 decades, at some time when neither of us was in a relationship, let alone married.
Wow. That’s cynical and paranoid. My friend would be pulling a Michael Jackson, after all these years? I don’t even know what to say to this. You’re way off. I know it’s IMHO, so that’s YHO, but it comes nowhere near my particular situation.
Now this thread is starting to depress me. I had no idea this situation could be viewed so horrendously far from how it really is. I’m pretty sure my husband doesn’t think these things about me or my friend, but still… wow.
Yet your husband objects to this activity and, from what you’ve said, you’re not quite sure why. It could be that what he thinks and what he tells you to not offend you may be quite different things.
Honestly? If he thought that I actually want to fuck my gay best friend, or vice versa and I was a naive dupe playing into a (very long term and completely ineffectual) con on the part of my friend, I hope he wouldn’t have married me, or would just leave me right now. Seriously. Because some of the scenarios described in this thread have made me queasy, not because they haven’t happened in the world somewhere, I’m sure, but because they bear no relation to my actual situation. It’s been an eye opener, lemme tell ya. And I have talked to my husband about the whole thing in greater detail since starting this thread, and I’m sure he’s not harboring some perverse fears which are divorced from reality.
I understand intellectually why he wouldn’t want me to do it. Emotionally, though, because the whole thing is totally innocent in every way, I know it’s no threat to him, I can’t quite get why he’s so against it, and I probably won’t. That’s OK, I can accept the difference of opinion without having to attribute it to sinister (and somewhat lurid) scenarios. I’m sure he can too.
Think about it-- if there was weird shit going on in this situation, why would I tell him about it? It came up in a conversation about something else, not when I was asking his permission to do it. Why wouldn’t I just go behind his back like everyone else does when they are violating their marriage vows? And is it so impossible to think, after 18 years of being friends with this person, that I wouldn’t be sure that there was no weird shit going on?
There are some things my wife does and says that drives me completely batshit. Does that mean I love her any less? No, it doesn’t because the good far outweights the bad. If that ever came to be reversed I’d analyze it and see if it was just me, or if there was something deeper that couldn’t be fixed. Otherwise, I accomodate her ‘idiosyncracies’.
Then why let it bother you what other people think if it isn’t relevant? You asked what people thought about your situation and they answered you.
You have talked to him and you still don’t understand why he objects to that sort of activity? Is it that you are incapable of understanding him, or he isn’t telling you what the real reason is that is bothering him. You have read a number of different posters here give their opinions which boil down to only a few real reasons (off the top of my head):
Trust (you or your friend).
Boundaries in a relationship in that some things are acceptable and others not.
It is likely that he isn’t disimilar in his feelings on this matter.
Hey, you don’t have to convince me the situation was innocent.
(as an aside, but my initial impression is that the women in this thread, those that I assume to be women that is, tend to be more accepting of this than the men. It is just an impression and most likely mistaken.)
Every couple is different and should decide these things for themselves. I would say the only absolute here is that the man doesn’t want to wife sleeping with a gay guy, he shouldn’t be sleeping with lesbians. It sounds like it’s kind of an alien situation for him - he might feel differently if the gay guy was a close friend with the couple as a whole and not just the woman. Or if both members of the couple routinely travelled and stayed in other’s home or went camping, or dormed in a college, where this sort of thing is just a matter of being practical. Sleeping in the same bed may just be something he feels is a personal thing in the relationship too. Like if me and my SO’s “thing” (quality time) was to share a glass of brandy then I might feel weird about them sharing a glass of brandy with someone else even though there’s nothing inherently romantic or sexual about a glass of brandy. It varies with culture too, in many other countries, friends hold hands in public and share beds without it being a romantic or sexual thing, they are just more platonically affectionate there.
I guess it’s because a lot of the answers are not about my situation. Gay men who screw women? Michael Jackson? Secret fantasies? Those weren’t in the OP. Those are what surprised me.
I said I DID understand INTELLECTUALLY, but I don’t feel the real heat behind it. It seems sort of silly to me, though his reasons are clear. It’s a difference of POV-- I’m not going to come around to his way of thinking, but I’ll accede to his wishes. Make sense?
It’s the boundaries issue, and I respect that.
Me, too. I had no idea there were so many guys pretending to be gay, for years even, just to bed women. And I had no idea the only thing keeping some people from cheating on loved ones was the chance to lie next to someone for 6-8 hours. I was fearful at the beginning of the thread that my frequent sleepovers with friends were childish, but now I see it’s likely the other way 'round.
While it’s good to accommodate your partner’s wishes on an issue like this, it would be even better if you could get at least a partial understanding of why this is a big deal to him. In my experience, it’s easier to do things when we know the reasons for what we’re doing, instead of just doing it because someone asks you to. If you can understand your reasons for why your husband does not want you to sleep in another man’s bed, I don’t think you’ll just humour him on it; I think you’ll probably end up if not agreeing with him, at least validating his opinion and it will never be an issue in your marriage. Everyone wants to be heard and understood; that is a huge gift that you can give your husband.
Oops - this should read " If you can understand your husband’s reasons for why he does not want you to sleep in another man’s bed, I don’t think you’ll just humour him on it;"
I do have “at least a partial understanding,” which I think I’ve said at least 3 times now.
You do get that I do not just want to sleep in other men’s beds, right? This was a unique situation in my life, with one friend, and it’s never going to happen again because the circumstances have changed, so it’s a moot point. There’s no other male friend, gay or straight, who I would even consider this arrangement with anyway.
Under the specific circumstances (which no longer exist, thus making the point moot), no, I would not agree with him, but I’d figure out some way to accommodate him. There are other things I don’t agree with him about too, even though I understand them, and I’m sure he feels the same way. I’d also bet you and your husband disagree about things and have to agree to disagree because you’re different. Perfect agreement on all issues is an unrealistic goal for a relationship. I respect his wishes and I realize that he can’t see the situation from my POV because he hasn’t been friends with my friend for 18 years, doesn’t know a lot of gay people, is more conservative overall, and that’s OK.
featherlou, lest my above reply to you sound snottier than it needed to, the point I’m trying to make is, the disagreement with my husband is not a huge chasm. We agree in general about sleeping arrangements-- the situation I wrote about in the OP is an exception that I would make but he’d rather not. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’d have to agree to disagree about it in principle, since it’s not going to be an issue in reality.
No problem. I get that you and your husband have reached an agreement on this issue. No, my husband and I don’t have perfect understanding on every issue, either. If you guys are good, I’m good.
I agree, and even though I’m quite the sexually free young man, and have even been interested in certain women from time to time, let’s just say that a platonic, circumstances-imposed sleepover with the monogamously-coupled wife of a friend of mine would not be the circumstance I’d pick to explore that.
Personally, I don’t like sharing a bed with anyone I’m not actually having sex with. It feels strange. My own policy is not to share gay men’s and everyone else’s beds even if they are morally upright and it’s only for purposes of sleep. Works for me.
If the sexual orientation of the people were not even compatible, it wouldn’t be in issue at all.
If we both knew the other person, it wouldn’t bother me at all.
If the sexual orientation of the people were not even compatible, it wouldn’t be in issue at all.
If we both knew the other person, it wouldn’t bother me at all.
Wow, I like how you put that. I remember once when I was married; my wife stayed at a female friends house. (they had been drinking and she was too drunk to drive home so I told her to sleep over.)
I later found out they had slept in the same bed together. I never said anything to my wife but this made me slightly jealous. I never really knew why untill I read your post.
For the record: I’m female, college-aged, with a male SO.
A bed is, in itself, just a bed. A mattress, held up by a frame, usually with some sheets and blankets and pillows on it. Most people may assume some sort of “emotional intimacy” attached to it, but that is not a guarantee. I’ve been in the bedrooms of, sat on the beds of, people I just met. I’ve slept curled up by platonic straight male friends (hell, I’ve slept right next to my ex!) and there was no sort of intimacy, emotional or otherwise, that either my boyfriend or I would constitute as cheating. My culture, the culture of the college student, usually assigns no emotional value intrinsic to the bed itself.
However, that doesn’t negate the opinions that many, many people do hold, including your husband. If he believes it is cheating, and you do sleep next to your friend, knowing that he believes that, then you should be fully aware that you just violated his trust in the exact same way that you would have if you’d had sex with someone else.
And to get practical – yes, I would be slightly (though not much at all) uncomfortable with my SO sleeping in the same bed as a platonic friend (no matter the gender). There would be absolutely no reason for me to distrust him for it, and I would try my very best not to; but like the rest of you, I’ve had decades to be socially conditioned, and my emotional reactions aren’t going to subside just because the logical part of my brain realizes they shouldn’t be there. 