Barrington I think you miss my point. What is currently “primary” is immaterial to the comment. The comment is trying to help you see the contradicition in your own positions.
Having virtual sexual affairs is just play with pixels. The fact that we met doing that is of no significance any more than meeting in a bookstore.
Relationships in the virtual world via our avatars are very real and valid and translate from our avatars to our “real” selves.
Those two don’t fit neatly together and you can’t have it both ways at the same time. Now I’m more prone to accept the second than the first, but think that neither are entirely true or even equally as true for each individual or each individual’s seperate encounters … or between A, B and Z in an individual encounter.
It is not only grey and murky, it is a potentially very different truth for each participant including the non-willing participant Z. And each time.
I’d be really curious to know the status of contributors to this thread: male or female; married or single; married more than 5 years or less than 5 years.
If anyone care sto answer, I’m still genuinely curious as to what constitues “virtual sex” in Second Life. Are there explicitly pornographic animations involved or is it all text or what?
Male, married less than five years, if you swore it you honor it IMO.
To Diogenes: Disturbingly, yes. Second Life allows 100% user created content, images, animation, and 3d models–so the porn is … frightening and frighteningly customizable.
Female, married more than 5 years (in an open marriage, obviously). I don’t much care what anyone’s contract with their spouse looks like as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, but I am finger-wavy judgmental when people don’t honor their contracts, I admit.
I don’t think Diogenes sounds like a prude, at all. I think he sounds like a guy who knows what love & committment is all about, and who has managed to rise above his baser instincts. More people should be like that.
I should probably comment here, as I was in a similar position to Z myself a while ago. And unlike Z I went through with it, and things did work out well in the end, although my situation was different from this one in many ways.
I was friends with a married woman for several years. We met in real life, online virtual worlds not being as widespread back then. At the time I knew her marriage was unhappy, emotionally abusive and apparently without anything to keep them together. I later learned that her husband had been physically abusive to her for a while, until she became strong enough and sufficiently fed up to defend herself physically. At the time we started having sex the marriage was effectively over except for the legal status.
Even so, I felt guilty enough that I insisted that her husband knew. He didn’t approve, but at the time neither of us really cared. I was quite aware that seeing her was likely to push her marriage further towards divorce. In fact that was part of the reason I had for being with her - I thought that anything I could do to break them up would be a good thing for both of them. As for her, I suspect that she was simply looking for physical and emotional companionship with someone who’d be nice to her.
At the time our plan was not for this to be anything other than a short-term fling. Our moving in together after her divorce, and then getting married some years later wasn’t what either of us foresaw at the time. But we did, and have now been happily married (Yes, in an open marriage) for 6 years.
Although it worked out well in our case, I still wouldn’t advise Z to go through with his fling. I do not in any case condone anything less than total honesty when it comes to sex. I also believe in keeping to the vows you make. Even so if I had the chance to go back and do it again I wouldn’t change my decision one bit. Perhaps that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, perhaps it’s just a very situationally dependent thing, I don’t know.
I think the key word in all of that is “kinks.” We’re not talking about sexless marriages, but about going outside of marriages solely to satisfy some unimportant desire for a particular act or costume or whatever. “Kinks” do not rise to the level of emotional needs. I think that you, CarnalK, are conflating trivial desires and fantasies with real deprivation and need.
Gentlemen, shall we agree that the importance of kinks, preferences, and quirks vary from individual? Let’s assume that and look at things logically. If a person’s kinks are important enough to her that she is unwilling to give up indulging those kinks, then to me that leaves her two ethical options for marriage: 1, find a spouse who’s willing to share those kinks at reasonable intervals; or 2, enter into an open marriage in which her spouse knows that she’s indulging her kinks with third parties and is all right with that.
Unfortunately, Barrington’s woman didn’t choose either of those courses of actions. Her kink is important enough to her that she’ll go out and look for someone to share it with, but she hasn’t told her husband this. As a result, she is deceiving him. He’s described her as being “absolutely fucking gorgeous, mentally, physically, everything. She’s my best friend, my soulmate, my all-consuming passion, and I’d rather suffer not being able to know her better than to have never known her at all,” but this mentally gorgeous woman has chosen to indulge her desires and hurt two men she supposedly loves.
In answer to brazil84’s question, I’m engaged to a man I love very dearly indeed.
Well, exactly. I’m not going to apologize for taking marriage seriously, but that’s not really the point. The point is, there are things worth breaking up a marriage for, and I don’t think sexual “kinks” qualify.
Not all kinks are created equal. For some people, a “kink” means “I think it’s kinda cool when my girlfriend wears high-heels during sex.” For others, however, it means “I can’t become aroused, let alone reach orgasm, unless my sex partner is wearing a diaper.” For the latter group, denial of their kink is tantamount to denial of sex. For a whole host of people in between, sex is possible without indulging in their kink, but it’s just not any fun.
My point is that it’s easy to look down on people who depend on a kink for sexual gratification when you, apparently, have no trouble getting off with relatively straightforward sex. Kinksters didn’t choose to have a sexual foible that will send most prospective sex partners running for the hills.
I have no idea whether any of this is relevant to the OP’s case.