The slutty phase

Dear Sasha
My fiancée and I are in a long-distance relationship. I am open and sharing but she is not. She has never been good at expressing her feelings as she had a rough childhood surrounded by an abusive, absent father, drugs and alcohol. She grew up being emotionally shut off in relationships and never really “made love” to anyone. We recently had a conversation about our sexual pasts, and though I was playing in dark waters, I wanted her to be more open and expressive to me, I think I made a mistake. I may have opened a Pandora’s box. She told me that she has had a threesome. My sexual past has not been as adventurous as hers and this seems to bother me. I keep on picturing the woman of my dreams, my future wife, being dealt with by two guys. How should this affect me? I keep on thinking that that was the past, everyone experiments sometime in their lives, girls always go through a “slutty” phase, so this shouldn’t bother me, but it does. What should I do? Feel? Should I mention this to her though I fear that she may never open up to me again?

—Confused Fiancé

Dear Confused,

This type of situation always reminds me of my favourite joke in the world. A Catholic priest and a Hawaiian king are standing at the lip of a volcano. The Hawaiians are throwing virgins in as part of a ceremony. The Catholic priest is horrified and asks the king, “Why are you throwing virgins into the volcano?” The king looks back at him with equal horror and says, “Well, you don’t think we’d throw in the sluts, do you?” Being open and sharing in the context of a relationship means accepting that peoples’ pasts embody a variety of experiences (some of them even really good), so I would say your first step is to acknowledge that identifying as open and sharing is a bit of a self-deception. You don’t have to celebrate lovers’ past follies and pleasures with parades, but referring to your fiancée’s threesome as being “dealt with” by two men is totally disrespectful to her as an autonomous sexual being. Your fiancée is not a passive object you are taking lordship over. In your quest to open and share (more appropriately called prying, in this case), perhaps you believed you’d peep into her trousseau and find nothing but neatly folded dish clothes and some crocheted tea cozies. But underneath these items was a real person—and now the real challenge of opening up and sharing begins. Don’t kick yourself too hard for feeling dismayed and threatened. We’ve been trained to be possessive about our partners, it’s unfortunately as natural as clit crème for so many of us. But needing to control someone’s past requires a lot of effort—relentless suspicion, constant harping, time machines—seriously, work on letting it go. And then breathe. And then let it go. And then breathe. And then remember that the woman you will be spending sexual eternity with once had a threesome. And then in 10 years, remember that maybe, just maybe, she’ll want to do it again. With you. And another girl. Kind of makes your penis brush up against the seam of your pants a bit, eh?

Average Walking Cliché update: Jamie Campbell has taken all the photos—thank you so much to our adorable models; guys, wait’ll you see them, they’re cuter than anything—and Sean Pajot is now building the site. We are hoping to persuade people to join simply out of enthusiasm, but I know how people love to detail their dating woes and then do nothing about them (it’s why I still have a sex column after almost 13 years). See, the site is going to be free so we can’t even offer free membership to the first 250 people to encourage participation. Any suggestions? Patrons with warehouses full of iPods or time machines to give away? We await your ideas and generosity.

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM