So Your Girlfriend Used to Have a Girlfriend
 

As society staggers onward to the big question mark that is the future, it’s appropriate and expected that the draconian values of previous eras begins to peel away. What was once only rumor or taboo has become the everyday norm to some of us. With this in mind, I know I am not the only one who has encountered the currently bi or previously bi girlfriend. I’m actually having my third go around with it currently and thought this might be a good place to compare notes, thoughts, anxieties and such. Worse case scenario, you guys can point and laugh at my inability to just buy the ticket and take the ride.

So my current girlfriend, codename Maia, was raised in a Jehovah’s Witness household on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Like a lot of people who grow up in a restrained environment, at the age of eighteen she left home and indulged in everything she couldn’t have before… hard drugs, strange sex, and rock’n’roll.

In many ways this is just the new rehash of the old sexual history issue. No one likes to think about their current partner’s former activities. Am I wrong in feeling that this is compounded when the former activities include hot tub foursomes and lesbianism. To add some napalm to the fire, she’s recently shared her interest in maybe having a physical fling with another woman.

Perhaps I’m just having a Woody Allen moment.

Run screaming.

If you're into this for the long haul, and your partner isn't done with her partying yet you are, end it. Otherwise you're in for some heartache and headache.

It sounds like you're monogomous and she likes you enough to try to play along.

Perhaps she thought you would be turned on by the thought of her with a woman.

Are you certain that you're leaving her sexually satisfied? Perhaps you should talk more about what she'd like to try - with you -

I read your description of her, and that she seems to be the type that you date. However, I don't see anything of you, or what you think about her.

First off Scud1373, I LOVE your writing style. My closeted attempts to man-lick your keyboard fingers aside, I have no proper advice to offer besides what wooÐsie dearest said.

I've been with women who've had lesbian relationships and it's really all the same to me - so long as I don't need to know then I don't need to know. It's an inescapable game that you'll have to play in some way or another but surely there's some reason why she's with you and not with any of them.

Talk it out.

I've got no interest in any woman that wants to explore sexual "options" with someone outside the monogamous relationship with a man or a woman. That makes me a prude by TFP standards, and I don't give a shit.

This is a valid point and a logic beginning. I'll try to keep this as short as possible, otherwise it's going to sound like a Springsteen or Mellencamp song. That said, feel free to clap or hold up lighters.

I'm afraid my romantic tastes draw me to women who are more likely to be experimental. In short, I dig alternative/artist types. Find me a woman with tattoos, a rockabilly wardrobe, and a sketch portfolio and I am a thoroughly distracted man. This type of woman doesn't exist in the small Mayberry-like town that birthed me.

Bi-girl one was a goth sketch wiz who moved to town before our junior year of high school whom I fell for savagely. Rebekah was into industrial music, fishnet shirts, and having a go with girls and guys... providing the guy wasn't me. I wasn't so much trapped in the just-friends zone so much as entombed. By graduation day we had become bitter enemies. I left for college with a raging veiny hate-on for "greedy fence straddling"
bi-sexuals.

Bi-girl two was my college girlfriend Sara, a hippie-pagan photographer and costume designer. She spent a long time trying to convince me that nudity isn't always sexuality. This I could readily agree with, providing that I was the only one seeing her nudity. My own stubbed emotions had closed what had been a relatively open mind, and eventually poisoned the relationship.

Maia is different in both overall personality and the circumstances in which we met. We both had some heavy substance abuse problems and met as roommates in a small house owned by a mutual friend. The only thing keeping me from calling it a crackhouse is that it had functioning electricity and digital cable. I found her to be both sweet and fiercely intelligent; too intelligent to be working a dead end waitress job and snorting her life away. I knew and participated in some of the more trashy details of her life at this point but didn't know the meat and potatoes of it till we moved out, got clean, and found an apartment together. Now I work a white collar office job in financing and she is half done with a degree in computer programming and advance math. It was during our first year in the new apartment together that she told me the whole story in sweaty detail.

Growing up the weird fish in a small pond had given me the feeling that I was "enlightened" enough to accept things like polyamory and twisting sexuality. My pragmatist mind can endorse the idea that she has sexual feelings that, as a man, I cannot fully address. I know that forbidding acknowledgment of these desires will only start a growing black pearl of resentment and contention.

In many ways I am more uncomfortable with myself than her. I thought I hadn't carried away the "not in my backyard" mentality with me, when I left small town Western Pennsylvania. It seems I'm only conservative about sex when it's happening without me.

On an entirely unrelated note: Xerxys- I'm a burned out old writer who will greedily accept your compliment, while I dust off my keyboard.

Geez, I'm not sure how to say this correctly, but I think that you already know it yourself. You are attracted to and repulsed by the same thing. This is an issue that you have to resolve within yourself, one way or the other. Is it fair to continue dating girls like this while you still have this conflict? Should you try dating outside of your "type"?

I dont have any issues my gf having a gf in past or present
as long as it is just fun and with a respectable friend whom she knows and can trust - i have no issues

Fuck her. Fuck her like there's no tomorrow. Fuck her and her lesbian girlfriends like there's no tomorrow. Pile on top of them like a Greek orgy. Then leave her, and don't look back. It will do both of you some good.

I would say "repulsed" is too strong a word. Unsure is a more apt description.

Regardless, I never intended this to be a me-centric topic. Despite what would seem like a contrary personality; I find human sexuality very interesting and though this a topic I could converse on.

I used to be poly, but am now in a (mostly)monogamous relationship. I've had girlfriends and boyfriends and now I just have the boyfriend, unless a lady wants to join us one day.

Just because she used to sleep with everyone doesn't mean she still will now that you're together.

While I won't address the uncertainty issue over your girlfriend's prior relationships and lifestyle, why do you believe she wishes to experience a woman-on-woman fling? What are your thoughts on that possibility? Does it excite you? Is there a kernel of trepidation over the idea of the female lover supplanting you as your girlfriend's preferred companion?