Ask Beastly: LDR

Hey cowboys, vixens, and sluts across the gender spectrum. My name is Alexander Cheves. Some people call me Beastly. 

I answer questions on sex and life. To ask one, email askbeastly@gmail.com or use the contact form. All are published anonymously. 

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Hi. I’m a straight-ish woman (female pronouns) in my mid-20s, so not your target audience, but I’m neurodivergent, a recovered addict, and used to be a sex worker, so we have things in common.

My boyfriend recently got accepted for a job he’s always wanted that will have him on the other side of the world for 8 months each year. He’ll be home the other 4 months and is only planning on staying in the job for 15-16 years, it’s not an industry people often spend their whole career in. I’m really happy for him, although I’m worried he’ll start to forget about me or get distracted.

I’d like to stay in a relationship with him. He makes me happy, he makes me laugh, he prefers the icing, while I prefer the cake. We go well together, but we’ve only been together for a year, and although we’ve talked about ‘the future’, he’s only 19 (the age of consent is 16 both here and where he’s going, I’m not doing anything illegal). I struggle to understand how he can be so confident in talking about 10 years when 10 years ago he wanted to be spiderman, and when I was his age, I only cared about having enough smoke for the night (it was a dark time).

I’m looking for advice about maintaining an intimate connection in long-distance relationships, both romantically and sexually.

Now I’ve thought about it, any advice about getting his parents to like me despite the age gap (they know nothing of my past) would be appreciated too, although I’m fine with them not liking me. I don’t like them much either.

Also, I know you’ll get my name from my email address. I trust you won’t publish it.

Best of luck xx

Ps. Apologies, I just realized that once I’d taken out everything irrelevant, what’s left is monumentally boring.

— Anonymous

Hi Jane Doe, 

You sound like a cool person — my target audience. I include names when people write their names in their message. I do not get names from emails. I cannot assume that a message from janedoe@gmail.com (just an example) is from someone named Jane Doe. Anyone can make an email address with any name in it.

Your message is not boring. All messages are appreciated, but many of mine come from beginners, newcomers to life’s tribulations: not you. You and I share big things — neurodivergence, sex work — so I will speak as if to a friend. I am passing you the drug plate and telling the truth: long-distance does not work. 

LDRs have a low success rate even in the best conditions. Humans may be infatuated with images and impressions of each other online, but that’s not love. Instagram crushes run deep, hovering somewhere between mild curiosity and low-voltage want, but real lust needs skin and smell, and love needs even more. Deep bonds live in the flesh, in being and breathing. As I wrote in this month’s edition of my column in Document Journal, a relationship is shared time, nothing more. Think of dating like latching on to someone for a bit — not just to their timeline but to their location in the world. Life is movement, and dating someone means moving with them. Invariably — unavoidably — life forces people apart, physically and otherwise. Even marriages bound by finances, social pressure, and legal obligations like parenthood are often upended by travel and work. Marriages are inconvenient and force people to give up chances they would otherwise take if they were single. To last, marriages must be flexible and, if possible, mobile. 

You are not married. You are not tethered to him by children, money, or law. You are linked to him by affection — chemistry built on in-person contact. You must physically be with someone and look into their eyes to keep that up. Eight months out of a twelve-month year is too much time apart. If he keeps this job for fifteen years, you will spend only five of those with him. You will get a third. That is not enough.

Any couple spending so much time apart will drift — and seek intimacy elsewhere. Humans need humans. You can’t expect him (or you) to go without intimacy for eight months. So, at the most, you can have a casual, non-monogamous or even polyamorous relationship with him in which he (and you) enjoy sex and companionship while the other is away. If you cannot do that, this must end. There would be far fewer miserable couples if people read the contours of life as signs that a relationship has run its course. If you cannot bend with those contours, you break.

As many couples with age difference will tell you, age difference matters less as you age. It stops being a concern altogether after a certain point. The differences between someone nineteen and someone twenty-nine are substantial — the nineteen-year-old has a lot of growing up to do — but the twenty-nine-year-old and the thirty-nine-year-old are on more even footing. I would be wary of dating someone so young, but the older he gets, the less his age will matter. 

It’s a slightly-red flag that you don’t like his parents and that they don’t like you. Parents are, for better and worse, part of dating someone. Liking them is not required but it really, really helps. I would not be as concerned about your relationship with them if your relationship with him was more solid. Since it’s not, the tension between you and them only adds to the strain of distance. If you were married to him or had a child with him or were planning to move with him, you would simply have to endure his parents, and their approval would be a greater concern. Your attitude about them (“It doesn’t really matter if they don’t like me”) suggests that something in your mind knows this is ending. 

So, things don’t look good. That’s not me being a fatalist, just honest. Be proud of him, happy that he found a job and is going on an adventure, and let him go on it — alone. Sometimes people have to go on adventures, and we must let them. That’s love. 

Sometimes people wind up together. Sometimes they do not. Life cannot be predicted. Love has a way of looping back on itself and reconnecting people who drifted apart, but do not count on that. I do not believe in a grand design or ordered universe — I believe in chaos and chance — but love lives in chaos and chance. Like life, it cannot be predicted. Who needs romantic fiction when our love stories are too bizarre, too impossible to be believed, but true? 

I am not saying you will date him again. He might be a stepping stone, a growth point, a place of warmth in your story. On a long enough timeline, and in the best scenario, that is all anyone can be: a glowing dot on the map that makes you smile. If he is that, be grateful. Love him for that. Name a star after him and look at it once in a while. Don’t text him drunk. 

Love, Beastly 

Dear Alex,

I’ve just read and enjoyed your excellent article on tickling. It compels me to share my lifelong (70+) obsession as a fur fetishist. My fetish began in the crib when a babysitter tickled me with her furs. My erotic fixation with furs grew stronger. Even to this day, I crave submission to a man controlling my huge fur collection (read: arsenal) to explore pleasure and torment through light touch anywhere and everywhere. I’ve introduced many men to fur sex, some loving it and others no part of it. Gay fur fetishists are rare but still numerous. What compels me to write to you is my hope that you might include furs and fur play in your extensively sex-positive efforts. Thanks so much. 

p.s. I too am in NYC.

— Bob 

Hi Bob, 

I have moved to Berlin, the land of fetishes. That tickling article is rather old, and I probably will not write another one like it, but I am glad you enjoyed it. I will do my best to always validate people’s kinks and depict all fetishes, even the more obscure ones, as perfect little gems in us that cannot be tainted by the world. I do not have a tickling fetish, but I love the fetishes I have, and I love how they are evolving. They make me so real — so me, so alive. The day I adequately explain fisting will be when I master all poetry. I will drop down from heaven with a message from god in my rectum. 

Love, Beastly 

Dear Ask-Beastly,

Thank you for your website, and congratulations on your recently published book. Thanks for taking the time to read this email. I wanted to ask about Daddy-Boy sexual fantasies and what inspires them. I myself sometimes feel a natural inclination to say “daddy” and be daddy’s “good boy”. What does it all mean? Best wishes.

— Anonymous

Hey boy, 

I don’t mean to sound unkind, but questions like this have grown a little trite. You are overthinking kink. You want to call someone “daddy” and be a good boy while getting fucked. That’s great. Do it. 

The gentleman above cannot explain his tickle fetish any more than I can explain why I like two hands in my ass. He thinks he knows when his fetish was first triggered — in the crib, allegedly — but that is not an origin story. It does not explain why that crib tickling evolved into a fur fetish, nor does it answer the ages-old question: Was he born with it, or did that experience create a fetish? Arguments go both ways. Most tickled babies do not become adults with “arsenals” of fur. 

Until we isolate genes that predict homosexuality 100 per cent of the time — and I hope we never do — sexual orientation will always work the same way. Some queers might bristle at that — at the idea that homosexuality is just a kinky fetish — but it is. Fetishes can be intense, lifelong, beautiful, and powerful experiences. They can be identities that create and define us more than the gender of those we fuck or even than gender itself. My kinks live somewhere deeper than my gender identity and sexual orientation. This is why the words men call me in sex — words like “faggot” and “pussy” — ring deeper and truer than “gay” or “queer”. Kink is the closest one can get to what I really am. I cannot explain it or cite its point of origin any more than I can explain why I fuck men or why I sometimes fuck women. To overthink one’s kinks is to miss their point: they exist because we do, and they suggest forever the possibility that life is meant to be enjoyed, not understood. 

Love, Beastly