As happy as they look?

Warning: Adult Material

Is “Happily partnered” the most overused phrase on the Internet?  Trawl through any gay website’s profiles and you’ll find it cropping up everywhere.  It seems to be especially common in the hairier, bearier parts of cyberspace, where for some reason almost everyone seems to come with a buy one, get one free offer.  I’m glad to find such an apparently high level of conjugal bliss out there, but it seems to leave some people – my friend Jon among them – bristling with disdain.

“If they’re so happy, why are so many of them showing us all pictures of themselves with their arses out in that cruisey bit of the dunes at Sitges?” He asked me recently, while flicking through a range of potential hook-ups on his I-phone.  Erm, I’m not sure – because they like getting compliments from strangers, perhaps?  Surely letting casual browsers see you flashing your sandy crack in a holiday snap isn’t automatically proof of marital misery?

“Maybe not” Jon replied “But messaging me asking for daytime meets behind their boyfriend’s back is, and that happens all the time.”

Ah, now that’s something I’m familiar with – If I had a pound for every time someone who had initially claimed to be monogamous with their partner had suggested meeting up I’d have six pounds.  It would be nice to be able to affect moral outrage at such underhand approaches, but, alas, two of them were so hot I said yes.  Single people have such a raw deal in this world that if someone hunted me down and suggested sex, I didn’t see any great obligation to come on like the cock police and reprimand them.  At the same time, both meets proved to be hasty, book-ended with guilt and resulted in the men in question blanking me whenever I stumbled across them with their partners, so they were hardly encounters to memorise for the wank tank, either.

Of course, plenty of partnered guys out there play the field with their lovers’ full knowledge, either alone or in threesomes together.  It’s never worked in my relationships, but I know some open couples whose partnerships are genuinely loving, stable and durable, so I wouldn’t presume to condemn it either.

That said, I’m no fan of being the one couples choose to play with.  I’ve done a straw pole of my mates (well, two of them) and we agreed that the problem with shagging a couple is that there’s usually only one you’ve got the hots for.  The less handsome one inevitably gets sidelined, which isn’t just boring for them, but must spark the sort of insecurity that pushes couples towards hostility and competition. The one time I tried a couple threesome, I liked one guy so much it hurt, but was really turned off by his boyfriend’s bad breath and sunbed tan.  It ended up with me banging away at the hot one’s arse while the plainer one hunkered down behind me and tried to lick my balls, a well-meaning but damned annoying manoeuvre that only meant his nose kept prodding places that hurt as I jiggled.  It’s an experience that’s made me doubly keen to keep my current relationship monogamous – neither Karim nor me fancy being the minger left at the side of the plate for Mr. Manners.

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