Ask a Sex Goddess

By Sex Goddess, December 20, 2008

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I slept with my roommate. What do I do?

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Dear Sex Goddess~ I recently moved to a new city for a job. I moved in with a guy who is my age, a total stranger, but really wonderful. We hit it off immediately, and the attraction was magnetic. We started sleeping together a couple of weeks later. After a few weeks of this, we both realized that it was a bad idea, and with some hard work and dedication, we were able to stop having sex. A week later, he started dating someone else.

He has now been dating this new woman for a couple of months, and he has never told her about our history (I also have a boyfriend now, and I have told him about it). I feel really strange that there is this aspect of our relationship that my roommate's girlfriend knows nothing about. If I were in her position, I would want to know that my partner was living with someone he used to sleep with. He has no plans to tell her, and I just feel awkward around them.

What Should I do?

Awkward and Confused

Portland, OR

Dear Awkward and Confused ~ What you should do depends in large part on how serious your roommate is about his new girlfriend, and his reasons for not telling her about your history. He may not be very serious about the relationship, in the which case he may not see the need to add any drama to a good time. Or he may feel that what's passed is past and since what happened between you and he was "just sex", it would be making a mountain out of a mole hill to tell his girlfriend about it. Undoubtedly, she would feel less secure about the two of you living together if she knew of your brief affair.

On the other hand, some would argue that she has the right to know about the history, so that she can decide for herself whether or not she wants to continue participating in a potentially volatile situation.

I suggest you sit down with your roommate and tell him how uncomfortable you feel with the status quo. Try to come to an agreement together about how best to handle the situation. The last thing you want to do is dramatically confess your affair to his girlfriend in a fit of impassioned guilt while the two of you are out shopping for her wedding dress five years from now. Ideally, he will tell her himself when he is ready to deal with the consequences.

You want to preserve your friendship, and a positive living situation, with your roommate, and you have no need to damage their tender new romance. But transparency is almost always the better road in these situations, and I would be very surprised if your roommate's girlfriend does not already suspect that something more than friendship has transpired between the two of you. Women tend to have very keen instincts when it comes to...other women.

Good luck!

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Do you have a question? Email SG at SexAndRelationships@WireTapMag.org.

Rules:

1. I hate rules!

2. There are no stupid questions, only stupid hang-ups.

3. Pleasure came before political correctness, and so should you!

4. Love yourself first.

Who: Who I am is unimportant. I do, however, enjoy sex, dally in various relationships, and on top of that I am an organizer by trade, or perhaps faith. I declare here and now that I know as much as anyone about sex and relationships -- which is roughly nothing and everything.

Why: Organizers, activists, change makers, closet progressives -- people trying to save the world often have a hard time figuring out how to ... do it. Whatever it might be at the moment -- love, dominate, submit, indulge, deny, give, take, fight, let go, wonder, know. I secretly suspect that if everyone were able to find the freedom to really love and please themselves (not to mention each other), the world would be a much more peaceful place.