Email from a guy who doesn't have sex with his boyfriend anymore

I've only written two posts for this blog since 2016, so imagine my surprise last week when I get an email from a reader. The email is as follows:

Dear GB,

First I must confess I love reading your blog! ;) I'm a fan! I always wanted to know how you look like ... hahaha.

OK, so basically I would like to seek some advice from you on matters related to the heart. I'm a gay male living in Hong Kong. I have been with my boyfriend for many years now, maybe 20 years +.

We stopped having sex for many years now. I'm not sure why but somehow it just didn’t happen. And we didn't talk about it too.

I can't resist the temptation when guys come up to me, like in gym etc. Nothing much, just touching etc. I feel bad, but I don’t have any intimacy with my boyfriend anymore, and I have needs also.

I know this is a bad excuse but what can I do? Do you have any advice for me? Thank you!

Hear from you soon. Regards

As soon as I see the email, I send a reply to say that I will do a post for him. Within a day I get a response in which he admits that he wasn't expecting me to reply. Smart guy, because let's face it, these days my blog looks pretty dead!

In some ways his story is very familiar because it's hard for all couples, gay or straight, to keep the passion going forever. However, not having blogged for the last few years, I'm not sure whether I've answered exactly the same question before so I decide to look through my Dear GB "back catalogue". There are, of course, a few stories with some similar characteristics.

For example, I find the Email from a guy with a long-term boyfriend. In that case, the reader who sent me the email had also been having much less sex with his boyfriend, but then he suddenly found out that his boyfriend had been having lots of sex with other men. The email was sent 6 years after that discovery, when the reader had started seeing an erotic masseur regularly.

I also find the Email from a gay guy with long-term relationship issues. In that case, the reader who sent me the email had stopped having sex with his boyfriend many years before he emailed me, because the boyfriend had rejected the reader's physical advances. The email asks whether he should finally move on, after having being together for 25 years.

There are also a couple of emails from guys who found the sex lives with their boyfriends declining after only 6-7 years. There is an Email from a gay American guy with relationship problems and then just 3 weeks after I posted that there was another Email from a gay guy with relationship issues.

However, perhaps the closest and most relevant email in my Dear GB "back catalogue" is the one titled Difficult conversations from ten years ago. That post contains an email from a reader who had been with his boyfriend for almost 10 years, and it had got to the point where they only had sex maybe once a month, even though the reader says that his boyfriend used to have a crazy sex drive.

In any relationship, it's quite common for one person to be more dominant than the other, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's research that suggests that straight marriages are more stable when one spouse is more dominant, and I would suggest that a stable relationships means more long term happiness for both of the people involved. The reason that I mention this is because when I read the reader's email carefully, it seems likely to me that his boyfriend is more dominant in their relationship than he is. The reader says that the current situation just happened. However, it seems more likely to me that his boyfriend, as the more dominant person, started finding satisfaction elsewhere and consequently lost interest in having sex with the reader. By no means is this meant to be a criticism of the reader, who has managed something that has so far eluded me, namely a 20+ year gay relationship that will hopefully last many many more years. But the reader said that he has needs and the same will be true of his boyfriend because all healthy men need to ejaculate regularly, so what does he think has been going on?

The question is what to do about the situation, if anything. The reader's needs won't go away, so if he agrees that his boyfriend must have been finding satisfaction elsewhere then one thing he could try and do immediately is to stop feeling guilty about doing the same :-). However, unless they find a way to start talking about the situation then there'll still be an elephant in the room, which is presumably why the reader emailed me in the first place.

So I do think that the reader should try and talk to his boyfriend about the situation, and there are some useful tips in my Difficult conversations post. However, before the reader tried to broach the subject he should think carefully about what might be in his boyfriend's mind, and what all the possible responses might be. I have no idea what relevant discussions they might have had over the years, whether there's anything suspicions about the boyfriend's behaviour that might suggest he's been getting satisfaction elsewhere, whether they've ever discussed having an open relationship etc.

It's been almost 3 years since I last did a Dear GB post, and my old readers probably don't check my blog anymore. However, if anyone does read this, please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for the reader who sent me this email :-).