During the period of my life when I was playacting as a more sociable and emotionally slutty person than I actually am, I once went on a date with a new partner after spending the previous night sleeping over at another partner’s house. The one I was staying with was a kinky fucker (well, actually, they both were, but I didn’t know the full extent of that yet), and because we’d been discussing shaving fetishism among numerous other kinks, he offered to shave my legs for my date.
As kinksters are wont to do, we first discussed our motivations for pursuing a scene such as this – and he clarified, crucially, “I’m into it for service reasons. It’s not, like, a cuckolding thing for me.”
I was glad he called this out by name, because my experiences with non-monogamy have often felt laced with quiet cuckold feelings. It’s hard not to internalize the tropes of this kink (hopefully sans the racist aspects some people incorporate into cuckolding, which are obviously very troubling and are not what I’m talking about here), and to bump into them while navigating the choppy psychological waters of dating multiple people in a world that tells us we should only date one at a time. Unless you’re one of those people who’s blessed to find polyamory instantly easy (and tbh I usually doubt these people are telling the full truth), you probably have to fight against your ingrained emotional responses to access a mindset more in line with your values and ethics, at least some of the time. Culture tells us another dude stealing your chick is an egregious harm requiring aggressive retaliation, and another chick stealing your man is an invitation for catty sabotage – so sometimes you may have to swallow those societally-induced impulses before responding in a way you’re actually okay with. (Not sure what the common “infidelity” tropes are for non-hetero orientations and non-cis people, frankly, because our culture has far less to say about them!)
While some people neatly sidestep these tropes altogether, I’ve often been intrigued by the idea of wading right into them – consensually, knowledgeably, communicatively, and carefully. My partners over the years have differed a lot on the subject of how much they wanted to hear about my interactions with other partners – some preferred to hear nothing at all, some wanted just the basics, some wanted elaborate descriptions of me getting railed by someone else’s dick. Cuckolding often felt like the elephant in the room. I was aware, always, that going into too much detail – or the wrong kind of detail – could make a person “feel cuckolded,” and that this was generally something to be avoided.