Dear Bartender: As a bartender this must be the most common thing you hear: I have been dating my girlfriend for 18 months. She will make the perfect wife/mother. She is very caring and loves me more than anyone else. But we are only 24. I feel the urge to have sex with other women as I want to experience all that life has to offer. I enjoy sex with my girlfriend but still want to fuck other women. My girlfriend is the jealous type and would never understand something like this. She would not believe that I could satisfy my sex drive with other women, while still being intimately in love with her. One day I want us to get married and have children. But I realize my sex drive will only last so long and do not want to regret it passing me by. I don’t want to be deceitful or hurt her. I don’t want to resent her. How do I reconcile sex and love?
Dear Wants It All: First things first. Your girlfriend is not the “jealous type.” The correct way to describe a girlfriend who doesn’t want her man fucking other women is “female.” You’re not the first man to have this problem.
Mother Nature designed men and women with the proliferation of the species in mind, not your personal satisfaction. Man is born wanting to spread his seed; woman is born seeking to secure a safe haven for her young. That these two things are in conflict is the reason Hollywood has produced an excess of romantic comedies.
In short, you want what every other male on the planet wants: to fuck around without consequence. Sadly, it don’t work that way — the occasional exceptions notwithstanding. (Many gay male couples — ones who have come to grips with evolutionary reality — have enduring relationships that are less than monogamous, to give one example.) It’s unlikely you’re going to get all the sex you want without going behind your gf’s back.
The alternative is to wait until she gets restless — it happens around age 35 — and broker a deal, tit for tat. But by that time, alas, your sex drive will be on the downhill side of Mount Everybody.
Mother Nature has a sick sense of humor.