This is something I've been struggling with for many years. I've known this guy for almost 10 years. For various reasons, we've never been a couple but it's clear we both like each other very much. We like the same music, movies, we have great conversations. I think he's unbelievably attractive and sex between us is wild and passionate. I've only truly fallen head over heels in love with 3 people in my life so far (I'm in my 40s) and he's one of them. The problem is he only loves bareback sex and he's extremely promiscuous. I'm a late bloomer: I was a virgin until age 24 (not on purpose!) and I was "straight" (I consider myself bi) until age 34. He's the opposite: he started having sex as soon as he was biologically able to at age 6 or 7 and has probably had sex with well over 1,000 men by now. I don't mind the promiscuity. He gets tested often and I'm assuming he's not lying about his clean test results. I'm not the jealous type and I know he truly loves me -- sex with other men is just to have some fun. But he hooks up with various men without using protection quite frequently. He's almost 100% bottom and will have bareback sex with strangers. (please don't take the following bit as racist part of my family is black). He usually sleeps with white men but told me he wanted to try sex with a black man so he hooked up with one recently -- bareback of course. The problem for me is that the HIV rate in the black MSM (men who have sex with men) community is 50%. If he had used protection this would not bother me. What bothers me is the fact that he won't let me have protected sex with him. In the past he let me use condoms but in the recent few years he'll start yelling that I'm hurting him and to take the condom off while we are having sex. It's really obvious that he gets turned on by unprotected sex and turned off by protected sex. If he knows I'm going to use a condom, he doesn't have an erection. If he knows I'm going to have unprotected sex with him, he has a raging hard-on that never softens the whole time we're having sex. I usually oblige but then I try to finish as soon as possible because now I start thinking about STDs and HIV and it's no longer a pleasant experience for me. For me sex is not pleasurable when the objective is just to climax as soon as possible. As a (vers) top, yes, sex without condoms is more pleasurable. But I like it either way, and I feel relaxed and safe wearing protection. I have two questions: 1) For the bottoms: is there actually a huge difference between unprotected and protected sex? I bottom as well but always with a condom. I've only bottomed once without a condom in my life (around 5 years ago) and I didn't notice a huge difference. 2) My theory is that this is a psychological thing. For him, unprotected sex is dangerous, risky and therefore very exciting. I'm thinking about doing an A/B experiment where I have him close his eyes and I switch between having a condom and not and seeing if he can actually tell the difference. Kind of like when I have my friends who are vodka snobs guess which kind of vodka they are drinking and they are almost always wrong. Has anyone tried this? Do people think this is a good idea to try?
Not worth the risk. That is a ridiculous demand. He can either let you wear protection or quit being promiscuous. Demanding both is incredibly inconsiderate to you.
I can tell you there is no way he'll stop being promiscuous. It's in his DNA like being gay! But when you find the one person on the planet that makes you feel like you're floating on a cloud with when you're with them, who completes your very thoughts before you make them, who still gets you insanely sexually aroused almost a decade like it was the first time you met, someone of the caliber and compatibility you'll probably never ever find again in your life (especially at my age!) - and who says he feels the same way about you -- you're willing to sacrifice quite a bit.
He says he feel the same about you, but how can you know for sure? He seems very manipulative to me. Like, he tells you you ''hurt him'' when you put on a condom. He knows about your concerns, but that doesn't seem to matter to him. He puts his desires above your safety and peace of mind. Ask yourself just how much you're willing to give up for that guy. Would he be willing to give up as much as you would?
Thanks for all the replies. Of course, he should be accommodating to my needs and not expose himself and me to all sorts of danger. That's not in dispute. If it was almost anyone else, I would say sayonara and just be friends and move on. But like I said when we're together I'm floating on a cloud. It's like no other experience. It's not just me. The first time I ever took him to a gay club in San Francisco, if I left him alone for 1 minute there would be a ring of guys around him. This is going to sound like I'm exaggerating or making it up but I remember this very clearly ... When it came time to leave I had to go get our jackets. When I returned to the front of the club, there were 5 guys surrounding him all trying to give him their phone number. I had to pry him out of there. As we were walking to my car, another guy comes RUNNING down the sidewalk with his phone number. As I got to my car, there was a note on the windshield: "You're cute! Call me (phone number)" -- not for me of course ... how did they even know that was the car we arrived in? It wasn't parked anywhere near the club. The fact that we were obviously together was no impediment to them wanting to hit on him. Sigh! ---------- Post added 16th Jul 2016 at 12:28 PM ---------- One more thing: I realized I've kind of painted him as some sort of slutty monster. He at least tells me about what he does with others, as opposed to guys who think they are in a monogamous relationship and find out one day they are HIV+. And when we are together (we live far apart so we don't see each other often) he has no problem with me administering a home HIV test to both of us. Yes, I know, that's not 100% effective, but it's better than nothing.
You are putting yourself at quite a risk. A very dangerous situation in my opinion and to say the least, in my opinion, its not worth it. Furthermore, it really doesn't matter what others may think of your situation because from your response...if I'm not mistaken from what I've read...it appears that you are so into him that you are willing to overlook whatever concerns you may have in order to be with this guy especially when he revealed he is having promiscuous bareback sex with other guys for the most part. However, I wish you well...
This sounds like a destructive relationship. However, since your question is about risk, some numbers are appropriate. First, getting tested is not an acceptable prevention strategy, because it takes months to assure a positive test once infected and, during that time, the infectiousness of a positive partner will be very, very high. The CDC estimates that anal receptive sex without a condom with a positive partner carries a risk of about 140 times per 10,000 events. In other words, around 0.14 percent. If you have 100 events, then you would have an 87 percent chance of remaining uninfected. This would be, for most people, unacceptable risk. If your partner is positive, and is on antiretroviral therapy, then the risk is about 0.06%. In this case, you would have an approximately 94% chance of remaining uninfected, after 100 events. This illustrates why it is considerably more risky to have receptive anal sex with a partner who has not been diagnosed and treated, but who is positive. If condoms are used, then the risk decreases from about 140 per 10,000 events with an undiagnosed positive partner, to about 40. It decreases to about 2 per 10,000 events when the positive partner is being treated. If the risk is 2 per 10,000, then you would have about a 98% chance of remaining uninfected after 100 events. If the uninfected partner is treated with drugs, the risk can decrease even further. Now, since you have said he is the bottom when you have sex, your risk will be a bit lower than the above. The CDC estimates that you would have a risk (without a condom) of only about 11 per 10,000 events. You'd have a 90% chance of remaining uninfected, after 100 events. The reason I went through the summary above is that it should show you how it is very likely for your partner to be HIV negative (or stay that way), after hundreds and hundreds of unprotected sexual encounters with people he does not know. It is clear from the above, that your partner is putting you at considerable risk by being more popular than Heidi Fleiss and then insisting you do him with no protection. That sort of situation is common with sociopathic personalities, and it's no wonder that someone who attracts men like flies could afford to be as sociopathic as he wishes. ---------- Post added 16th Jul 2016 at 01:36 PM ---------- The sentence in my recent post that reads: "The reason I went through the summary above is that it should show you how it is very likely for your partner to be HIV negative (or stay that way), after hundreds and hundreds of unprotected sexual encounters with people he does not know," should say instead that it is very unlikely.
I would like to add to my post that in the case where your partner has been infected in the last 30 to 60 days and is an "acute phase" of infection, the CDC estimates the risk of infection due to anal-receptive intercourse at more than 1% when condoms are not used. What this means is that you would need to have sex only 75 times to have a 50-50 chance of infection. This is why people who claim to have been "recently tested" are giving you no useful information at all, because it requires 60 to 90 days to attain a reliable, positive test result and the most infectious stage of HIV infection occurs earlier than that.
This isn't worth the risk at all. If I were you I would not involve myself in such a risk that would put me in danger of STD's and HIV. Sooner or later he will unknowingly catch something and will then pass it on to you. Not intentional, of course, but barebacking with strangers is the highest risk of transmission and staying with this guy will put you at risk. You said you dont mind the promiscuity, but would you be okay with the consequences that come with it?
I don't mean to be harsh, but here it is: if you continue having unprotected sex with him, you will, with a high degree of likelihood, end up with HIV. And, quite possibly, hep-c, plus a bunch of other unpleasant but more curable STIs. The fact he is regularly tested is near meaningless because once he has HIV, by the time he shows up positive, because of the nature of how the virus spreads in newly infected people, he will have already spread it to likely several others... Perhaps including you. By the time the test results come back, it's too late. If you don't care about having one or more serious diseases that will require lifetime medication, then being with him is a reasonable choice. Otherwise, if you care about yourself and your health, you really have no other choice but to ditch him. It is highly unlikely he will ever be monogamous, and equally unlikely he wi agree to play safe. Quite frankly, he's likely got some pretty serious self esteem issues, but apparently no interest in addressing them... And clearly you have an interest in taking care of yourself. In short, you deserve way better.
