I saw on the Twitter the other day someone post a link to their blog where they talked about whether masturbation could be considered cheating on one’s partner. I didn’t click the link so can’t give them credit or even see what they said because at the time the topic didn’t seem that interesting. But here I am still thinking about it.
First off, for me, yes, masturbation would be considered cheating. I’m not allowed to do it. I consider it something I used to do back when I had control over the penis. That’s gone and along with it went my right to jack it whenever I want and the resulting orgasms. So I do personally consider at least masturbating with the penis to be a form of cheating. But that’s just me.
But that’s not the only kind of masturbation one can do. This morning, I took advantage of the last school day (and concomitant child-free time we’ll see in our house for a while) to scratch an itch only a big fat dildo can get to for me. I had a grand time and would probably still be doing it even now if not for the demands of work, life, etc. Is that cheating? At one point, Belle told me I had to have permission to do even that but I don’t bother asking her anymore. She’s made it clear that she’s not interested in working with me on my need to be someone’s hole so, when the craving gets to be too much, I’m my own. I do not consider that cheating since the activity involves my deeply-seated need to seat something deeply inside my ass. It’s a thing she’s not interested in so I’m not withholding anything from her. And, since I don’t come at the end, I’m not depleting my reserves of sexual energy in the slightest. Quite the opposite.
But what about you, oh dear amorphous blob of the average sex blog viewing masses? Is masturbation cheating when you do it? That all depends. If you’re the lower-case consonant in a power exchange dynamic like I am, yep, without explicit permission, I’d say it probably is. If you’re the upper-case consonant, nope, you can do whatever you want since the rules are yours. (I generalize and assume, of course.) But if you’re not playing the D/s game, I would say that I’m inclined to think excessive masturbation is a form of cheating.
Back in the Bad Old Days of our relationship, when we never had sex (OK, not never, but like maybe once every couple of months at best), I would jack-off regularly. I’d leave the bed, go into the den and edge myself for as long as possible looking at and reading porn until I spewed all over. Masturbation wasn’t the thing that caused our problems but it exacerbated them. The more I jerked-off the less interested I was in Belle and working on our issues and the greater the gap between us grew. I became angry and resentful and that led to all kinds of nasty stuff which, in turn, led to where we are now which is glorious so I’m not bemoaning that it had to happen. But we were lucky.
So yeah, in the specific case I laid out above, I think masturbation is cheating the relationship. It may be the case that people with extraordinarily high sex drives or the young can pull one out in the morning and still have enough left at the end of the day to make their partner feel special. Obviously, there are no absolutes. But you know what kind of person you are and where your relationship is. So you tell me. Are you cheating yourself and your partner when you take care of yourself? Are you using easy access to your wiggly bits as a way to ignore other issues and/or obligations?
I guess, at the end of it all, I can’t say if it’s cheating for you. Context is everything. Personally, I think people in relationships would be better served by pleasuring themselves absent their partners as infrequently as possible. But I’ve said things like that before and gotten in trouble. Oh well. I still think it…
