My Wife Always Insists We Don’t Have Sex While Visiting My In-Laws. But This Year, She’s Taking Her Rule to an Extreme.

How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous!

Dear How to Do It,

My wife and I are joining her parents for Thanksgiving. The trouble is that we are spending the week leading up to the holiday staying at their house, and my wife has a strict rule.

She insists that we never have sex while we are guests in their home or they are guests in ours. As ridiculous as I think that is, I am willing to go along with it. However, my wife has now decided it even extends to self-pleasure. She has forbidden me from taking a Fleshlight and has gone so far as to say I’m not even allowed to jerk off! She’s completely out of line here, right?

—Expected to Spend a Week Solo

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Rich Juzwiak: It always makes me chuckle when we get these short-term issues that will be resolved inevitably in time, especially if it’s like in this case, a week. I try to have a lot of sympathy and empathy, but I’ve never been able to extend that to anyone who can’t have sex for a week or two.

Jessica Stoya: Not having sex does not kill people. It does not cause them significant harm. You’re more of the penis and prostate expert, so I’m going to defer to you, but even from a perspective of prostate health, not ejaculating for a week is fine.

Rich: It’s fine. You’re fine. It can be annoying. But I also think resetting is a good thing. I find that if I don’t have sex or masturbate for a period of time—it could be a few days at a time, but it’s usually less than a week—when I get back to it, it’s better. So when life forces a reset, I think the best thing to do is to embrace it. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference for some people. I’m sure some think: I’m horny all the time. I’ll be horny if I have sex right now, and I’ll be horny if I don’t have sex for days. But all of that’s to say that this is a very low-level problem.

Jessica: In the event that, in practice, it doesn’t feel like a low-level problem, that is something to consider. Because it’s not a physical health issue. It’s not an issue of losing physical connection with your partner. So if it is a problem, and it would be frustrating to the point that you’d have difficulty maintaining emotional stability, then that points to an issue with how you’re using sex in your life. It’s likely signaling an absence of a more robust toolkit for stress relief, soothing, feeling good, having a release valve, all those things.

Rich: Right, your emotional regulation. Maybe there’s a bigger problem there, but the writer isn’t necessarily presenting it that way.

I don’t think that a partner has any right to legislate their partner’s masturbation unless it is so distracting, intense, or frequent that it’s getting in the way of an otherwise regular sex life with them. At that point, I understand them saying, “Look, you’re jerking off three times a day. We can never have sex because you’re so into this. Let’s have a conversation about this.”

Otherwise, if it’s a situation where both people are having regular sex and one partner is just more horny than the other and they feel the need to masturbate, I don’t really think that the other partner who’s not masturbating as much or at all has any right to get in there and say, “You can or can’t do this.” What do you think?

Jessica: Generally, I agree. The line is essentially, is the partner’s masturbation affecting the other person in some fairly concrete way? Are they shaking the bed and/or making noise in the middle of the night while their partner is trying to sleep or doing something like what you just outlined?

However, when we’re talking about this particular situation, it’s a bit different and more complex. My guess is that these discussions about having sex when the parents are around have always been in the same sort of tone as this letter, although maybe not as aggrieved. I can imagine it’s looked like the wife saying, “I don’t want this,” and the husband saying, “Fine,” or, “I think this is ridiculous, but fine.” It’s not used as an opportunity to understand each other.

Jessica: My guess would be the wife and her parents have some sort of discomfort around sex being a topic of discussion between them, and she’s trying to avoid feeling mortified herself, or upsetting or offending her parent, and that’s where this is coming from. In that case, putting myself in her shoes, I would absolutely not want a Fleshlight around. I love Fleshlight. I’ve had a licensing deal with them for over a decade, but as much as they joke about it looking just like a flashlight, that’s not actually the case.

I’ve heard of people, for instance, who, in an emergency situation where they needed a flashlight, mistook one for a flashlight. That’s even worse because then you open the thing and a vulva is staring you in the face. You are surprised because it’s not what you thought you were getting. So there are two risks. The parents could stumble upon the Fleshlight in fairly calm circumstances and know exactly what it is, or they could find it in this chaotic, frantic emergency scenario. And so that would be the last thing that I would want brought into my parents’ home if I had a well-established discomfort around discussing sexuality with them.

Basically, our writer gets to choose: Do they want to negotiate and debate, or do they want to understand their partner a little better?

Rich: I agree. I understand the problem with the Fleshlight because it’s an external thing, makes a little bit of noise when you use it, it’s hard to hide, and is easy to encounter if somebody comes into your room and is cleaning it.

But to this writer, I would say, unless there are really good reasons for your partner to have an issue with your masturbation, if somebody’s trying to impose bullshit rules on you, I don’t think that it’s wrong to break those rules. You just have to be sneaky about it. If you can masturbate in the shower without your wife knowing, then her family’s certainly not going to know, and no one’s the wiser. So why isn’t that the answer? Just be subtle about it.

Jessica: I kind of want to know if our letter writer is perhaps an accountant or any other profession that thrives on figuring out what the letter of the law is and how to walk right up to the line or find a loophole, because there very much seems to be this impulse to find one.

At the end of the day, the best and most effective negotiations come not from a goal of winning, but from a starting point of, “Tell me exactly what the issues are, what you’re hoping to accomplish, or avoid. Why?” And then coming up with suggestions for creative solutions that allow everybody to be comfortable and as close to their ideal as they want or as they can be.

Rich: I agree. So often, these problems that are posed in questions are opportunities to have further conversations or improve something about sex or communication that is lacking.

Jessica: I’m also wondering whether there’s a tendency for the wife to dictate how certain things are going to go in their relationship, because it seems like quite a big reaction to this.

Rich: Also, maybe this is not the battle for you to fight. Maybe this is the one where you say, “Uh-huh.” And then, like I said, you jerk off in the shower and do it quickly. Nobody knows. Then a week is over, and you’re back to your man cave with your Fleshlight and available sex from your partner, and everything is fine.

Jessica: One last thought: Do make sure that you have thoroughly rinsed the bottom of the shower and anywhere else semen might have landed.

Rich: Yes. No matter what, that’s just basic respect.

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