Q: I am a twentysomething, straight, cis-female expat. How long do I have to wait to ask my German lover, who is übersensitive about the Holocaust, to indulge me in my greatest—and, until now, unrealized—fantasy: Nazi role-play? He is very delicate around me because I am a secular Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. (Even though I’ve instructed him to watch The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling as a Jewish neo-Nazi, to get a better grasp on my relationship with Judaism. To be clear, I am not actually a neo-Nazi—just your garden-variety self-hating Jew.) This persists even though we’ve spoken about my anti-Zionist politics. Evidently he was indoctrinated from a young age with a hyperapologetic history curriculum. I appreciate that he thinks it was wrong for the SS to slaughter my family, but it’s not like he did it himself. I know it sounds really fucked-up, but I promise this isn’t coming from a place of deep-seated self-loathing. Even if it were, it’s not like we’d be hurting anybody. We’re both in good psychological working condition, and neither of us is an actual bigot. I would try to get to know him better, but we are so different (there’s a big age difference) I don’t really see our relationship being much more than ze sex. —National Socialist Pretend Party
While your kink didn’t really faze Oppenheimer (it’s not exactly unheard of), NSPP, your discomfort with your own Judaism did.
A: “They’re both right,” said Allena Gabosch, a poly activist, educator, and podcaster (The Relationship Anarchy Show). “What the letter writer describes—a small group of people who love each other and all sleep together—is sometimes called ‘polyfidelity.’ It’s less common, and yet I’ve seen it work. His ex’s definition is more common: a primary couple with secondary and sometimes even tertiary partners. There is no ‘one true way’ to do poly, no matter what anyone says.”
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