Ask Beastly: I’m in an Open Relationship With a Much Hotter Man

Beauty standards are a trap, and comparison will rot your joy. Here’s how to climb out.

I'm writing to suggest a topic that you might not have addressed head-on. I'm in a 20-year relationship with an extremely beautiful man. He gets hit on all the time, sometimes by famous model types, could "get" most anyone he wanted, looks 10 years younger than he is, and so on. He's also successful, charming, and so on. I'm not a total slouch, but I have my typical human flaws and am considered "above average" or "nice-looking" by many. However, there is a clear difference in the level of attractiveness that probably 99% or more people would agree with.

Here's my issue: especially as our relationship becomes more open, this power differential becomes starker, and it causes a great deal of anguish, jealousy, and even envy. On the plus side, he has always maintained that he finds me attractive and has demonstrated this, though not as much as I'd like. Also, I've seen the guys he goes for and, interestingly, it's not necessarily the "super good looking" types. Anyhow, I'm hoping you might be interested in writing a post about how apparent attractiveness asymmetry affects same-sex male relationships, particularly in an "open" situation.

Hey friend.

If I had an easy solution to the comparison games of gay men, I'd make way more money than I do now.

I have been in relationships like yours and know how they can feel. On the one hand, dating a very hot guy is a confidence-booster—he’s daily proof that a hot person finds you attractive. On the other hand, it's intimidating and baffling, and sometimes you wonder how you measure up, and how other gay men compare you to him.

In my life, feelings of inadequacy and competitiveness have decreased with age. Growing a little older and discovering that I no longer have a college-student body has been as jarring for me as it surely is for everyone. But, to my pleasant surprise, the comparison games have cooled. My body and appearance, though far from what I consider ideal, are set and unlikely to change much now. This is now, unquestionably, my body. I was given some good looks, and I can tweak those looks with steroids and surgery, but I am not going to drastically change into one of the great beauties I admire. But everyone else has aged alongside me, even the really beautiful ones, and that’s the grace of it—aging is the great equaliser. Time chases all of us.

It’s nice to see how aging and time can make gay men more humble, less judgmental, and less caught up in the mess of all this. But sometimes it doesn’t. If, by his thirties, a gay man hasn’t learned that the imagism of our youth must be surrendered a bit, he’s still a mess, still figuring it all out, and that’s okay, too. Looking for that kind of maturity, that kind of aged energy, is now part of the hunt. In the past, I might have just looked for a big dick and hot body, but now I also look for some evidence of having grown up.

Gay men tend to come out late—our sexual and romantic lives start later than our hetero peers—so it can take us a bit longer to outgrow high school and become adults. But that’s the game! That’s the community! We must love it for its mess and glamour, and we must also be able to manage our lives within it healthily—no small feat in an arena of intense, soul-crushing body dysmorphia and the normalisation of such extreme measures to create and preserve beauty.

My former partner, Brent, and I shared an attraction to beefcake studs and muscle guys, but beefcake studs and muscle guys usually chose him. That was hard. But it became less hard as I grew up during our relationship, and I'm not entirely sure why. Some element of the chase, and the imagined hierarchies of beauty, waned. I grew more confident, not because I necessarily looked better than before, but because I settled into greater comfort with myself and with a world in which many men are not attracted to me, while many others are. Some of the men who are attracted to me are ridiculously hot. For every man who's not interested, someone is, and I increasingly care less about the ones whose bells I just don't ring. I've talked to others who've left their twenties behind and feel similarly. It seems we just have fewer fucks to give.

I'm not old enough yet to say from experience whether or not gay men develop a natural magnanimity to one another as we age, but it would make sense. Time spares no one. I have spoken to men of all ages about sex, and the highest reported degree of sexual satisfaction seems to come from men in their fifties and sixties, which suggests that every decade comes with fewer fucks to give. And that's fucking awesome.

Your partner is a great beauty, so instead of comparison games, try to see his life from his perspective. He got lucky in looks and is using them while he can. Celebrate with him. Enjoy him. After all, looks fade. Time is cruel. Let him enjoy where he is, and let yourself do the same. You cannot change the cards you were dealt, but if you're above-average, you're lucky. So be lucky. You can’t change the minds or tastes of the men who aren’t interested, so focus on the ones who are.

Surely you know by now that your imagined hierarchy of beauty (you being "above-average" and he being "exceptional") is a fiction, something that exists only in your mind, right? We have all been conditioned to accept certain fictions of beauty—and not very effectively, since everyone disagrees over what features are most beautiful.

Ask any group of six or seven faggots who their celebrity crushes are or what their idealised image of male beauty is, and you will get six or seven different answers. Surely you know these estimations of beauty are your head talking, not the vox populi. We can be aware of our delusions and still be troubled by them, but it helps to see these so-called "standards" of beauty as they are: an amalgamation of history and commerce, rolled into one big, lucrative delusion that exists only in your head.

From history, we know steroid culture among gay men was a direct result of AIDS wasting syndrome. Steroids were prescribed to prevent wasting, and after HIV medication improved, the wasting went away, but the muscle look remained in vogue. From commerce, we can see how we've been strategically sold what is beautiful by dozens of industries for generations. Gay men are a lucrative market. We tend to be childless with expendable income. Clothes, underwear, lingerie, art books, magazines, vacations, resorts, and all kinds of shit branded specifically for MSM are a multibillion-dollar industry. We are sold image standards. They are a product of marketing. They are not real. And they cause incalculable pain and body dysmorphia disorder that leads to drug addiction, eating disorders, and suicide every day.

Gay image standards have evolved for decades—influenced by porn, television, music, and much else. Can you imagine being a gay man in club culture in the ‘90s when everyone had to be hairless? Imagine having a complex of shame and insecurity around something as natural as body hair—something that (at least in gay circles I run in) is now quite popular. It’s all trivial—it means nothing. If any wisdom can be gleaned from the continuous changes over the years regarding what is deemed beautiful and what isn’t, it’s a lesson in the subjectivity of beauty—the idea that anyone you find gorgeous is beautiful just to you, not the wider world. Each of us has to contend with an arbitrary set of image standards that exist in our time, but within those standards, we are free to explore and define what and who we desire.

However fictitious, beauty standards do affect our lives. Of course they do. (Money, nations, corporations, and all sorts of other entities that have no literal reality—the lines on a map are just lines on a map—shape the lives of modern humans far more than objectively real things like rocks and rivers.) However, we can work on how much we let these standards affect our lives, since, as conscious beings, we have some ability to choose how much we agree with and believe in them. We are not dumb automatons, wholly at the mercy of the cultural standards we are born into or the mores we’re brought up in (if we were, no one would be kinky, there would be no cultural rebels, no free love movement, no youth rebellion). I get much encouragement from punk, goth, grunge, and other alt movements—any subculture that resists societal standards of dress and behavior and says "fuck you" to commonly accepted notions of beauty. Thank god for rock and roll. I love people who live in defiance of norms, and we should all be glad they exist because they are proof that the system can be defied, that beauty is subjective, that standards can be smashed, and that tastes can change.

As a personal choice, I do not live in total rejection of the commonly accepted image standards I know as a gay man in the West. I go to the gym, eat my protein, take more testosterone than I should, and participate in arguably some of the most toxic aspects of gay male image culture. That’s a choice. However, I believe in doing it conscientiously. And, as a personal ethic, I do not impose it on others. Quite the opposite: I must affirm and celebrate those who choose to look, live, and behave differently from me. And while no one is forced to have sex with those they don’t find attractive, as a sex writer, I’d suggest everyone at least try sex with those whose looks fall beyond what you initially find beautiful, as you might be surprised at how varied your so-called “type” is. I participate in fitness because it's fun, but I know what it is, and sometimes I laugh at its stupidity while dragging my ball and chain to the gym.

There is nothing I can say to make you stop comparing yourself to him or being envious of the guys he gets. If these feelings are bad enough to end the relationship, maybe it needs to end. Relationships have ended for less. But take heart: time evens the playing field. The energy you're wasting on weighing yourself against him is not being spent simply enjoying your life.

I think many people fear jealousy when considering a non-monogamous relationship. The trick with non-monogamy (and polyamory, and any healthy relationship) is to let everyone own their feelings. Thoughts and feelings are the sole domain of those who think and feel them. No one can make you feel anything, and no one is responsible for making you feel differently. This means your insecurities and self-perceptions are valid, but they are strictly your business (thoughts and emotions exist only in your mind, your body). These feelings are not his to fix and have nothing to do with him.

This might seem obvious, but the implications of viewing thoughts and feelings this way are profound. Accepting that emotions and thoughts are the sole domain of whoever thinks and feels them means it's no one's prerogative to manage your emotions, including your insecurities—it’s yours and only yours.

Similarly, your perceptions of other people's attractiveness are also only yours. You're allowed to feel what you feel and think what you think, but you're not allowed to project your perceptions onto others. You can’t assume that "99 % or more” people would agree with your private estimation of your attractiveness versus your partner's—you have no power to crawl into the minds of other gays and see how they view the two of you, and you never will. These estimations are just your mind talking.

We tell ourselves that beauty standards are unanimous and objective when, of course, they are not. Yes, there are some consistencies across cultures: thanks to evolution, signs of health have often been preferred because they signal a higher likelihood of gene survivability. But it's been a long time since mate selection was a life-or-death decision for humans. We now live in a world where all body types and abilities are valued, where so-called "standards" of beauty are as numerous and diverse as the global cultures (and subcultures) that exist on Earth. And while so-called “beauty standards” were once products of longstanding global cultures and religions, they are now the domain and creation of advertising companies, social media, and e-commerce platforms—they are as ephemeral and passing as a YouTube ad. Which means they just matter less. And that’s good. With so much more noise in the world, so many different influencers and agencies screaming for our attention to tell us what is beautiful, you’re freer than ever before to decide for yourself what is.

This scale of beauty on which your partner allegedly sits higher than you is a personal belief, something that does not extend into the objective world. You can believe in it—people believe all sorts of things—but you're not allowed to assume everyone else does too. What’s beautiful is that you see him that way. You got the guy you think everyone wants. And if he’s stayed with you, he probably thinks the same of you.

Love, Beastly