My bf (28) and I (32) are both gay trans men. We’ve been together a year, and happily living together for 10 months – we took a chance on living together when we both needed new housing situations and it’s honestly been the best decision I’ve ever made. Love planning for the future with him and incredibly grateful he’s been in my life over what’s been a tough year for me developing chronic pain.

When we got together, we had a very active D/s dynamic and had a lot of sex, kinky and otherwise. Also around the time we got together, I started developing pelvic floor dysfunction, which variably really impacts my ability to have sex. Some of the common symptoms I have are genital numbness, pelvic tension and pain that’s really exacerbated by arousal, pain in the hips/abs, low libido, and too much pain for penetration. I’m learning how to manage and anticipate these symptoms, but it’s a slow process and really been taking a toll on my confidence and feeling comfortable in my body.

We got into our relationship intending it to be open (sexually, not dating other people) and speaking about that from the beginning. It’s something we’ve both been really excited about, both exploring separately and together. However, for various reasons, we didn’t do this right away – we had a lot of upheaval in the first few months together between him getting top surgery, moving in together, him getting laid off from his job, and my various health ups and downs, so we wanted to wait until we both had more stability and headspace to make opening up as pleasurable and communicative as possible.

A month or two ago, I was starting to get to a place where opening felt more possible – my sex drive was coming back after months of dedicated physical therapy and when my boyfriend asked how I felt about him starting to look for hookups, I was turned on and excited by the idea. He and I also had sex again for the first time in months and I was feeling really relieved about our dynamic continuing to evolve and feel live and good.

However, about a month ago I stopped being able to access PT, which triggered my worst pain flare in months, a libido crash, and also my first ever herpes outbreak 💀. Tbh this has felt pretty devastating for me – feels like a massive setback and bringing up a lot of grief and old trauma stuff for me. I’ve been struggling to tell what I need, and while I thought about asking my boyfriend to hold off on seeing other people, I finally settled on asking him not to tell me anything about his hookups other than where he’s going and that he’s home safe. That feels right for right now – he has a very high sex drive and gets a lot of physical/emotional support from sex I really want him to have, I’m less anxious hyper-fixating on details and feel like we’ll need to navigate periods like this again, so might as well start now – but I feel like I’m also grieving the hot, mutually fun opening we’d both imagined. Also really conscious that it might take me a while still to figure out how I can have sex right now full stop, much less how to navigate hookups with other people. My bf is incredibly supportive, but it’s really hard not to feel like my disability is tanking the best, most exciting and loving sexual relationship I’ve ever had, and him meeting up with someone a few days ago just made me incredibly sad.

Tl;dr: my boyfriend and I are opening up while I’m learning a navigate a new-ish disability that significantly impacts my ability to have sex, I’m really struggling with grief and lack of confidence and don’t really know what I need/how to navigate an open dynamic that atm looks like only him fucking outside the relationship. Would love to hear from people who’ve been in similar situations or if anyone has thoughts/advice!