Ryan and Randy met at a sex party in 2019 and started dating shortly after. By month four, they made the relationship official, eventually moved into a two-story house in Los Angeles together, and did all the things happy couples do: date nights, vacation with friends, support one another's ambitions. Then, in 2022, they decided to open the relationship. As Covid-19 restrictions loosened, "we were being exposed to other attractions and to other people who were seeking our attention," Ryan says. "We both knew we had attractions to other people. It was, let's talk about being open and see what that means for us. Because being open can mean different things to different people."

How to Do It is Slate's sex advice column. Send it to Stoya and Rich here. My husband and I have an awesome, intelligent 14-year-old son who identifies as bisexual. We are totally accepting and supportive of him. He has had a few short-lived crushes on different genders, though he doesn't seem to be particularly interested in dating right now. His internet search histories are pretty benign--mostly video game stuff, and the occasional search for "hot girls" and "boobs."

In the late summer of 2020, when much of normal social life was suspended, a relationship that I had been in for several years abruptly collapsed. I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in. I wandered the sidewalks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where discarded masks littered the gutters, with a sense of having been exiled from my own life. My apartment, with its cat and its plants, still existed but was no longer my home; I could get a glass of cold prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished. In Haruki Murakami's novel "1Q84," a character climbs down a ladder into a parallel existence in which things appear to be the same but nothing really is.