I Just Learned How My Wife Paid Her Way Through College. It’s Changed Everything I Thought I Knew About Her.

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

My wife “Halley” and I have been married for a little over four years and we have a 1-year-old child. Last weekend, we both had a few drinks when she revealed something to me that I never would have expected from her.

Halley said that back when she was in college, she used to work as a dominatrix to support herself. I was taken aback and since then I haven’t been able to look at her the same way. I realize this took place before we met, but I can’t get it out of my head the my wife and the mother of my child is a former sex worker. Should this be an issue, or is it something I need to get over?

—Shocked

Rich Juzwiak: The final question is amusing because this would never fly with us. Do you know who we are? Do you know who Jessica is in particular?

Jessica Stoya: For people who don’t know, I was a quite notable porn performer for over a decade. To this day, the royalties from my Fleshlight fund my university education. I have throughout the almost two decades that I’ve worked in sexuality, dated many people who’ve had this problem. So I actually have a lot of empathy for it. The first thing I want to say on whether this “should” be an issue or not, is that it is an issue for our writer. The first step is to admit to yourself, that yes, it is an issue for me.

Rich: And then what?

Jessica: Then sit there and try to understand why. Where is this issue coming from? Are they insecure now because they’re projecting some deep knowledge about sexuality onto their wife that they think no one who hasn’t done sex work could ever attain or measure up to? Are they dealing with internalized voices telling them, “How could you possibly have a partner who used to do this kind of work?” I could go on at length. Many previous boyfriends would recognize themselves to an uncomfortable degree. But the way to get through this is like with anything that we’re feeling judgment about: ask ourselves why, and then engage our logical mind to work through whether we actually believe the things coming from inside us or can debunk them.

Rich: To me, like always, I have a hard time empathizing with having an issue or a problem with somebody’s sexual history. I understand if you found out your partner committed vehicular manslaughter really negligently or your partner did something just absolutely terrible in the past that you just can’t get over. But sexual history doesn’t hold the same weight for me. There’s a practical reason for why she did it, too. She did it to put herself through college because it made her money.

So I think I’m less sympathetic to this than you are because if it weren’t for someone’s past, they likely wouldn’t have been led to this moment. Almost certainly the trajectory of our writer’s life would have been different in a way that would have never allowed them to meet. So would it have been better if she didn’t do the sex work and then the butterfly effect means she never came into your life? Would it have been better not to have her in your life? Or do you want this whole person who comes with a history that maybe even has stuff you don’t like in it? But she’s not currently a dominatrix and that whole phase of her life is over, so whatever problem you have with that, I do think that this is a letter writer problem and certainly not a wife problem.

Jessica: It is absolutely a letter writer problem. I can also add that this history is a part of who Halley is. Whether working as a dominatrix shaped her as a person in some profound way or simply allowed her to access the education that likely shaped her as a person in a profound way, it impacted her.

One mistake I have seen men make is to try to separate these things—they’ve acted as though my work in sexuality took part in some parallel dimension that has nothing to do with me. And I think where they run into trouble there is that rather than sitting with all these uncomfortable emotions and working through why they’re having these emotions, they’re just trying to shove them in a box. So then like you pull out a sex toy and they like lose their minds because it reminds them of this feeling in a box that they’re trying really, really hard to ignore. Or you know, they see a banner ad or a story comes out… Whatever it may be.

So if our letter writer has some impulse to say this was in the past and I’m going to put it out of my head and never think of it again, that anecdotally speaking, does not seem to be useful. Also, in my experience, it’s just really uncomfortable to have someone trying to take part of your lived experience and erase it.

Rich: Right. It sounds like it will come up again in some way. What if she gets verbal in bed? What if they already have a dynamic where she dominates him in some way or in all the ways? I see how what was once accepted and even taken for granted could now create constant distractions pulling you out of the moment if you stay hung up on this.

It sounds like the answer to that then is to really get to know it, to demystify it, and to really understand what it was like, why it happened, and to what degree it’s part of her personality. There are probably a lot of unanswered questions here.

Jessica: Work as a dominatrix tends to attract people who love power exchange. Again anecdotally speaking, but I’ve seen a lot of pro doms who are interested in psychology as well, and also people who are attracted to the way that it sits in this space where you don’t actually have to show your face on public record.

At the end of the day, you are a service worker exerting acting skills and people skills. But I say that to maybe help our writer consider that this as a form of work a person might choose precisely because it requires several different skill sets. I’ll spare everyone the full rundown of all the different skill sets that go into it.

As far as confronting the writer’s feelings on this issue, I’d also simultaneously encourage them to talk with their wife and to avoid putting the work of helping them process this on their wife.

Rich: It’s like what people say, if you’re having a psychedelic trip and it starts to take a bad turn, the worst thing that you can do is run away from that scariness. You have to actually go through it, and even if it’s hard, you just have to push through. Oftentimes, once you do, that creates the kind of profound psychedelic experience that people take with them after the trip is over. Dealing with the hard stuff facilitates growth. It seems to me like there’s no way to really get to the other side of this without actually getting through it. Does he have the strength to do that is the other question.

Jessica: To circle back to internalized messages about how can you respect someone who did this work, I would advise our writer to be careful and intentional about who they’re choosing to talk to outside of the marriage about this. Go for your progressive, chill, understanding friend, or seek out a very sex-positive therapist.

Rich: Yes, getting over this will take work. It’s going to be a process. But that’s your wife of over four years and with whom you have a one-year-old child, so it seems like that process is going to be worth going through.

Jessica: Absolutely.

More Advice From Slate

I’m dealing with feelings of jealousy for the first time in about six years and I would like it to stop. For context, I have a roommate to whom I’m very close and we have some mutual attraction that we’ve agreed not to act on for a variety of reasons. They’re maybe my closest friend ever and I absolutely love them. The roommate is polyamorous and currently has three partners. About two months ago I made a pretty major faux pas in asking out their partner M (who said yes) and it nearly destroyed my relationship with my roommate.