The term “fuck buddy” was coined for a reason as was “friend with benefits.” I discovered the difference between these two terms and “partner” in an odd way. My partner and I had an open relationship. I met a flight attendant (Michael) at a party thrown by a mutual friend. Michael and I hit it off from the start, and reasonably soon afterwards, we began spending weekends together. We had a lot of common interests; the sex could be amazingly hot (he lived 6 blocks from one of the bathhouses in the city — after screwing each other silly, we’d go to the baths for more insanely hot sex); he was fun to be with; and for reasons I won’t bore you with, he made me feel alive.
My partner and I were together 29 years (he died in November 2016). Out of all of the guys I knew, Michael was the only one for whom I even thought of leaving my partner. But when the vet called me one November afternoon in 2007 to tell me that my golden retriever — who had been my constant companion for a couple of years — had cancer, I didn’t call Michael to tell him or turn to him for solace. Instead, I called my partner (who was out of town at the time) and told him that Skipper had class 4 mast cell cancer. That was the moment I knew I wasn’t leaving my partner. I stopped seeing Michael shortly thereafter.
The point of the anecdote, I suppose, is to illustrate this question: if you learned that your 9 year old dog, whom you had adopted from the SPCA when she was 11 weeks old, maybe had 6 months to live, who would you call? If you can look yourself in the mirror and say “the guy who’s riding [my] ass,” then it’s time to start divorce proceedings. Until then, you’re with your wife. (To finish out the anecdote, Skipper died in September 2009. The day of Skipper’s death, my partner and I went to the SPCA and adopted a 5 month old female pit bull-mastiff mix.)