The fantasy of your partner having sex with someone else sounds like a niche fetish. It's closer to mainstream. In Dr Justin Lehmiller's survey of 4,175 Americans, 52% of straight men and 66% of gay and bisexual men had fantasised about it at least once, along with 26% of straight women and 42% of lesbian and bisexual women (Lehmiller, 2020).
Men report it more, and the roles tend to split: men lean toward watching (voyeurism), women toward being watched (exhibitionism). But the real story is why people want it, because the same fantasy does very different psychological jobs.
One fantasy, three motives
Status ("hotwifing"). The thrill is pride: my partner is so desirable that others want her. Here it's an ego boost, not a humiliation.
Masochism. The scenario is deliberately degrading. Chastity devices, small-penis humiliation and verbal put-downs often feature. Sex columnist Dan Savage, who co-authored research with Lehmiller and psychologist David Ley, argues humiliation or denial is what makes it cuckolding rather than simple sharing (CNN, 2018).
Compersion. Pure pleasure in a partner's pleasure: the opposite of jealousy.
The taboo matters too. Ley notes that in a culture that idealises monogamy, cuckolding offers a ready-made script for transgression. In gay men, where monogamy norms are looser, the fantasy leans more toward voyeurism and group sex than humiliation (Lehmiller, Ley & Savage, 2018).
Why humiliation can feel like relief
Humiliation is psychological masochism, and masochism has a surprisingly well-studied payoff: it switches off the overthinking brain.
Escape from self. Roy Baumeister proposed in 1988 that masochism works like extreme sports or meditation: intense experience crowds out self-awareness, offering a break from the burden of being you.
Subspace is measurable. Ambler and colleagues (2016) randomly assigned 14 experienced practitioners to top or bottom a scene. Bottoms showed transient hypofrontality, reduced prefrontal control linked to floating, peace and time distortion. Tops entered flow. Both reported lower stress afterwards (Ambler et al., 2016).
Control is exhausting. That's why the CEO who wants to be told what to do is a cliché with a grain of truth. Temporarily handing over control is regulating, not regressive.
Chastity devices stack several of these at once: orgasm denial, mild physical tension and symbolic submission. For some the denial is the point; for others, the status or humiliation frame.
None of this signals pathology. Consensual BDSM hasn't been shown to harm relationship functioning, and sexually satisfied people are 2–3 times more likely to have tried it (Lehmiller, 2021).
Kink peaks young. Sharing peaks later.
The "wild when young, tame when old" story is wrong. Different desires follow different curves:
BDSM fantasies peak in your 20s and decline with age, and are more common in women than men at every age.
Non-monogamy fantasies rise with age, with threesomes and group sex most popular among people in their 40s and 50s. Younger adults fantasise more about passion and romance (Lehmiller, 2024).
Lehmiller links this to personality. Extraversion and openness tend to rise with age and neuroticism falls, and that profile predicts more non-monogamy fantasies (Lehmiller, 2021). His other explanation is simpler: when we're younger, fantasies chase validation; once we're settled, they chase novelty. That may help explain why partner-sharing fantasies often surface well into a relationship rather than at the start.
The choking problem: when porn becomes sex ed
The youthful kink peak has a darker edge. Debby Herbenick's research at Indiana University shows sexual choking has gone from rare to routine:
35% of US women aged 18–24 were choked during their most recent sexual encounter, versus under 3% of women over 40 (Herbenick et al., 2023).
64% of college women have been choked during sex at some point (Herbenick et al., 2021).
About 2% of students who've been choked have passed out (ISSM), and half didn't agree on safe words or gestures beforehand (Herbenick et al., 2025).
Most choking is consensual and often wanted. The problem is information. Most students first learn about choking as teenagers (Herbenick et al., 2025), usually through porn and social media memes that treat it as default.
Porn is a highlight reel. It edits out negotiation, check-ins, lube, breaks and the constant micro-adjustments real bodies need. Porn literacy, learning what's been cut, is the missing piece of sex education.
How to bring a fantasy home
A fantasy is not a to-do list. Plenty of people enjoy cuckolding purely in their heads, and Lehmiller's team found it goes worse for people with high relationship anxiety, poor communication or a habit of rushing in (CNN, 2018). If you do want to explore something new:
Make sex talk boring first. If talking about desire is routine, raising a fantasy isn't a shock.
Lead with appreciation. "I love what we do, and I think we'd both enjoy adding X" lands as an invitation, not a criticism.
Go in small steps. A blindfold before bondage. Dirty talk about a third person before an actual third person.
Expect awkward. Most new things feel clumsy the first few times. Treat it as play, not performance.
The payoff is real. Arthur Aron's research on self-expansion has found that couples who do novel, exciting things together report higher relationship satisfaction.
The bottom line: no fantasy is good or bad in itself. What matters is consent, information, and the psychological job it's doing for you.
References
Ambler, J. K., et al. (2016). Consensual BDSM facilitates role-specific altered states of consciousness: A preliminary study. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. Link
Aron, A., et al. (2000). Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2).
Baumeister, R. F. (1988). Masochism as escape from self. Journal of Sex Research, 25(1).
Herbenick, D., et al. (2022). Non-fatal strangulation/choking during sex and its associations with mental health. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Link
Herbenick, D., et al. (2025). Sexual choking at university students' most recent sexual event: Consent, wantedness, and choking-related symptoms. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Link
Herbenick, D., et al. (2025). Students' age at first learning about choking. Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Link
Kerner, I. (2018). Why cuckolding can be positive for some couples. CNN. Link
Lehmiller, J. J. (2018). Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Da Capo.
Lehmiller, J. J. (2020). The psychology of cuckolding (podcast ep. 10). Sex and Psychology. Link
Lehmiller, J. J. (2021). The way our sex fantasies change with age. Sex and Psychology. Link
Lehmiller, J. J. (2021). 5 things science has taught us about BDSM. Sex and Psychology. Link
Lehmiller, J. J. (2024). How and why our sexual fantasies change as we age. Psychology Today. Link
Lehmiller, J. J., Ley, D., & Savage, D. (2018). The psychology of gay men's cuckolding fantasies. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47.
