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Q I am a 20-year-old male and have been with my girlfriend for two years. We have sex every day or every other day. But for some reason, sometimes we have to stop because my penis starts to get cuts—not on the head but on the skin that overlaps the head. Is there something I can buy or do to stop these cuts?

A Okay, let’s take this in the order of likelihood: No. 1: There’s not enough lubrication when you’re having sex. To resolve this you either have to make sure your girlfriend becomes good and wet naturally before entering her, or have a lubricant handy and apply liberally. No. 2: The sex you’re having is so extremely vigorous that your penis is getting just as much of a pounding as your girlfriend. Lack of lubrication could be a factor with this as well, but I would think that your girlfriend would be bemoaning her soreness just as much as you are if this were the case. Resolution: Take the thrusting down a notch and the lube up a notch. No. 3: Your dick is sporting something called a frenulum breve, which essentially means that your foreskin doesn’t have as much wiggle room as it should, thereby causing it to develop abrasions rather than moving freely during sex. Resolution: frenuloplasty, a surgical procedure in which the frenulum—the strip of skin that connects the foreskin to the head of the penis—is lengthened to allow for more mobility. As someone who’d prefer not to have anything sharper than a bicuspid anywhere near his dick, I sincerely hope it’s not issue No. 3, but you should have a urologist take a look just in case.

Q I am a 33-year-old gay male and have been with the same guy for 16 years. We began dating in high school in a small town down South. We moved to New York from Mississippi about five years ago, and that’s when things began to change. Four months after moving here, he cheated on me. We fought and then I forgave him and we made up. Two months later he did the same thing, and although we continued to live together, I couldn’t fully forgive him. We decided to stay together, but things never got back to normal. He would ask for sex, but I would always decline because I felt uncomfortable. We rarely argue and we have lots of fun but still no sex. Some of our friends say we are stupid, dependent or just too cheap to get separate apartments. I am content with our relationship right now, and although the sex is absent at the moment, I know that it can easily return. Are our friends right? Should we stop this nonsense and go our separate ways?

A There’s no way I’m going to give you a definitive answer to that question—you put 16 years into this relationship, you don’t really want some schmo in a magazine to make the final call, do you? Here’s what I will say, though: Some relationships have a time and place. You meet someone in high school and it clicks and you help each other survive being gay in a small town, and you depend on each other as you make the move from Mississippi to New York City. It’s a beautiful thing, but sometimes an expiration date appears simply because you’ve gone as far as possible together. That’s when hanging on is done out of fear of the unknown or an interest in trying to cling to an unrecoverable past. If you both are still willing to work on it, then he’s got to stop cheating, and you’ve got to start allowing yourself to be vulnerable again. If that’s not possible, then it makes the most sense to call it quits and start to grow again with someone else.

Send letters to Jamie Bufalino c/o Time Out New York, 475 Tenth Avenue, 12th floor, New York, NY 10018, or send e-mail to sex@timeoutny.com.