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I'm not in the habit of asking the internet for advice but my wife and I have stumbled into something that has put us way out of our element and quite frankly the nature of the question severely limits even the number of people in our lives we can solicit advice from so You get to weigh in.
For whatever reason, my wife is a magnet for LGBTQ+ people. Roughly half of her friends fall into this category. I have theories as to why this is the case but they are unimportant. One such couple is a married lesbian/bisexual pair who we have been good friends with since college. There's a running joke about us having a threesome with the bisexual, who is really quite fetching. It works as a joke for us because my public stance on group sex is "Dear Lord spare me from that awful group sex. All that commotion."
Well it looks like the chickens have come home to roost. They invited us to dinner last night, which they hardly ever do, and asked us if we would be cool with me fathering a child with the bisexual. My wife choked on her drink and I made a joke that I'd only agree if we did it the old-fashioned way rather than IVF which didn't land because that was, in fact, their plan. My wife understandably rejected that idea outright and couldn't even be mollified by a promise that it only be missionary with the lights off and I'd try super-hard to think of her, so now the question is do I contribute genetic material into a plastic cup some time in the near future.
I'm willing (and kinda want) to do this. We have a gaggle of kids of our own so it's not like I'm going to run off to play dad. We also have come to the conclusion that lawyers are going to be heavily involved beforehand to keep us free of financial obligation and limit any parental rights my wife and I may have claim with the possible exception of the couples' untimely death.
But even so, this seems like a big ask from them, and kind of risky w/r/t our marriage. The couple is pretty enthusiastic about my involvement though, so my wife is quite concerned that a "no" from us will damage the friendship irreparably. Why me specifically? I'm well-liked, have a family history of longevity, I'm smart and conscientious enough to be a physician (at least by training), and (perhaps somewhat cynically) a 6'4" formerly muscle-bound football player. Like Sydney Sweeny I've got good genes even if I'm a 4/10 in the face with abnormally long alien limbs. Plus we live in the same area so we'd have the chance to be involved at least somewhat. We see these two semi-regularly. That may be a downside though! We do have a plausible out that could spare us in that I'm over the age of 40, which I think is when most sperm banks won't take donations.
Thoughts? It hasn't even been 24 hours since we've been thinking about potential problems so I'm sure you guys could come up with new ones to think about. We're kinda Christian but this kinda stretches the whole "love thy neighbor" thing a bit.
... I philosophically prefer surrogacy where the donors stay in the picture, so caveat that I'm going to be biased in favor of donation, here. That said, potential problems:
All of that said, I've seen it work out perfectly fine for a good few people, and not in the porn premise (or polyamory) sorta way. The problems are downstream of you not just getting a kid, but a whole set of informal relationships, but those relationships remain when good things are happening, too.
The only group of people that lesbians seem to hate more than straight men are bisexual women. I recall being algorithmically given some tweet where a lesbian separatist was insisting that the lesbian domestic violence rate normalizes once you exclude lesbian/bisexual pairings; no idea if that's true (it's rather self serving).
(I don't think gay men generally hate straight women, but I'm pretty sure there's tension between gay men and bisexual men because bisexual men are seen as having an easy path to normalcy, though my impression is that this is mollified somewhat by the likely long-standing fact that bisexual men are a big chunk of penetrative partners. My entirely politically incorrect, and probably also factually incorrect, theory is that crossdressing and affected femininity emerged as a kind of cultural adaptation to this fact that pulls in some straight-leaning bisexual men. The loneliest person I know is a gay friend, who is both the archetypal femme who went to cosmetology school and has mostly women friends, yet is, apparently, a top. He's the sort of man who would be a ladykiller if he played for the other team and were 10% less obsequiously feminine, so his professed loneliness startles me a great deal.)
I can also say that I had the strange honor? of having been propositioned by multiple women or trans men in marriages with women to cheat on their wives with them. Turned it down, very much not my thing. But it was more than slightly creepy how eager and graphic they were in their apparent desire for the male anatomy. Neither homewrecking nor "I'm the guy who turned her" are my kink, though it really must be said that these ladies were not for turning. They were already, well, turnt.
I can't say my LGBT friends have always been the closest, but dang did they give me some great stories.
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