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It's Hard to Find Love if You're into Adult Breastfeeding

Whether you're visiting your lactating girlfriend three times a day or buying illegal supplements in order to produce milk, the adult breastfeeding lifestyle is pretty stressful.
'Roman Charity' by Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck

Eli* never knew he liked human milk until he tried it. It was an accident, he told VICE. When he was about 30 years old, he was dating someone who had a two-year-old daughter and had only just stopped breastfeeding her about six months before. One time they were having sex, and it just sort of happened. Neither of them said anything about it for a couple of weeks, but when they did broach the subject, they discovered that they were both super into it. They were so into it that soon Eli was on call whenever his girlfriend's breasts would hurt, which meant he was going to her house before work and on his lunch breaks.

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"I was in love with this woman at the time, and it was kind of like another way in which she needed me," he explained over the phone. "We went from dating to meeting regularly––three times a day at least––pretty quickly. I think I liked that part of it as well."

Sometimes things don't work out, even when a couple's kinks align, and they ended up splitting, leaving Eli with an odd desire and no way to fulfill it. The Philadelphia man had never sought out an adult breastfeeding relationship (ABR) before, but after his last relationship, he was unable to divorce it from feelings of arousal.

Adult suckling has been more common than you might think throughout history. There's the famous Ancient Roman story of Pero, who nursed her imprisoned father Cimon; there are examples of women breastfeeding sickly adults in pre-industrial England; in 2007, a Muslim cleric controversially announced that he thought it was OK for women to suckle men. As recently as 2013, wet nurses in China drew outrage for offering human milk as a nutritional supplement.

But as a sexual expression, adult breastfeeding is sometimes considered problematic by the DSM, one of the diagnostic manuals psychologists use to diagnose patients. But in the past few years, there's been a major push by activists to declassify offbeat behaviors like ABR as disorders. The new thinking among many scientists is that kinks only count as mental illnesses if they cause the person who has them distress or hurt other people.

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Not that Eli's situation is free of distress; adult breastfeeding is a tough kink to satisfy. Eli's only had a couple of short-term ABRs in the subsequent 14 years since he broke up with the girlfriend who introduced him to it, because having such an unusual and specific fetish puts pressure on a budding courtship. He said that he's never been on more than two dates with anyone he's met specifically because of their shared interest in lactation.

"I've found that it's absolutely a disaster," he said. "There's so much expectation and pressure that it's never worked out for me. It's so rare to find someone who's interested in this that you'll do anything you can to make something work, and it just doesn't work."

Life with a milk fetish is arguably much tougher for Laura*. She's a polyamorous lesbian and full-time college student living in what she described as a very rural part of Appalachia. As she puts it, "dating is tough for me as it is." But an additional roadblock comes in the form of her interest in breastfeeding, which she told VICE she's known about for most of her life.

Unlike Eli, she didn't have the luxury of dating someone who happened to be lactating. She figured that she'd just wait to have a kid and that everyone who dates a woman who is lactating would get curious about what the milk tasted like and things would just go from there. "Or a lot of times a couple's baby will be sleeping, and the person will be like, 'Oh my breasts are engorged, and I need someone to help me,'" she explained. "So the partner usually offers."

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A couple of years ago, Laura's primary partner was into another kink called feederism, which is the desire to see someone get fatter. She figured that her girlfriend's interest in making her breasts fill up with milk would go hand-in-hand with her desire to be suckled. So she did some research online, which led to the discovery that there were natural supplements that are illegal in the US, like Domperidone, that make women produce milk without having to get pregnant first. The drug is impossible to get here, she said, but widely available through online pharmacies in China and India.

"It was terrifying to wait for something I knew was illegal, and I would get in trouble for ordering," she told me. "But the bulk prices were like $60 for 300 pills on some websites. It seemed like too good of an offer to pass up."

She used milk thistle, put flaxseed oil on her chest, and ate lots of oatmeal to help with her output and purchased a $100 pump online to get the operation started. It was time-consuming, and it required her to actively work at it for about 20 minutes every four hours.

But when she broached the topic with her partner, her reaction was tepid. Not necessarily negative, but not gung-ho either. "She tried to suckle me a few times, but at the end of the day, I could tell she wasn't interested, and I wasn't gonna push it any further," Laura said.

As a result, the two broke up about a month ago. She said that using Tinder to find other lactation fans is a fool's errand, and that even fetish sites aren't brimming with people who are interested in an ABR. But rather than find a partner who she's compatible with in other areas, she prioritized finding someone who is into suckling––even dabbling in open-minded men for the past few weeks, though she identifies as gay.

She's done with that now, but she still has no interest in getting back with her ex, with whom she said she's reached an impasse over their divergent sexual interests.

"I'm pretty picky," she said. "But I think everyone is."

*Names have been changed.

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