The moment it became ok

I’m at a conference out of town at the moment, in a hotel with no wireless in the rooms unless you want to pay 15 bucks a day (apparently the $200 a night can’t cover the cost), and my lab group are either A) in their rooms having called it quits at 8:00pm or B) made plans without consulting me. Oh, and for some reason the lobby, where the WiFi is free, has the air conditioning blowing in the middle of December, and I’m right under a vent. So, why not write a blog post about ethical non-monogamy? Why not, indeed.

Of course, all the pictures will have to be SFW. So here's a kitty. 

My initial post may have made it seem like, after the “Three Bottle Night,” I was completely on board and ready to jump into this thing. That may have been a slight exaggeration for the sake of dramatic flow. The reality is that, when I got up and went to work the next day, a lot of the same concerns had started to come back. I wanted to make things work with the wife’s plans to open up our marriage, but could I really do this? Could I really deal with her being with another man? I wanted to think that I could, and it had all seemed so doable the night before. But that didn’t change the fact that the nervous feelings were here, and I would need to sort them out before I proceeded. And, of course, I did what people who are nervous in these situations do, I found some falsehoods to which to cling.

Maybe she only really wanted to date women? I could deal with that. It’s kind of stupid that I would feel that way, but I’ve come to understand this is a pretty standard reaction among men. Women still fall in love with other women, but for some reason it doesn’t feel as threatening as other men. I guess it’s just a primal male thing. Stay off of my woman. Ugh ugh. *caveman sounds*

Or, maybe we would just date as a couple? You know, swinging. Group stuff. That sort of thing. That would be ok. It could even be pretty fun. I mean, who doesn’t fantasize about that? And then I can keep an eye on her and end it if it starts to feel like she’s more into the other people than me.

Cling to that life raft, buddy.

I tried to discuss some of these concerns with my wife that night, and that was when she made the second awesome choice in this process: she didn’t let me hang on to my delusions. Did she want to date other men? Sure. She mostly was curious about seeing women, but she wasn’t going to rule out seeing men either. Well, but, what about dating? Just group stuff, right? No, not that either. We could start out that way if it made me more comfortable, but the time would come when one or both of us might want to date solo (little did I know it would be me, but that’s a topic for a previous post,) and ultimately she didn’t want to put any barriers on the future. That was a big thing, and something that I would recommend to other couples thinking about exploring this: don’t put up unnecessary barriers before you even begin. By all means communicate and determine what you can both handle, but be open to that changing in the future as well. One of the first instincts most couples who are getting into this have is to generate a bunch of rules, and one of the first things that happens when you tell people who have been doing this for a while about your rules is that they will smile knowingly, if not laugh out loud. Because really, the people that make it work almost exclusively cut it down to as few rules as possible. The wife and I aren’t QUITE there yet, but I think we’d both like to get to a point where we had only 4 rules:

1. Be safe
2. Our family comes first (not a rule for some Poly couples, but one we both believe in strongly.)
3. Communicate
4. If they don’t read, don’t fuck ‘em (again, not a rule for everybody, but seriously who wants to sleep with some dumb-dumb?)

So I was a little put off by her no-longer coddling me, but it was really the shot of cold water to the face that I needed at the time. I think the worst thing I could have done was to go in with some illusions about what would be going on down the line. She was willing to work with me (I have to emphasize this,) but she didn’t want me to have something false in my mind that, when revealed later, would make me feel betrayed or tricked. And, ultimately, she tried to get me to stop for a moment and look at the positives, since I was focusing too much on the negative possible outcomes. And, ultimately, that helped to lead me out of the funk.

But that didn’t make it immediately easier. I went to bed that night still pretty worried about the future, and did a bit more pacing and fretting the next day. Until, of course, the moment that I was referring to with the title of this post occurred. I had sat down and started looking through Craigslist Casual Encounters before shutting it off in disgust and horror when a thought occurred to me. I don’t know what reminded me of this, but I started to remember an old fantasy of mine. It was very specific: I wanted to go running with a woman or work out at the gym and then, sweaty and exhausted, fall into a pile with her and have sex. Gross, post-workout sex. Quit judging me. I don’t know why this turns me on, but it totally does. My best guess is that it’s related to a “Hard Bodies” issue of Playboy my dad had when I was in my teens.

This would be a picture of the cover, but I'm in a hotel lobby, remember? So here's a bunny.

Anyway, this was a fantasy I had more or less written off as “never going to happen.” But, all of a sudden, it hit me that this was no longer the case. Admittedly, I would have to find someone else that was also into this (extremely specific) fantasy, but it was BACK ON THE TABLE. It was possible! And all the other weird shit my subconscious didn’t really want to admit it was into was ALSO back on the table. Group sex? It was possible! BDSM? Possible! Sado-Masochism?Why not? POSSIBLE! Or, in the non-sex realm, I could find another hardcore gamer (my wife tries, but she’ll be first to admit that some of the rules of stuff I’m into make her head spin.) Or someone else who I can’t even think of yet who would enrich my life in ways I couldn’t currently imagine!

And that’s the point, people. The sex is cool and all, but if that was all that was involved in this it wouldn’t be worth the time or effort, because open marriage isn’t easy. My wife and I almost never fight, but there have been a number of “tense conversations” that have occurred as a direct result of our opening up. If you’re doing this for the right reasons, however, it’s worth the trouble. You’re not trying to replace something that’s missing in your relationship, but the new people in your life can complement what you already have. And I’ll be honest with you: this was an entirely selfish moment for me. Yes, my wife was going to get the same benefits from this, but for the first time I let myself think about how this could be awesome for ME.

And that’s another point of all this: rediscovering independence in your relationship. I’m a person that will absolutely lose myself in the person I’m with, but suddenly I found myself feeling like I did for the period between my first marriage and when I met my current wife. I’ll probably discuss this more in a future post, but it felt inexplicably good to be back on the hunt for prospective partners on my own, mostly because it put me back in the mindset of thinking, from time to time, about myself first (within reason of course, love you honey.)

And just like that, it started to be ok. Maybe I just needed a carrot dangling in front of me, but I started to really think “Huh, this could actually work.” There was still work to do, of course. That visceral gut reaction to men who aren’t me touching my wife was still not under control, so I had a lot of mental exercises and visualization to do before I could get a handle on that. But I was on the path at last. And if you are a person who is considering this type of relationship with your significant other, I encourage you to look for the positives as well. You might be surprised how open to ethical nonmonogamy you can be. And to celebrate here’s a picture of some raunchy BDSM hentai.

Just kidding, it's a puppy.