Our Decades of Open Marriage: Part 1

Before I start I must say these are recollections of our activities over the years. I have written this as accurately as I can without embellishment, though as you read it you will see it would have been more erotic with some changes, but this is what really happened. The initial material was written around 1998, therefore is based on memory that I won’t’ claim to be perfect. However most of the text covering the events after that was penned within a week of the actual events. Thus from chapter ten onward there is a higher degree of detail and accuracy. In particular you will find the narrative becomes quite explicit when discussing sexual experiences. This was not because I had, at the time, intended to make this public, but rather that I knew my memory would fade and jumble up what really happened. As it turned out I am very glad I did it this way because when rereading these stories I realize how much I did indeed forget.

One last thing. I know that my dear wife, Paula, will not agree on some points (but of course my telling of it is the right one); however the larger facts are not in dispute.

1

How We Came to Have an Open Marriage

Well I must simply consider myself about the luckiest guy around. I have never been much of a stud. When I was young I was skinny and uncoordinated, I’m now in my mid-50’s and a little too heavy and still uncoordinated. I had a 20+ year career in education and soc

ial work before earning my PhD and moving to higher ed. So I’m kinda dull and not rich. Yet for all that I have been blessed with the most amazing wife in the world for the since 1986.

I was raised in a very progressive, upper middle class home. I would describe it as “Leave It To Beaver” in its simplicity and “Love American Style” in its outlook. Until I was in high school my mother was a stay at home mom and my dad earned plenty as a senior executive in a national firm. My parents joined the PTA, we took annual family vacations and we went to church regularly. It wasn’t until I got married I realized my family was so liberal on sexual issues. I guess I knew our family was a little different. As far back as the late 1960’s, while I was in elementary school, I knew my parents took the Playboy and Penthouse magazine off the living room coffee table when my grandparents came to visit. My older brother and I were told not to let our friends see those magazines. At the time I had no idea of the significance of those magazines, but, but at that age I didn’t ask why Grandma and our friends shouldn’t see them.

As a Junior High student in the m

id 70’s things were very open. My parents stored a huge box of old Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and OUI magazines upstairs in the closet opposite my bedroom and I thought nothing of having several in my room where my mom would know they were there. Speaking of my mom, I remember every Christmas my dad would get my mom a new negligee and she would put it on before we kids could open any of our presents. For dad there was always the Playboy calendar and a box of cigars in his stocking.

On Christmas morning after we opened our presents she would wear her new negligee and drink coffee and he would smoke his cigar.

This had been the tradition as long as I remember and from looking at old photos I think it predated my arrival in 1962. I distinctly recall at least one Christmas night that we put together a big Playboy centerfold puzzle.

I really did think all mothers wore semi-see-through negligées around the house when only the family was around. In public during the 1970’s she wore the smallest bikinis, shortest shorts and halter tops that showed lots of cleavage.

(Yes, this is a photograph my father took of my mother in about 1959)

My father had been taking lingerie, topless and nude photos of mom since photo processors first began to print them in the late 1950’s. When we converted the old 8mm movies to video we found one reel from a trip to Yellowstone of mom nude soaking in a hot spring in the woods with us kids just as naked running around (these are captures from that old video).

My pubescent friends must have loved my house

and they told me they thought my mom was great looking. It wasn’t until several years after I was

married that my mom told Paula she had gotten some of the first silicone breast implants in the country back in the mid 1960’s. To her long term regret in a fit of anger one day, my mom destroyed 20 years of nude photos of herself. Only one set of slides from a trip to the nude resort in Jamaica survived which came to me after her passing.

When was in junior high I began to become curious about my parents life style, not because I thought it unusual, but because I was growing up. I remember snooping in my parent’s room and finding the box of nude photos of my mother and a stack of 8mm movies that were not our home moves. One night when they were out I took the movie projector to my room and saw my first hard core porno.

It was shortly after that the Debbie Does Dallas movie came out. In the Dallas area it was front page news as the Cowboys sued because in the porno the star played a Cowboy cheerleader and wore a real Cowboy cheerleader uniform in the movie. I remember the “Wild Bunch” (as they called themselves) were right up front with us kids that they were going out one night as a group to see the movie.

One summer my parents and two other neighborhood couples went for a week to a nude resort in Jamaica. When they returned and started showing the slides they made us kids leave because “You’re not old enough to see the ones from the nude beach.” These are the slides I now own.

For my Dad’s 40th birthday my mom threw a luau party and his cake was a nude woman with a cherry baked in…. well you can guess.

As time went on and I moved through junior high school I began to get a better idea of what was happening with the parent’s gang. One Sunday afternoon the Wild Bunch failed to lock the door for their “adult time” A couple of us walked right in on them, when we arrived in the living room the adults were scrambled around hiding things and began yelling for us to leave. I didn’t get a good look but I saw, in the second before were aggressively shoo-ed back out the door, magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, OUI were opened to photo spreads and strewn all over the floor, almost to the door where we stood. It was evident that this is not what they were trying to cover up, because the big throw pillows that were very popular at the time were not used to cover the magazines; but rather they were used to hide several of their they women who appeared to be topless. I more information about what they all were doing one evening when I was asked to baby-sit while the Wild Bunch went out to celebrate one of the member’s 40’th birthday. The party had started at the house at which I was sitting, and what they left behind was all new to me. Sex jokes and toys I hadn’t known existed and did not know what they did were left strewn around the living room.

Additionally, the normal nature of “men’s magazine’s” continued in my home. There is no way my parents could not know that by putting all those magazines in the upstairs hall closet (their room was down stairs) they were in effect giving them to my brother and me. Thus when I was about 12 and I my brother was 14, we had unrestricted access to all the erotic material we could imagine existed. Though this kind of access is the rule in the internet age, it the 1970’s it was extremely rare. To this day my favorite images are from that early 70’s style Playboy. In time I read every word of every magazine in that box and masturbated to every nude photo. I love Playboy cartoons and “Little Annie Fanny” to this day. One year Paula bought me for Christmas the collection of every centerfold from the first edition of Playboy.

As I said, this was however, long before the internet or even VHS porn. So I wasn’t “shown” how guys masturbate. I didn’t know what I found enjoyable was not ‘the norm.” By the time I was thirteen or so, I found I very much enjoyed using make shift dildos (no I didn’t have that word yet) to put in my mouth or up my ass while masturbated. In time I found the perfect substitute penis in a 16” long bean bag snake. It was firm and flexible. Covered with Saran Wrap, I could suck it pretending it was my penis, and it by putting shampoo as a lube, I could fuck myself with it. It seemed the most normal thing in the world.

Sure I knew guys called each other homo or fag as an insult, but I really had no idea that guys actually sucked other guy’s penises, or were fucked by other guys. To me, when I did those things with my homemade dildo, I always just imagined it was my own penis. I have no doubt if a guy had introduced me to male-male sex at the time I would have jumped on it, but it would be many years before that bean bag snake method of masturbation became a real man’s penis in my mouth. So, though it would be decades before I took the label bisexual; from the beginning of my sexual life, my interest was in women, blended with my desire to be penetrated by a penis.

All that to say that I grew up in a sexually liberal home; so when I chose to rebel against my parents at age 17, I became an arch conservative rather

than a liberal. In my conservative rebellion, I became involved in the fundamentalist Christian movement of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. For several years I became radically conservative.

I met my Paula senior year at the very conservative Christian college at which we were students. When Paula and I got married in the early 80’s I was still a virgin and clueless about actually having sex. Though from my earlier years, I was well versed in the writing of Xandra Hollander and the other writers in Playboy and Penthouse, and had even read a good part of “Everything You Wanted to Know about S*x but were afraid to Ask”, I found on our wedding day, there was so much I did not know. To this day she teases me about how little I knew about the female anatomy.

After only dating 3 months we were engaged and by the time we had known each other less than 7 months we were married in November 1986. Our wedding night was not the first time she would have sex, but she was still very conservative and guilt ridden about her past.

It was only years later she admitted that she got married because she wanted sex and at the time she thought the only guilt-free way to have sex was in marriage. Guilt was the controlling force in her sexuality when it came to guys, but, like all people it was complicated. Her Christian fundamentalist parents did not acknowledge sexuality even

existed unless it was in a condemnation. However, she had developed a taste for sexual gratification young. By the time she was in elementary school she had learned to masturbate to orgasm (though she had no idea this was sex). Her favorite method of masturbation was rubbing her crotch up and down on the post of her four-poster bed. To the best of her memory, she did this so regularly for several years until she was caught and told that what she was doing was BAD. So she stopped for a very long time.

Significantly, her first forays into sexual pleasure with other people was with girls. Her first real sexual experience was perhaps far more common in years past when it was normal, even in middle class homes, for siblings to share both one room and one bed. This was the case with Paula and her sister.

Her sister was (is) 7 years older than she is. As a child that age difference is immense. It was the late 60’s and early 70’s and both the sexual revolution and the youth culture and were in full swing. However, she lived in the very isolated rural farming world of the Deep South. In many ways, she was among the last children raised in the world that people think of as the Old South. Her Grandfather was a wealthy plantation owner and political leader. Yes, she had a “Mammy” and everything.

Her father had married his best friend’s sister and as such their world was filled with aunts, uncles and cousins. Nearly all the cousins were, like her sister, significantly older given her dad and all her uncles were WW2 vets. And, like so many of the baby boom children during the late 60’s and early 70’s; her cousins were very much into sex, drugs and rock and roll. But in this Paula was a bystander, as a nine year old in 1969 when her cousins were in high school getting high and fucking like rabbits. Her sister however, has always been somewhat socially inept. Despite the fact she is pretty and had a killer body well into her 50’s, as far as Paula knows, in high school her sister remained a virgin and did not use drugs at all. However, she swam in a sea of sexuality. Her closest friends, both cousins, were fucking like mad and from what Paula could piece together, her sister would be around and see a lot of the sex, but did not participate.

What her sister did do, was to get her little sister to play with her when she got into the bed they shared. By the time Paula was ten she was giving her sister oral sex several times a week. As far as Paula recalls, her sister never reciprocated, but that didn’t bother my wife. She enjoyed giving her sister cunnilingus and playing with her breasts. It was something special they shared between them. I’ve asked her about it and she does not feel in the least bit traumatized by the whole thing. Though she does point out that she did learn to put sugar on her sister so as to make her pussy taste better; to her, it was just a normal and enjoyable thing she and her sister did together for years before her sister went off to college.

From what I understand, they never had sex after her sister went out of state for her education. I say Paula wasn’t traumatized, but her sister, without a doubt is. She became involved with a hyper conservative Christian group and is as sex-negative as it gets. From things that have been said, I think she is wracked with guilt to this day about what she “did” to her sister. Things would have likely been much different if they had lived in the world of hyper-sensitivity to sibling sexual contact.

Though she and her sister were never sexual again, not long afterward Paula began making out with a local girl her own age. In all this there was simply no understanding that what they were doing counted as the sinful thing called sex. The simple truth was, just like I had no idea of the homoerotic nature of my early sexual life, the idea of being a lesbian wasn’t even part of her vocabulary in the early 70’s.

What she has always known is that she is sexually attracted to girls with equal intensity as her attraction to boys. When she was in college, her friends at the place she worked part-time clearly picked up on this because she told me how they were confused about her sexuality. They would say that she must be a lesbian because her interest in girls, but they also said she couldn’t be that because she REALLY liked guys. Even in the 80’s the idea of being fully bisexual was not part of the common discourse.