Our Decades of Open Marriage: Part 1

Our Decades of Open Marriage:

A True Story

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. I should also note that I know full well that compared to some people, our experiences are not particularly exotic, but they are the experiences of a very ordinary couple who have now been married for almost 40 years. That alone perhaps makes this tale, extraordinary.

I hope you find this narrative both enjoyable and instructive.

(1/1/2025)

1

How We Came to Have an Open Marriage

I consider myself about the luckiest guy in the world.  I have never been much of a stud.  When I was young I was skinny and uncoordinated, I’m now in my early 60’s and a little too heavy and still uncoordinated.  I had a 25+ year career in Christian ministry, education, and social 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 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 design-construct 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 that. When I was in first and second grade I didn’t ask why Grandma and our friends shouldn’t see them. After all, I wasn’t interested in the photospreads, I liked the comics.

 As a Junior High student in the mid 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.

Christmas 1970

I really did think all mothers wore 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. As a kid, I honestly thought that was how all mothers dressed. I didn’t understand why my friends liked it when my mom was at home.

Mom had been showing off since she was a teenager. This was taken in the mid 1950s on a date with my dad.

Circa About 1974

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

One frame from an 8mm movie from about 1968

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. 

When the Debbie Does Dallas movie came out in the mid 70’s, where we lived 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 my parent's group of friends called themselves) were right up front with us kids that they were going out one night as a group to see the movie. When I asked my mother about it the next day, she said that the movie was OK, but it didn’t really have much of a plot, rather it was just like a travel log of all the men she slept with. To her, it was rather boring, but she made no condemnation of the sex on screen, nor did she show the least embarrassment that she sat with three other couples watching it.

In the summer of ’75 (or perhaps ’76) my parents went for a week to a nude resort in Jamaica.  Mom was right up front with my siblings and me that she loved going nude out on the beach and that she was excited about showing the photos to her friends. When she put on a whole party to show off the slides, my parents made us kids leave because “You’re not old enough to see the ones from the nude beach.”  However, as I recall, a few weeks later she let my brother (who is 2 years older than me) watch the slide show. Of course, I was not going to be denied and I went snooping. Sadly, only a handful of the photos had been printed, most were slides. But it was the first time I ever recall seeing a nude picture of my mother.

Oddly, I never really understood how pretty my mother was

It was seeing those photos that got me interested in my parent's lifestyle. It was not that I thought what my parents did was unusual, but because I was growing up. I eventually found the big box of nude photos of my mother in their closet. It was quite an eyeful for me. To her long term regret in a fit of anger one day after my father remarried, my mom destroyed 20 years of nude photos of herself. The only photos that escaped destruction were some outtakes that were in a large cache of slides that came to me after Mom passed.

When I was snooping in my parents closet, I also found a stack of 8mm reels that were not our home movies. One night when they were out I took the movie projector to my room and saw my first hard core porno. Of course, they were just “blue loops” of silent 8mm film, but I saw sex for the first time that way. I suspect I’m not the only guy of my generation who had a similar experience.

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 where that cherry was found… and yes, Mom made sure that Dad got that piece of cake.

Dad's 40th birthday party.

All of us kids were invited to the party. No, I'm not in this photo, but my brother is to the far right. The couple in the center were my parent's best friends (and the man was Mom's lover for some four years though we did not find that out out until later).

As 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 began scrambling around hiding things and began yelling for us to leave.  I didn’t get a good look but I saw, in the second before we were aggressively shooed 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. That was not what they were trying to cover up though. 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 the torsos of the women. Since I could see the sides of the four moms in the room, it was apparent to me that they all were topless.  While it was interesting, I wasn’t overly surprised.

I got 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 downstairs) they were in effect giving them to my brother and me. Thus when I was about 12 (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, in the mid-1970’s it was extremely rare. To this day my favorite images are from that early/mid 70’s Playboy style .  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 Playboy from the first edition until the 90’s.

As I said, this was however, long before the internet or even VHS porn.  So I wasn’t “shown” how guys were “supposed to” 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 I 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 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 seriously considered 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.

After our father passed away last year, my brother sister, and I compared what we knew about our parent's lifestyle. It does not appear that they were swingers per se, however, there was at least one skinny dipping party and there was more than a little sleeping around. It appears that my mother had been having sex with other men pretty much through the 70’s while my Dad pretended not to know. In the last month of his life my father told my sister that he knew that our mom had sex with many men.

From the evidence It appears that when our family moved to the Dallas area in 1972 and Mom enrolled in college and developed a social group of young unmarried people, that she blended into the sexual ethos of the early 70’s college scene. Certainly, in the summers she always wore short shorts and revealing tops. Her favorites were halters that showed off her boobs.  Since she dressed that way all through my teen years, I just thought that was how all moms dressed at home.

I guess I was in my mid-teens when she took this selfie

I recall that around 1975, she spent an entire summer on an archeological dig living in a tent with mostly men. The dig was a native American site about four hours from our home. We went up to see her and at the time her living arrangement didn’t mean a thing to us kids, but my father had to know what that meant.  If that wasn’t enough, she openly told how the students named the site “Deep Pit” after the currently popular movie “Deep Throat.” While she directly told us that the movie was “X-rated” I did not understand what that meant. Do I know Mom was fucking her brains out that summer? No. But now it appears that not only was she having sex with her fellow students, but that Dad must have had to deliberately pretend not to see what his wife was making no effort to hide.

that is Mom in the halter top with her fellow students

As we know, a child’s perception of what is “normal” in a family comes as much from what is not said as what is. And what was not said was that it was a problem for Mom to spend a summer living with a group of men.

I will make a short detour to make a note of a story my mother told many times over the years which I did not fully understand until I was an adult. She told me how that during WW 2 (when she was something like four through eight years old) a few times a week her mother had men give her older brother a dollar so the two of them (my mother and her brother) could go to eat at a local diner and then go to see a movie. They were under strict instructions not to return home for two hours. Once I think she used the term “entertain” to describe why her mother had the men over.  

Mom and her brother during WW2

Initially, the only puzzling thing about this repeated story was I didn’t understand why that particular memory was so important to her. It was often tied into a larger tale about her mother’s drinking problem which was also something I didn’t understand. It wasn’t until I was well into my teens did I even start to understand the context of that story and what it really meant.

The context was that after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my grandfather joined the Army, despite the fact he was married with two young children at home. Of course, there must have been multiple reasons for his actions given the fact that the war meant plenty of work for men at the New Orleans shipyards and a father of two was not going to get drafted.  But no more of that story was ever passed down.

 I think he left for the Army when my mother was two or three. As far as I know, he didn’t return until she was something like six. As I understand it, at the time, my grandmother lived in New Orleans but had no family nearby to help care for her two children. I never heard anything about her taking war work, or waiting tables. She had no official income beyond the money sent home by her husband who was a low-paid private. There was simply no way she could support a family of three on $50/mo. (something like $650 today)  In time it became totally clear to me that my mother grew up the child of a soldier’s wife turned prostitute.  To be clear I never heard my mother ever criticize her mother for that, though she never forgave her mother for the extreme abuse she met out to her kids when she was drunk.

New Orleans has been a center for prostitution for a very long time. During the war, the Army worked to suppress prostitution in New Orleans, but that was nearly entirely restricted to raids on brothels. One article I read spoke of how taxi drivers became the connection between soldiers/sailors and women who sold sexual services from outside the traditional vice community. There was even a word for such women “Victory Girls.” Their sexual interactions with US servicemen were cast as patriotic service. Respectable but impoverished wives of service members were not of concern to the authorities. I’ve read in several places that during the war, many MANY, “good American women” turned to part-time prostitution to feed their children while their enlisted husbands were away at war.

Thus, under the table prostitution was so common in the places near Army/Navy bases (Like where my mother grew up) that after the war there was simply a social rule that everyone just pretended it never happened. Husbands had freely fucked other women while they were gone… and on the home front, their wives were often the ones providing much of that sex, However, the conservative postwar years simply washed those things from memory. However, in my family’s case, my grandfather was very religious and would not simply pretend it never happened.

My grandfather left my grandmother (and the kids) not long after he returned from service. Even as a child, I knew he detested my grandmother, but I didn’t know why.  My Grandmother married a career sailor not long after the war. He treated her like a queen. To her dying day, my mother loved and revered that Chief Petty Officer for what he did for her mother. Significantly it is his collection of military medals (including his combat submariners “water wings”) that our family keeps. We have nothing from my grandfather's Army service.  

My grandmother and The Chief. Looks looks like the mid 50's.

I have no doubt that those things passed lessons onto me that I didn’t understand until much later. I never ever drank alcohol, and when I found out that my first love (not Paula) began fucking other guys when I left for college, I didn’t feel any feelings of anger or betrayal. Like my father and my step-grandfather, I just took that as part of being in a relationship with a woman.  For those two men, love for their wife was not dependent on her keeping her legs closed. I’ll get into that story in the next chapter.

It was not until my parents split up that Mom came fully out into the open with her free use of her sexuality. Though I had gone off to college, according to my sister, there was a never-ending stream of men in our mother’s bed. To this day my sister cringes at the thought of coming downstairs before school to find a man she’d never seen in our home’s breakfast nook.

Additionally, for several years Mom became a distributor of sex toys which she sold at private parties. When I came home from college, several times I found the pool table covered with dildos, vibrators, sex-oils, sex books, and packaged lingerie. Though to be honest, I rarely left Chicago to go home to Dallas since I was working my way through school.

Mom also became a belly dancer and danced at private events. Actually, she’d begun that “career” years before I went off to college. I remember trying over and over to imitate how she could use her zils (or finger cymbals) but I could never do but one set at a time. She was quite good at it. But, Mom being Mom, it simply didn’t seem the least bit odd for her to embrace that kind of sexualized business and my dad showed no indication that he resented that she went off a few nights a month to entertain. As far as I can recall, he never went to her events though.  And I should also note here, that when my sister graduated from high school, my mother hired two male strippers to entertain my sister’s friends at her graduation party.

Unsurprisingly, nude beaches became an annual event. On my annual trips home from college, finding new nude beach pics was never hard. The man she eventually married was in some of them. I was not surprised Mom had found a man that was really…. I mean really hung.

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.

Paula’s upbringing was much different than mine. Her Christian fundamentalist parents did not acknowledge sexuality even existed unless it was in a condemnation.  However, Paula had developed a taste for sexual gratification when she was quite young.  By the time she was six or seven, she had learned to masturbate to orgasm (though she had no idea this was sex). Her favorite method of masturbation was to wrap her legs around the post of her four-poster bed and ride it until she climaxed. To the best of her memory, she did this regularly for several years until she was caught and told that what she was doing was BAD. So she stopped masturbating 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 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.  Sadly nearly all her family photos were lost in a house fife in the early 80's.

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 two closest friends, (who were 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. She particularly enjoyed bringing her sister to orgasm. 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 eventually she began putting sugar on her sister so as to make her pussy taste better. To Paula, eating out her sister several nights a week was just a normal and enjoyable thing they did together for something like three years, until her sister went off to college.

One of our few photos of Paula as a little girl. She appears to be in her panties.

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.  

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. It may seem unbelievable to the point of comic, but as late as when Paula was in junior high she still believed that couples who kissed too much could get pregnant. She was given absolutely no knowledge of human reproduction at home or at her Christian school. When she had her first period when she was fifteen, it had been terrifying. Though she knew her sister and cousins used tampons, she had no understanding as to why.  She tells a funny story of trying to put one up her rectum assuming that was how they were used.

 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 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 early 80’s the idea of being fully bisexual was not part of the common discourse in her world. Had she been able to conceptualize she was bisexual back in her late teens or early twenties, perhaps she would have begun her free-love life much earlier.

Paula in high school

All in all, when Paula and I met in January of 1986, we had many pieces of sexual understanding, yet completely lacked any knowledge of how to use it in our real lives.