A few notes May, 2023:
In the early 2010’s I blogged about our life with an open marriage as it happened on Tumblr. In the years between 2011 and 2015, our sex life had become so active and it seemed it would never cease being so, I actually only blogged a portion of all the things we did. It seemed silly to write of the same general things over and over again, so I only normally wrote up things that were either different or when I had some reflection on our life that I wanted to illustrate.
Yet, what I could not know was that those years would the last “highly active period” of our open marriage. Not that we decided to close our marriage, but due to circumstances involving family and finances, we took what we’d planned to be a short break.
It was about the time that we took a break that Tumblr decided to excise “adult” content from blogs on their platform. They not only blocked posts with nudity, but they also made all “adult” blogs (like mine) unsearchable so that they were essentially invisible even after I’d removed all the naked pictures. That led me to abandon that platform and start this website. In the conversion, I lost a good many posts that now make up this narrative regarding our decades of open marriage. As a consequence, there are gaps and posts that reference prior posts that no longer exist. For instance, next time, when I post part 57, I’ll need to fill in because it references things that are not currently in the narrative.
This week is just a short entry I made to explain how our life had changed.
56
New Reality in Our Open Marriage
It had long been normal for us to all but stop socializing from mid-December to mid-January. On top of the busyness of family holiday activities before Christmas each year, Paula’s job at Victoria’s Secret simply took over her life for a full month. The Christmas shopping rush was followed by the store’s Annual January Sale which meant she was working long hours and coming home very tired.
Consequently, after all her dating from spring to the end of fall, her last hotel date was over a week before Christmas and it was the middle of January before Paula was able to schedule another. Even then, much to her disappointment, she had to cancel that one when she got called into work at the last minute. Out of frustration at having had not a single night out in a month, she asked me to help her update her OK Cupid account. I did as she asked. In three days, she had booked four dates. Three of them were just meet & greets with new guys, but one was the rescheduled hotel date with Anderson that she had canceled.
She told me with a laugh how one of the guys she spoke to on the phone was stunned when she asked if he would mind if she brought along her husband on their date. He just couldn’t imagine having dinner with a guy when his wife was considering him as a potential sexual partner. Though this kind of thing happened quite a lot, it was easy to forget that our lifestyle was utterly incomprehensible to many (if not most) married people here in the Deep South.
Her Friday lunch date fell through. The man called at the last minute about a problem at work and she never heard from him again. That was par for the course. No matter how much she worked to vet dates in advance a significant percentage fell through. However, the evening went better. She and I went to meet Anderson at a local restaurant.
He and I got along great. As mentioned in prior chapters, he and his wife had been married as long as Paula and me; however, unlike us, their open marriage is “de-facto” rather than negotiated. They have one of those “business type” marriages. Though they care about each other and plan on living out their lives married to one another; they have long slept in different bedrooms and both have their own social and sexual lives. He explained to us that in most other aspects of their lives, they are very compatible; but they simply do not ever talk about their dating or sex lives to each other. In this, they do not operate as a couple in the way Paula and I do. He made a point to tell us that before leaving he had just told his wife “I’ll be spending the night out.” That was their code which meant that he was meeting a woman. His wife just let the implicit sexual content slide as if she didn’t hear it.
He had already gotten a table when Paula and I arrived at the restaurant. We had a good time talking and laughing. Though I have been with them for a threesome twice before, that night I left them alone at the table after we had finished our meal (Paula and I drove separate cars). We were all sure the waitress was a little puzzled in that this middle-aged couple joins a man for dinner, then the husband leaves and the wife goes off with the other man. From the restaurant, they went to the same business hotel that they always do.
She made it home at about 9:00 AM the next morning to get ready for work.
As she dressed for work, she told me that it was good that he was able to get a room with two queen beds again since he doesn’t like sleeping in a puddle. She went on to say she had pounced on him right off, and before they were done, she had sloshed all over him as she kept cumming and cumming. As she worked on her make-up, she explained that sucking him is different from any other man she’s been within that the top half of his cock is much thicker than the bottom half. "Since I have small hands, it makes it much easier to hold." That was an explanation I’d not heard before. She had been pleased when he’d told her how much he likes her blow jobs.
She went on and on about all the things she likes about having sex with Anderson, like how much she likes the feel of his penis both in her vagina and her mouth. She was also very pleased that last night after he’d cum once, by giving him a blow job she was able to get him up again. So, before they'd gone to sleep, he was able to climax a second time. She made a point to say that over their two-hour fuck fest the night before, she had no less than eight orgasms: hence the utterly soaked bed. She said he'd cracked her up when he had quipped that by the end of the night, he thought he was in a water bed with a leak in it.
All in all, she had a very nice night. However, this was just the way we lived. We were well past the stage of feeling particularly kinky about one of us having sex with other people. Thus, as she told me about her night, it was as if she were talking about a movie they had watched about a couple having sex, rather than actually doing those things.
Later that day I reflected on the reality that in some ways I missed that thrill we used to have when she’d come home after sex. For a long time, we would become so turned on by her telling me about it, we couldn’t help but start going at it ourselves. Most often I would go down on her right off while she told me what she’d done with some other guy. By that day, however, it was just another morning after she’d been out the night before. She had told most of the story while we sat in the living room and she put on her makeup and I ate a bowl of oatmeal. Once she was done with the story and her makeup, I let her know I was happy she’d had a good time, gave her a kiss and she was off to work.
The fact her sex life had become just the normal stuff of life was not necessarily a bad thing, but it was the inevitable result of living the life we had for so many years. While the zing and arousal of recounting a night in bed with another man were fun, that is not why, all those years before, I let her know that she was free to act on her desire to have sex with other people. We opened up our marriage because I knew I could not fulfill all her sexual needs, and that had not changed one bit in nearly two decades since I let her know I would be OK for her to meet those needs with other people.
In that same week, I had begun texting, talking, and emailing with a very nice couple who wanted to meet me… yes me on my own. By the next week, we had booked a room for February for the woman, her husband, and me to spend a night together. As much as I liked Paula to be with me, part of me wanted to try to pursue a relationship on my own. It was a big step for me to try something new in putting myself out there to develop my own polyamorous relationship. While I had mixed feelings about her coming with me, I decided to invite her to at least come with me to meet the couple. She clearly sensed my feelings on the whole matter and told me she wasn’t sure if she wanted to interject herself into my plans.
The hotel date was a full month off, so had time to decide.
More than ever, people can choose to define their relationships the way they want to. People living in nonmonogamous relationships are not all doing it in the same way. Your and Paula’s relationship differs from Anderson's with his wife in significant ways. It is all about the motivations for an open marriage. Paula’s libido is much higher than yours – so she needs more than what you can give. Anderson has a different reason. For me, there is another reason:
“From a spiritual perspective, we are in the process of evolving beyond our socio-biological drives as our primary motivators and moving towards a state of wholeness in the present… To experience polyamory fully, one must be willing to live in…