Shared by E & S
Everyone’s journey into non-monogamy is different, each beset with their own advantages and challenges, but I believe our story is unusual even among the groups of adventurers and thrill-seekers one finds in “the lifestyle.” My partner and I met in high school at age fifteen. She asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and we’ve been largely inseparable since. She was my first sexual experience, and I hers. We remained monogamous through to our wedding almost ten years later, and we remained faithful to one another to our twentieth wedding anniversary. She was my first, and I hers, and our only for almost thirty years.
We’d had more than our fair share of challenges: several cross-country moves, the joys and pitfalls of parenthood twice over, financial struggles, family conflicts, and finally, my cancer diagnosis in my fortieth year. We struggled, but we prevailed. We came out on the other side with a secure and healthy family, an almost fairy-tale lifelong love, and I was cancer-free.
When you’re as intimate with a person through formative adulthood and then decades after, it’s almost as if you live several lifetimes together. We always remained steadfast with one another, though, and became new friends and lovers again and again along the way. By the time we’d reached the Summer of our twentieth year of marriage, with cancer and the major challenges of parenthood largely behind us, we could finally focus on each other again. Our sexual relationship was broader, deeper, and more satisfying than it had ever been. Her relationship to her body, a major challenge through the child-rearing years, had improved considerably and our emotional intelligence and vocabulary had become expansive once we focused on self-reflection, communication and even read books on intimacy together. She would describe our sexual relationship as “in its prime.”
Only weeks after celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary, we were planning a trip to New Orleans, and she suggested we visit Colette’s. To describe my reaction as being thrown out of an airplane into the path of a speeding train would be something of an understatement. I remember being aghast, totally speechless, and meekly asking, “Do you want me to take you to a swinger’s club?”
The foundation of trust and communication we had built in the previous three decades gave us everything we needed to work through this, to determine if this was something both wanted, determine boundaries, fantasies and just as importantly, the things we didn’t want. We went shopping for new clothes, furiously read every forum posting we could find and talked and talked and talked until we were sick of talking.
Despite not having the gumption to engage physically with anyone else at the club, our experience was life-changing. We rode the high of the sexual energy we had absorbed there for weeks, almost physically unable to keep our hands off one another. She made dating profiles on all the sites you know on the drive home as our hands wandered in the car. Something primal had been awoken in us, and we wanted more.
As with most things in our lives, my wife took me by the hand and guided me gently into the next adventure. I was slower in facing the challenges that come with this hobby. I was critical of my body, compared to the younger, fitter men to whom my wife was attracted. The feelings that I encountered the first time I saw her kiss another man were so big it was impossible to see the edges. So we talked, and we talked and we talked some more. I looked inward and found my insecurities and we examined them together, and she helped me box them up and set them aside. She encouraged me, and I realized not only was this for us, it really was for us, and no one else.
I was finally able to fully appreciate the compersion we had read so much about. Watching my beautiful wife, mother of my children, and partner for life, experience sexual pleasure with other people is beyond energizing and exciting, it has made me a better lover and partner. It has energized me in so many ways, motivated me to claw back the strength I lost during my health challenges, and finally believe her when she tells me how attracted she is to me, and how I will always be her favorite.
It’s true that making new friends in your forties is challenging. Most people have settled into an idiosyncratic routine, friend groups set and rarely changing. The energy that comes from simply meeting new couples for drinks, or attending parties with gregarious and receptive people is invigorating, and enjoying intimacy together is life-affirming.
We are happier than we have ever been. We have so many new friends, it feels greedy to keep searching for more, but we do because it’s fun. Our sexual relationship continues to grow at a pace that seems completely unsustainable, and yet it continues to do so. To learn something new about the most important person in your life, who you’ve known for the majority of your life, is incredible. To learn more about yourself with each and every adventure is life-affirming.
This lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but it is for us.
Swing & Tell is a series of real-life stories from real-life people sharing their experiences with the swinging lifestyle. Please remember that everyone’s situation is unique, so what someone experiences might not be what you will experience. Click here to share your story or read other swinger stories.