So where did I leave off? Of course — the part where I thought I could completely separate my feelings from sex. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s taken me about a year and a half to actually see it myself. I am not, in fact, the naïve but pretty twenty something in Fox’s next mediocre rom-com. Quite the contrary. I’m more of an HBO mini-series in which the educated suburban housewife starts smoking pot, gets her mind blown open, and consequently starts desiring sex not just with men outside her marriage, but women, too. It’s much less predictable — after all, she already has the perfect guy, the precocious kids, the wild dogs, the house decorated to a T. What’s next?
Great question. Do I want to know, or is the rollercoaster of relationships, life, love, and living in the moment what makes this ride so fun and fulfilling in the end? Just when I think I have things figured out, just when I start thinking I can see where this might be going, I’m thrown for a loop. My anxiety flares, my depression ensues, my dopamine is through the roof, and my serotonin can’t be bothered to show up to the party. New relationship energy is a bitch, I tell you.
I’ve learned a lot in the past year and a half, but especially in the past four months. That’s perhaps the biggest understatement I am going to utter in this entry. I should also warn you, however, that I’m not even going to touch on the past four months in this post — this is all one big tease leading up to a situation of multiple orgasms both in my brain and in my bed. It’s necessary for me to tell this part of the story, though. Consider it foreplay.
To catch you up, I have to first go back to the fall of 2019. Pre-covid, pre-world changing, but post-Hedonism II vacation, post-deciding that we wanted to jump into “this stuff” at home. If my marriage was a book, well, we had only just cracked the spine and started on the first paragraph. The Kasidie profile had been created, in a rudimentary and mechanical way, and while we had sent some messages here and there, we mostly had stepped back. The school year was just starting and our evenings were filled with curriculum nights and carting the kids to their activities. On the weekends we would drive an hour outside our suburban circle of McMansions to visit pumpkin patches and apple orchards. Same old, same old.
In the background, though, the gears were turning in our brains and an undercurrent was rippling through our relationship. We’d spend each stolen kid-less moment talking in hushed tones about our desires, our newfound wants and passions. At night, after the kids were tucked safely in their beds, we rushed to our own room to continue our chatter before, during, and after the most explosive, erotic, energetic sex that we’d ever experienced. Each night was better than the next. We were high on the possibilities (and, yes, often on cannabis).
At that point, I was thinking mostly about women. Was I bisexual? Was I allowed to identify as such, barely having ever been with a woman? Did I count as a bisexual if I just had a fantasy in my head of what I wanted, and only one woman that I knew in real life that I was truly attracted to? It’s funny — no one ever asks a married woman what her sexual orientation is. I had never been given the opportunity to choose; it seemed that my choosing to marry a man closed the door on any such choice.
Jack, supportive as always, listened as I described my desires and psychoanalyzed my attractions to women. I had loved the feeling of other girls when I had my narrow experiences with them in high school and college. There were women here and there that I found myself thinking about, imagining what it would be like to touch their skin, their hair, their lips. At Hedo that previous summer, I felt a connection with a woman as we talked — flirted — in the pool, reaching out to touch and tickle. When another new Hedo friend and I were feeling silly after some drinks, I suggested that we pretend we were leaving to go have sex to tease our other friends. Our arms around each other, and our heads bent close together, sent chills up my spine. Why did it have to be pretend?
Back home, I daydreamed about women like those that made me feel that stir. I envisioned a skinny woman with smallish breasts, slightly taller than my short five feet, but not too much taller. I pictured luscious lips surrounding perfect teeth below a narrow nose. Her hair, cut shorter, perhaps in a straight bob or even a punk alternative style, would highlight her angular cheekbones. Her body would be firm but her skin would be soft. She’d smell good. We’d have insightful, soulful conversations during which I’d look deep into her eyes, gorgeous with or without her heavy going-out makeup. Not to say that we’d always be so serious — most of the time, we’d be downright flirty, sensationally silly. There would be laughter, and there would be sex. After a morning of coffee and antiquing, we’d end up in my bed, caressing, expressing our desires in gentle, feminine voices while basking in the nude afternoon sun as it shined through the windows.
And then we’d meet our kids at the bus stop, go home to our own respective houses, and get dinner started. “See you tomorrow, girl!”
Apparently, in that fantasy I’ve also quit my job and become a full time writer, writing only when the mood strikes and not on an ideal day for scouring thrift stores and daytime girl-on-girl action. But I digress. The point here is that I was starting to imagine what my life could be like if I just lived how I wanted — if I said “fuck it” to society’s path and went on my own adventure.
If I’m not hurting anyone, if on the contrary everyone involved is made better by the situation, what was really so wrong with this crazy idea that I care about — and have sex with — more than one person on this Earth, by choice, even while being in a marriage? I already did love more than one person — my husband of course, and then there were the kids, my family, my friends. I cared about so many people, but in so many different ways.
And then, on the flip side, I like sex. I love the pleasure, the passion, the entry into the other realms of being human. It’s nice to get out and do things; sure, bowling’s fun…but you know what I find even more fun? Sex. I’m not alone here — I’d bet a fair number of people out on the town with you are thinking about how they might score tonight.
That fall, I felt myself changing. I was learning things. I’d been introduced to what seemed to be the happiest swingers on Earth at Hedo. I read books like Sex at Dawn and Mating in Captivity, my eyes opening to the expanse of humankind’s relationship with sexuality. I alternated between swinger, psychology, philosophy, and sexuality podcasts. I smoked pot and thought about death — or more specifically, what comes next after I die. I let that infusion of fear and finality settle into my soul. Then, I thought about what I wanted to do while I lived.
Jack and I had spent several years in our early thirties “on edge.” We didn’t show respect for each other, and so our interactions were often bristly, stunted by exhaustion and my unenthusiatic attention to sex, and thus to Jack. We hadn’t yet ventured into the self help books, the psychology podcasts, and pot — all of which opened our mind to a fresh breath of life just as we left the baby-raising phase behind. We had always been open and honest with each other, for better or worse. Now, determined to make ourselves better people — to be our best selves and live our best lives — we were better. With respect returned to our relationship, we became master communicators. It’s our greatest strength as a couple.
(Sidenote: we saw a therapist together recently to ensure that we’re not completely crazy, and she noted that we will be fine as long as we take care of ourselves and continue communicating like we do; she said that we are “99th percentile” for communication in marriage. So…we always felt it was true, but didn’t want to brag, and now we feel like we got the gold star from the teacher, so…there ya have it.)
Anyhow, what I am trying to say is that I experienced a sort of midlife crisis where I started really desiring a female relationship, and also realizing that dude, I’m going to die someday and when else will I ever get to experience this? And then I communicated this openly and honestly with my husband, the person who matters most to me on this planet. And we learned together. We discussed what we’d read and heard. We’d put ideas together and synthesize our thoughts excitedly, jotting down notes and fine tuning our word choices while getting ready for bed, nude, in our suburban-posh, double-sinked master bathroom.
So, I told Jack about my desires. I told him that she would be mine, not ours. And together, we started to redefine the terms of our relationship. We redefined our desires, our outlook on life, and looked ahead to a path that was less travelled. It was a path that we had never considered before.
I know that many couples invite a third person into their bedroom to spice up their sex life. This isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want a unicorn or a threesome. I wanted a lesbian relationship. I also wanted a straight relationship, which I already had, with Jack. The woman I longed for would be another best friend — the female best friend that I’d been too closed up and too closeted to ever have had before. She would be beautiful, unconventionally, not giving a shit about how things are “supposed” to be, but relishing in the thrill of a life less ordinary. She would inspire me to be the same. Would Jack be okay if I found that other person of my dreams?
Yes, he would be perfectly okay; he was supportive, excited even. He had conditions, of course. He nervously told me that he didn’t want me to ever leave him, and I assured him the feeling was mutual. It wasn’t that I wanted someone else, or someone more. I just wanted more someones. I wanted a fuller life, with more love, more connection, more pleasure. I suppose I wanted an adventure.
Jack considered this fantasy — actually, this proposition for our marriage. I was serious this time; it wasn’t just pillow talk. I felt a drive to find this woman and make her part of my life, and thus our life. It was a quick consideration on his part, as if he’d considered it long before I said the words.
Jack didn’t envision jealousy or threats to our own relationship. He’s the kind of guy who always wants to make me happy — sometimes, to a fault. He wouldn’t be bothered if I had sex with another woman (so long as it was safe and consensual), but he would like it if I gave him some of the “dirty” details. I could see his deep arousal growing as he considered the nonfiction erotica that he might one day hear, starring his own personal Hotwife.
Problem was, I had no idea how to find a woman like the one I desired. Where does a married woman in the midst of a relatively conservative Midwest suburbia go to find a woman — married or single (at that point I was open to either) — to become besties who fuck? I was as clueless as I was inexperienced.
Kasidie was proving to be mostly couples, sometimes single men, and rarely single women. I adjusted my expectations and my fantasy: perhaps we would meet a nice couple and I’d become amazing friends with the woman. It could be a situation where sometimes we’d all four play, and other times just us ladies. Maybe if we were all comfy, we’d even try to swap spouses. This seemed ideal. It seemed gentle, like a big group of friends. Natural.
And yet, at that point in the fall, Jack and I were still uneasy about “full swap” (having intercourse) with another couple. We’d only ever been with each other in that way and it was difficult to imagine the scenario of being with someone else. Especially the Kasidie clientele…
Now, I do try not to be judgy, and I try to embrace all different kinds of people and approach others with an open mind…but…will you keep reading if I admit that I found most of the people on this lifestyle hookup site a bit…trashy? Unkempt? Crude? Where were the other thirty-something moms who drank tea and read novels on weeknights? I was feeling a bit like a lone wolf, or at least like a female lone wolf with a male wolf partner, but no other members of the pack seemed to be in our locale.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. There was one couple that piqued our interest immediately. They didn’t live too far from us, but they had also vacationed at Hedo — several times! They oozed the vibes of fellow free loving hippie types. And they were so cute. We messaged them, and they wrote back using correct grammar with a friendly tone. They seemed like potential friends with whom we might like to express our affection through some fun romps in bed. I kept up correspondence with them for a couple months, but didn’t suggest a meetup yet. They were too good to be our first, we reasoned. We didn’t want to blow it. We put them in our back pocket, hoping to get back to them eventually (spoiler alert — we did, but that’s a post-pandemic story and another blog post altogether).
Meanwhile, autumn continued on its usual trajectory of Halloween costumes and parent-teacher conferences. It was well into November when we received a message from another local couple who had also taken a few lifestyle vacations and had started recently exploring this path at home. On their profile, they billed themselves as classy, nice-looking professionals, with photos to prove it. The messages they sent sounded “normal,” and we seemed to have things in common…kids, socioeconomic status, education. Would we be interested in meeting up for drinks to discuss more? Jack and I were eager for interaction…er, action? We all agreed on a date.
At the restaurant, seated across from them in a booth, we sized each other up. Raquel was stunning with a friendly smile, gorgeous hair, and a toned body. Hal was a nice-enough looking guy, though not entirely my type. I’m spoiled, you see…Jack is cut and trim, and though he’s slowly transitioning into a silver fox, there is still plenty of thick, brown hair on his head to offset his baby blue eyes. He easily looks ten years younger than his actual age. Meanwhile, Hal was stockier — not fat, but not slim either, and something about his mannerisms reminded me of someone ten years older than his disclosed age.
However, both of them were attractive by all conventional standards, and they were extremely friendly and easy to talk to. We chatted for hours that first night, our nerves dissipating just enough over drinks to detail our limited experiences and our desires, but not so much that the aura of tension ever left the air. Talking openly about sex with people in all its intimate, raw glory was refreshing and arousing, but, looking back, I think any chemistry I felt on that first night was due more in part to the possible sexual scenarios that Jack and I might experience than their appearances and demeanor. Simply put, we were more aroused by the situation than the people.
Jack and I went home and fucked each other’s brains out, of course. We were hungry for these new experiences, so when Hal texted to ask us out for a second date, and suggested that we book a hotel room “just in case,” we eagerly accepted. We were officially entering this new realm. We wanted a notch on our belts; we wanted an experience and they seemed like a good enough match.
Silly Eliza, and silly Jack. We did write on our Kasidie profile that we had wanted friends to have sex with, not just random hookups. And yet, here we were, essentially agreeing to…a random hookup. Perhaps it felt safer to start that way. There were no deep feelings for these people. There wasn’t instant attraction; there was no true affection. There we were — a younger, naive, cute, overly sexual couple. We bragged about our comfort with nudity and our athleticism in bed. And they were eager for a fun romp with a secure couple like us. I won’t lie — I was excited for our upcoming play session, but…there was a “but.” What was it?
Sometimes I feel like I’m blindly putting a puzzle together. Those pieces with Raquel and Hal all fit together and seemed to work, yet something was off. I thought I knew what picture I was putting together, but now I was becoming slightly unsure. I started putting together another part of the puzzle in between our first and second dates with Raquel and Hal, while attending a friend’s Christmas party, and I was shocked to see a new picture emerging.
At the party, “The Escapades of Jack and Eliza” were an undercurrent in nearly every interaction with our old high school friends. We had been honest about our journey as we moved through it, not thinking it was heading in this direction back when we had simply been visiting nude beaches. Most of our friends were flabbergasted by where our adventure had taken us. The wives avoided the topic in conversation, and most of the guys made sly jokes with smirks on their faces. No one seemed to really want to understand us.
One of our friends, however, was intrigued more than most. Kyle had been Jack’s best friend since kindergarten, and when I started dating Jack in high school, Kyle and I became fast friends, too. We flirted often, the chemistry between us familiar and fun. In our younger days, he and Jack had eagerly watched me and Kyle’s then-girlfriend explore our then-mild bisexuality on occasion. When we came home from Hedo a few months prior to that Christmas party, Kyle and his wife had listened, wide-eyed, as we described our experiences.
Now, I found Kyle pulling me aside at the party. Infused with a couple drinks, he’d finally worked up the courage to ask me about something he said he’d been thinking about for awhile. Would we be willing to demonstrate how Jack gets me off using that G-spot technique? He and his wife, Megan, (who was unable to attend this party) had been intrigued by our story about the tantric workshop at Hedo. Since we were doing this with other people, would that be something that we — the four of us — could do all together?
My eager acceptance of this idea aroused the both of us. The air around us felt thick with energy. Jack came over to see what all the smiling and giggling was about. I’m sure others at the party were appalled at what they may have overheard, or perhaps they were just curious why the three of us whisked ourselves away into the mudroom, where we flirted with the possibilities in relative private.
We didn’t do anything with Kyle that night, but we left that party elated and aroused. In bed, we lay next to each other looking at the ceiling, basking in the vibes that our encounter had left us with. When we told Raquel and Hal that we’d only be comfortable with a soft swap scenario, we had been very serious about that boundary. We hadn’t felt ready to full swap with them, because at that point we haden’t been sure that we’d ever feel ready to full swap with anyone of the opposite gender. It seemed so abstract back then. Who would we ever feel that comfortable with? What would it feel like to want to be that intimate with another person, let alone another couple?
Suddenly, we felt like we knew. Kyle had bestowed chemistry on us that night. Vibes. Tingles, sexual tension, titillation. Kyle and Megan were the type of people that we’d want to have sex with — full swap. They were fun. They were attractive. They were our friends. Truly.
Not long after that memorable change of heart at the Christmas party, we went on our second date with Raquel and Hal. We met for drinks again, nervously sipping just enough red wine to make it to the hotel next door safely, then drinking just enough more to remove our clothes and proceed with our first official swinger experience. There was kissing, and fingers, and massage, and in the end we dosey-doed back to our own spouses for the grand finales. We left the hotel room around the stroke of midnight to tend to our respective children and release the babysitters. We politely texted niceties for a couple days afterwards, and then things fizzled out.
There had been no chemistry. No elation, no feelings of connection, nothing sweeping me off my feet. There was no passion, no primal urges kicking in that made me lose myself completely in the moment, the way I do with Jack. I briefly wondered if this was just how sex with people other than my beloved Jack would always be.
And then I remembered Kyle, and the chemistry. I recalled the connection and the caring that we felt for him, and for his wife. The bond that we have. The feeling that if we played with them, it would be like kids playing the greatest game of house ever. Raquel and Hal hadn’t really worked out as we’d hoped, but there still seemed to be possibilities out there in the universe.
We weren’t giving up — we booked another vacation to Hedo. We updated our profile on Kasidie to be more specific about our desires — namely “friends with benefits,” equal emphasis on the friends and the benefits. We chatted with other couples that we had connected with on the website, and we started discussing our wants and needs in terms of relationships rather than just sexual mechanics. Winter was wrapping up, and our world was opening up…until it suddenly wasn’t.
In March of 2020, the pandemic reached our part of the world, and the door of possibilities seemed to slam in our faces. Like so many others, we were forced into a hiatus. To be continued…a year later.