Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 21 February 23, 1540 hours

So. Having a boyfriend. A major shock to my system and as transformative as anything I’d ever experienced at that time. From the beginning, the Specter of Gayness hung over everything and us guys weren’t really afraid to have sex with a guy but what did scare us was being some guy’s boy- or girlfriend and really being a homo.

Growing up and running into a lot of guys – and some of which weren’t bi – who were of a mind that, okay, maybe having sex with a dude wasn’t that bad but the fear of turning into a gay dude – and an effeminate one – and being someone’s boy- or girlfriend was so bad that guys who might’ve been okay getting or giving a blowjob used this aspect to not even go there. Among a lot of us – and myself included – to think that we could fall in love with a guy and be in a relationship with him was… beyond patently ridiculous. Whenever this conversation came up, we’d categorically deny the possibility of this happening with a dude and loudly profess and proclaim our great love and need for women and their pussies.

Indeed, among us bi guys, many of us were of a mind that women were for love and relationships and men were for sex-only. I learned that I “wasn’t the only one” running into gay men who wanted to have sex but they were also looking for someone they could be in a loving relationship with and, well, um, nah, man, that ain’t gonna happen. On the one hand, I felt… flattered that a gay guy could have feelings for me other than lust and, years later, I would realize that I’d been “hiding” my own more emotional feelings for certain guys but, on the other hand, nope. We can have all the sex you care to, but we are not going to be in a relationship because I am not going to give up wanting to be with a woman.

A bit embarrassing to look back and see the way I was thinking about this. I never had a problem with gay guys and definitely didn’t have a problem having sex with them, but a relationship was asking for too much. Anchoring this position was the “horror stories” I was hearing from both sides of things where gay men were getting their hearts broken by bi guys and bi guy saying that being in a relationship with a gay man was worse than being in a relationship with those crazy women. Hearing all of this lent credibility to the crap I was hearing about bi guys not being able to commit to being with just one person and we were all serial cheaters, so on and so forth. I felt that it was a lot of sour grapes being “tasted” by both sides of this argument and more so when I’d gotten totally disabused about my belief in the sanctity of marriage and being monogamous. That, all by itself, rearranged my thinking about relationships and sexuality and given what I had been forced to learn and accept, sure, I could see why the sour grapes existed; some gay men were looking for loving and monogamous relationships and just like straight and bi men were and the only real difference was who we wanted this with.

But having a boyfriend? Pffft! Even with my new understanding of things, I maintained that it couldn’t happen to me. And then, it did. “Holy shit” didn’t begin to explain how it made me feel, let alone how “fast” this all happened. He was an amazing kind of guy, quite effeminate, but, yeah, he was cool. He’d flirt with me at times and I was okay with it because I could play the “flirt game” with the best of them because flirting doesn’t always mean intent toward anything else. We became good friends, and we had a lot in common. I remember us talking about the “differences” between being gay and bi and given the sour grapes being sown all over the place by gay men who, again, got their hearts crushed by bi guys, it was educational talking to him about these things.

Okay. He played the shit out of me and to this very day, I still get that look on my face thinking about how smoothly he pulled the wool over my eyes and me thinking that we were just and only engaging in friendly guy-play. I knew that I cared about him; the caring, I would later see, went a lot deeper because I was aware that something was really bothering him but he was refusing to talk about it and it was frustrating because he was too nice of a guy to keep whatever was bothering him on the inside. One day, he stopped by and asked, “How do you tell a guy that you have feelings for him and without him losing his mind about that?”

I was… out of my element on this one but I knew what it was like to have feelings for a woman and being scared shitless to tell her about it and, well, you just roll the dice and take the chance that you can tell the guy and he doesn’t freak out about it. Of course, I wanted to know about the guy who he had these feelings for and, again, I got played because as he was telling me about him, I had no idea that he was talking about me! I would realize that I was so caught up in being happy for him because he’d finally found a guy he could love that I was “blind” to what was really going on.

“So I should just tell him how I feel, huh?” he had asked.

“That’s what I would do,” I said.

And… he told me how he felt about me. When he said, “I’ve been in love with you from the moment I first met you…” everything fell into place and I do mean everything and I also knew that the feelings I had for him was… love. I was stunned; dumbfounded; confused but not really because everything he had been saying to me and doing was now seriously clear to me and I knew what I was feeling for him was real and… where did this fucking come from? It was… I can’t think of a word to describe the elation I felt. We were already connected and now we were really connected. All of this was running through my head from the moment those words were uttered by him and, in real time, it only took me a couple of seconds to tell him, “I… I don’t know what to say!” but deep inside, I knew what to say and I practiced what I had just preached to him and told him that I loved him, too.

It was like being pleasantly high. Y’all know how you’ve felt when you knew you were in love with someone, right? He’s smiling and tears were rolling down his face and I’m smiling even though there was a part of me wondering what the fuck just happened. He knew I was married – my wife got along with him amazingly well – and he knew that our marriage was open but I “kind of” remember us talking about the implications of our feelings and I do remember asking him, “So, what do we do now?”

“You should make love to me,” he said. “Whatever happens is going to happen…”

What I would later see as being significant was that at no time before this revelation, I never had any sexual interest in him despite how we’d flirt with each other and toss around sexual innuendos like they were a ball. The “shit” got seriously real, seriously fast and I really don’t know what I was thinking when he said that I should make love to him but I do remember… shrugging and… we naked and going for it and intensely so. I… laid waste to him; I would, again, later, understand that in that moment, everything I felt about him came to the surface and powered how our first time having sex went. As I was making love to him like there was no tomorrow, I was thinking… is this really just lust? Just me giving in to a sexual interest in him that I wasn’t really aware of? The lust was real and instantaneous but that wasn’t what was driving things.

I had sex with him and like I hadn’t had sex with any of the other guys I’d ever had sex with. I held nothing back and I ravished the shit out of him and so “badly” that he was crying uncontrollably which, at first, scared the shit out of me because I thought that I was hurting him but he assured me that I wasn’t – he was crying because he was happy and more so when it had been a long time since he’d been happy. Dear lord… I just kept taking him over and over; every time I thought I was “done,” I wasn’t and I loved him even more because he was so… responsive and so into it; he wasn’t holding anything back, either and I remember that making love to him was better than making love to a lot of the women I’d had sex with. Not better than sex with my wife but, yeah, holy shit… it was right up there with the best sex I’d ever had with anyone.

I had… put him to sleep. I sat beside him and just looked at him and felt so much love for him that I was having a major problem understanding it – and I still wanted to keep ravishing him and that, all by itself, had surprised and baffled me. He opened his eyes – they were the prettiest green – and… I took him again; inside my head, I’m asking myself, “What the hell is going on?” and… I had no answer and didn’t much care if there was an answer. What I knew was that I loved this very gay man and because I did, it was going to change me forever.

I remember him going back to sleep and I reluctantly left him alone because there was something important I had to do: Tell my wife what happened and why it did. I was really afraid because I didn’t know how she was going to react to me telling her that he said he was in love with me and I said that I was in love with him but I had to tell her so I did. As I related it all back to her, I was waiting for the shoe to drop; she had shifted her position in bed and I almost jumped out of my skin, which made me feel pretty stupid, by the way. I finally got it all out and fell silent. We’re looking at each other and it’s killing me because I’m waiting for her to say… something. Anything. Just put me out of my “misery” already! She… blinked, looked at me and said, “I think it’s so cute!”

And jumped the shit out of my bones. Our bed was one of the old kind that had slats and… two of the four slats got broken and one of the rails holding the box spring in place got detached from the headboard. It hadn’t escaped me that I’d just got done making love to him several times and I didn’t have anything left in the tank but, apparently, I did. We got done making love and, crap, gotta fix the bed and while I’m looking at what got broken and thinking about fixing/replacing stuff, she said, “I knew how he felt about you; I knew that he wanted you because he had asked me if he could have you and I told him to go for it. I’m just surprised it took y’all this long to realize how you felt about each other and to… consummate things.”

Wait, what? A lot of other “shit” fell into place; it would explain why I’d see the two of them talking and, as the old folks liked to say, my “ears were burning.” I’d never bothered to ask her what they talked about because… it wasn’t any of my business and if it was something she wanted me to know, she’d tell me – but she didn’t tell me this! Years later, I would be thinking and reliving this moment in my life and wondered what, if anything, would have happened if she had told me before all of this went down. Would the same thing have happened? Would it have happened differently?

So… now I have a boyfriend. I was in love with a man. His… feminine behaviors drove me insane because, I would realize later, he just didn’t behave like other gay dudes I’d been sexually involved with. He, um, shit, he behaved like a woman. We had had that early rush of sexual excitement between us and… it didn’t “decline” one bit. He made me batshit crazy giving me blowjobs and no matter what I was doing at the time. I loved him for it… and it made me crazy at the same time. We’d make love and he would cry the whole time and I just wasn’t used to it… coming from a guy. When I wasn’t literally looking over my shoulder to see where he was, we… talked. He gave me a masterclass in… gay men. The sexual parts of his “class” I already knew about but it was the emotional part that I didn’t know a lot about because… I didn’t want to know about it and I didn’t want to because I had believed that what had happened to me… could never happen.

I’d find myself apologizing to him for being stupid about this and for being ignorant about how love didn’t give a fuck about the things we thought and believed it to be. It… just is. Not just something felt between men and women or men and men or even women in those combinations. The more I learned from him, the more I loved him. At one point, he told me that one of the things he really loved about me was… I wasn’t gay. Okay, if I hadn’t been confused before, I was really confused now! But he made me understand it. One of the things he had said was that he knew that I was “The One” because he got to see me interacting with my wife and could feel the love we had for each other as well as being daring enough to “spit in the face of what marriage is supposed to be like” so that we could go about being married in the way that worked best for us.

He had said my bisexuality was a breath of fresh air and so different from “just dealing with gay guys;” he said that I understood a lot of things that the gay men he’d been involved with didn’t or couldn’t understand. It was hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of this but I had to… because I loved him. He still made me crazy, but I was getting yet another masterclass in how to understand him, why he was the kind of guy he was, and what made being in love with me so very important. He even got a chance to find out what it’s like to have sex with a woman; I was shocked when my wife invited him to join us one night and even more shocked when he accepted even though he knew what he was being invited to get himself into. I had believed that a gay man (a) wouldn’t want to have sex with a woman and (b) wouldn’t like it and… he changed my mind about being that narrowminded.

“I understand now,” he said after all of the dust settled. “I understand why you love her so much and, um, well, shit – sex with a woman isn’t that bad, huh?”

“I never thought so,” I said with a laugh. I thought that this experience wasn’t going to “make him less gay” or anything like that but that he was willing to do what some gay men wouldn’t dare to do just made me love him even more. I would often find myself sitting and thinking about all of this and… it felt good. It made sense. I’m not only married to a woman I was very madly in love with but in a relationship with a “very gay man” who I also loved.

It broke my heart when it all came to a screeching halt. Other circumstances had him living with us and that was both fine and, of course, convenient but his world came apart when he got word that his grandmother – and the woman who raised him – had died and he had to leave to take care of things. I understood that he had to go but, at the same time, I also knew that I’d never see him again. He knew it, too, and it sucked that all we had with each other had to end. He had cried when we talked about what he had to do and… I cried with him. I cried when I told my wife about the call he’d gotten and what he had to do. I’d gotten my heart crushed before… but not like this. Not like this. I didn’t want him to leave but I knew he had to deal with this responsibility. I wanted him to come back to me… and I cried knowing that he wouldn’t and because he couldn’t. As we both understood things, his grandmother had put certain stipulations in her will as far as her estate and his rather impressive inheritance was concerned and it all added up to… us never seeing each other again. And, no, he never told her about our relationship, and it made me… feel better about things because her will didn’t read the way it did because of our relationship.

She’d known that he was gay and encouraged him to be the person he needed to be. He… wasn’t happy about the conditions and terms of her will and it was the first time I actually saw him get angry; I’d felt sorry for the lawyer that had called him and if you think getting cussed out by a woman is bad, that poor guy found out what it was like to get cussed out by a very effeminate gay man – and I learned some new cuss words.

I learned a lot of things in our time together. Being with him changed a lot of things I had in mind about love, sex, relationships, and sexuality, both bi- and homosexual. Love just is. It doesn’t care about the shit we care about and it’s not what we think it is. Once upon a time, I said that it was impossible for me to fall in love with a man, that it couldn’t and wouldn’t happen. And now? I won’t ever say never again about this or anything else in life. I have never tried to find him; I still wonder what happened to him and… I don’t know why I didn’t want to find him even though, once the internet came along, it would – and is – possible for me to do so. I can’t explain it but, strangely, I’m okay with it. Of all the people I have ever loved in my life, my love for him is right there at the top of that list. They say that time heals all wounds but this one has never healed, and I don’t want it to because it allows me to remember him and how he changed my life.

I see bi guys going on and on about them wanting a guy they can be FWB with but things falling short of feelings other than lust being involved and a sexual relationship turning into more than just that and I think that… there’s some stuff that they either don’t understand or are afraid of. I see the guy I mentor being “weird” about his FWB turning into his boyfriend and, well, there’s actually nothing unusual with that because there have always been bi guys who don’t mind having sex with a gay man… as long as it doesn’t turn into something else. Being in love with a man is a topic that comes up on the forum at times and while there are some guys who want to be in love with a guy, there are so many more who believe that… it’s impossible. Not ever going to happen because they love women (and pussy) too much to, presumably, give it up and because they assume that being in love with a guy demands giving it up. I learned that these assumptions are warranted because of the many times I’d gotten with a gay guy and he tried to “turn me to the gay side” and those who give me shit because they knew that I couldn’t and wouldn’t be monogamous with them and that I would cheat on them because I said that there was no way I was going to give up my love of women (and pussy)… because I didn’t have to.

There’s a current topic on the forum about “going gay.” I’ve read the responses the guy have been providing and many of them… don’t get it. They don’t get that love… doesn’t give a flying fuck about sexuality. But I understand that, and I find their responses – which, so far, is nope – not gonna go gay – interesting. It’s always been interesting in these things that one is expected to give up one thing in order to have another but this is because of what and how we believe The Big Three is supposed to be. I understand why my protege stops short of saying that he’s in a “loving relationship” with his FWB and I do get a kick of him tap-dancing all around his feelings for the guy – and feelings that have nothing to do with with the sex they’ve been having.

I asked him the other day, “When’s the wedding?” and I wasn’t really joking about asking him that. He sent back an “LOL” as a response and I just nodded to myself because I can see where his relationship with his FWB could go… if he wasn’t afraid for it to go there. I had asked him, on another occasion, if he could see himself living a “gay existence.” He… waffled all over the place with his answer to that and I knew that he’d already been subjected to guys wanting to be in a relationship with him as long as he would be totally monogamous with them and… he gives up women and everything about them. I knew about the guys who were…. pissy and flat out jealous that my boy was having sex with women and even other guys. So his reluctance to say that he’d want to be in a “real relationship” with his FWB makes sense to me and more so when this guy is… giving him some shit about consorting with women.

Having a boyfriend taught me some shit about this. I would hazard the guess that being with him put me on a path of understanding that regardless of sexuality, we all want the same things out of life: Love, sex, and relationships. He “made me” understand that any of these three things can be found with… anyone. A lot of bi guys head for the hills if a guy gets in his feelings and/or things look like they’re turning into something more than just sex because being gay is a “ghost” that still fucks with a lot of men. Guys like to ask if you’d leave your woman to be with a man – and only with him – and most guys say some form of “Fuck no!” I say that I wouldn’t say that it could or would never happen because I learned a very powerful lesson about saying that.

The Specter of Gayness still fucks with a lot of guys. Some guys get to feeling some kind of way over the fact that if you have sex with a guy, it’s called “gay sex.” It doesn’t mean that the men in a sexual situation are gay – but we assume that one or both are and has to be and because we know what “being gay” means – being into men and only into men and no… departure from this is allowed. I told my protege and after one of his early FWB got into his feelings and was demanding exclusivity as well as demanding that he stop having sex with women that it shouldn’t surprise him because the guy wanted the same thing that everyone else wants: Someone they can call their own and let no one put asunder. He was, at the time, most upset about how this had developed and I ended the conversation by saying, “Well, that’s what you get for being good at what you do…” and I didn’t mean hs sexual prowess – but I did mean that my protege is the kind of person that you’d want to be with and, yeah, as far as some gay men are concerned, he’d make a guy the perfect boyfriend or even husband so I’m not surprised that there are guys trying to take him off the market.

It’s… a human thing, really. My boyfriend taught me that.

 

Life, Living and Loving: 08 November 22

I read the TMI Tuesday stuff every day but I don’t always contribute but, yesterday, I made a rare contribution and all because of the very first question asked… which is and can be a major clusterfuck. For those of you who don’t follow TMI Tuesday, here’s that question:

“You unexpectedly had sex with your friend’s partner. You feel guilty. Your friend’s partner keeps texting you begging you not to say anything about the two of you having sex. Would you tell your friend or keep mum?”

I found the question interesting because of two aspects: “Unexpectedly” and feeling guilty. I found the choice of “unexpectedly” interesting since it implies that whatever happened wasn’t planned but there are those who firmly believe that you can wind up having sex with someone that you didn’t intend or expect to have sex with and that such things should never happen to begin with. I was forming my answer to the question – and you can see it here: TMI Tuesday: Coupling | Kdaddy23’s Blog (wordpress.com) – and going back in time and the early days when me and the fellas were chasing girls and with the hope of (a) having sex with them and (b) having them as a girlfriend and we would “invariably” wind up having sex with each other’s girlfriend either on-purpose, “accidentally” – that means that it just happened – and, yes, unexpectedly because we would learn that you do not ever do anything with your friend’s girlfriend other than speak to her and that includes not even looking at her and like you want her for yourself.

It made being able to fight rather mandatory; it also tended to result in a broken friendship and most assuredly a lot of hurt feelings. I think that what made this situation kinda/sorta less hurtful was that you could have a girlfriend today, she’d sleep with another guy tomorrow, and she could wind up being your girlfriend again on the third day. It was a very weird period and one that we all go through as we stumble and fumble through being able to establish a relationship and keeping it intact and in accordance to what we’d also been told about this: You can only have a relationship with one person at a time. Yeah, usually but not really because not only by the time I got into junior high school there were guys with more than one girlfriend, but there were also girls with more than one boyfriend.

Lots of fights and hurt feelings would often ensue. I remember the first wedding I went to and the part where the minister had them repeating the “for better or worse” parts and it “confirmed” what my parents had told me about being married and, well, okay. I remember them explaining being engaged – that meant that if you were engaged, you couldn’t “be” with someone else and having sex with someone you were engaged to was, at the time, still considered to be very bad form and this was very much in-line with them telling me that you should only have sex with (a) someone you loved and (b) someone you were going to marry.

So there were two things one had to be mindful of and adhere to: The Friend Code and marriage vows. I don’t exactly remember when I saw the similarities between these two things, but I would, one day, be very aware that people in a relationship but weren’t married are held to the same rules as being married, i.e., for better or worse, in sickness and in health; forsaking all others and keeping only unto yourself. And then… the reality I had already been introduced to that made me wonder about some stuff. I would understand why that part of the marriage vows existed and, yes, it has everything to do with making babies and having a good and viable gene pool and more so when all kinds of birth defects plagued humanity in its early stages. Okay. Makes sense.

But the reality doesn’t much care about this. I don’t know about anyone else but at some point, you learn some shit about attraction and chemistry that just flat out defies the rules we have in place to ensure that things between men and women are one man, one woman, and no exceptions. “Dating” and beginning in junior high school was a bitch and that’s being nice about it because, again, your girl could your girl this morning and someone else’s girl right after lunch. It would be so terribly heartbreaking to find out that some other guy stole your girl and, yeah, he fucked her, too. Cheating was just… par for the course, to put it that way and I would learn one day that there really is a difference between having a girlfriend and being engaged/married and that difference was that you were still held to the same rules but… loosely.

Yeah, sometimes, I’d wind up sleeping with a friend’s girlfriend or, um her boyfriend, and… I didn’t feel bad about it all that much. Like I said in my answer to the TMI question, I knew what the Friend Code said but I also knew about consent, too. If the party of the first part agrees that having sex with the party of the second part would be a very good idea, let’s get it on but if either party had a boy- or girlfriend, well, neither party can let it be known to their boy- or girlfriend that they had sex with each other because you knew what was going to happen with both parties when the boy- or girlfriend found out. I’m not going to say that I got involved in this purely because of intent or “premeditation” although, sure, if I could steal a guy’s girl from him, why not and more so when guys had no problem stealing – and fucking – my girlfriends. It was… dog eat dog and feeling bad about screwing your friend’s girl was, well, you kinda felt bad about it and you didn’t so much.

Messy. I don’t know how many times a guy introduced me to his girl, and I could feel the sexual attraction and, oh, yeah, if I could do her, I most certainly would but The Code prohibited it. You just don’t do your boy dirty like that but I would learn that sexual attraction is some damned powerful shit and to the point where I knew that breaking The Code would be very bad but the two of us knew we had to have sex with each other. This, again, was intent which isn’t the same as being caught up in the moment and, yup, unexpectedly having sex with your friend’s partner. Oh, shit. The rule says that the parties of the first and second part should, in the moment where sex is about to happen, say no, and run away as fast as one can and tell their partner about the incident.

Yeah… and even I found out that it doesn’t work like that. One might think that unexpectedly having sex is an impossibility, but I can assure you that it isn’t and the times when one of us has said, “We shouldn’t be doing this…” and we’re doing it just the same. I would “feel bad” and I wouldn’t because unlike my peers, I understood some stuff about attraction and that “chemistry” that tells you to have sex with someone and how this seriously conflicts with The Code. You don’t want to make an enemy out of your friend but, on the real, that urge to have sex can be damned hard to ignore and one minute you’re sitting there talking to her and the next thing you know, the two of you are going at it and you want to stop and you know you should and, nope, it’s too late at this point and, oh, shit. Well, I’m sure as fuck not going to tell him that I boned his girl and I didn’t mean to because he’s not going to believe that I didn’t mean to and, shit, I really don’t want to wind up getting into a fight with him but that’s pretty much a given that should be expected.

That sense of betrayal is a motherfucker to have to deal with, but this is one of those things that can be “filed” under, “Things happen when they’re supposed to” but this isn’t supposed to happen. I remember all too well how I (a) fell in love with my friend’s wife, (b) how she had the same feelings for me, (c) how we both knew that we shouldn’t feel this way about each other, and (d) we also knew that there was no way in hell we could have the sex with each other we both knew we had to have. And despite our best effort, it happened anyway. Okay. Here’s the thing: Neither of us felt guilty about the five hours we spent having sex that first time, but it was obviously clear that letting our respective spouses about this even though my marriage was open, and my wife and I were free to have sex with anyone of our choosing. So I was “good” on my end but, of course, she wasn’t. She made me promise that I would never tell my wife about this because they were friends, too.

And I never did. I did, in fact, break the rule my wife and I had between us to fully disclose all encounters with others and that just compounded the situation but, okay it got weird because promises were broken but kept and “all because” human nature does not give a fuck about the vows and promises we have created for ourselves. I’m not gonna say that my wife didn’t suspect that there was something between us but she never called me out on it. I would, many years later, find that she eventually told her husband about us – and many, many years later – and when I had asked how he reacted, she said that he was rather calm about it… because he kinda/sorta knew.

I would go to work every day and see him every day and I did not feel bad about the relationship I had with his wife, and it didn’t affect our friendship and working relationship but, then again, why would it when at that time, he didn’t know. Or, realistically, he knew that we were… friendly but not, perhaps, how friendly we had become. But, now, this.

Was there intent to, well, fuck shit up? No. Was it unexpected? No and I say that because we both felt the pull the moment we saw each other, and it was crazy and unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life. We knew we were going to have sex. We knew we shouldn’t have been thinking or feeling this way, and we both knew that we were going to fail to keep our hands off of each other, but I’ll ask you to believe me when I say that we tried and starting with stopping talking to each other and… that just didn’t work since, sometimes, she had to call me to find out where her hubby was and what he was doing. Shit.

Whether it was intent or “unexpected,” I screwed a friend’s partner and I did not feel guilty about it and there was no way in hell that I was going to tell him about it and even if she hadn’t made me swear by all that meant anything to me to not say a word about it to anyone. The Friend Code… busted. Marriage vows… busted but they were already busted on my end because I learned a lesson about how the vows don’t mean shit when someone is compelled to “do what they gotta do,” to put it that way. Zero guilt and I remember us specifically talking about this a few hours after our marathon first time. She asked me, “Why do we not feel guilty?” and… I didn’t know but I got to thinking about it and saw that, well, hmm, we both consented to it and as adults are “allowed” to do. We did something wrong, but it was the right thing to do, and I think we both got schooled on what chemistry can really be like and how fucking powerful it can be. When she asked, “Are we gonna do this or what?” I knew in my heart and soul that I could not and would not say no… even when I damned well knew that I should and because of The Code and the legalities involved when you’re married.

A very watershed moment in my life and… I couldn’t tell anyone about it. She didn’t have to “beg” me not to tell because, again, we both damned well knew that telling was out of the question and in direct violation of being open and honest with your spouse/partner. Yeah… I found out that she told a couple of her girlfriends that she trusted, and I’d met both of them one day and they both let me know that they knew, and they weren’t even mad at me and both said that they were happy for us… and jealous, too. I told my closest friend because I knew he wasn’t going to say anything to anyone else about it.

Tell our spouses? Hell, no. She asked me not to tell mine and she knew I was supposed to because she knew about our open marriage and that was because I told her about it when it became clear what had to happen and, yeah, it was a given that we weren’t going to say shit about it to her husband and my friend and coworker. We didn’t even think that it was going to be a one-time thing because we knew it wasn’t going to be.

The biggest sigh I’m capable of at this point. There are the rules we are to always follow and without exception, but you learn that human nature doesn’t give a fuck about stuff like that. It was a lesson I had learned growing up and getting into the “relationship game” but it wasn’t until this moment in my life that everything that I had experienced – and including my wife cheating on me and it leading to us being open – that everything that I believed in was seriously proven to be… flawed. Honestly? I knew it was before I got that kick in the balls and, shit, sometimes, we were having sex with our friends’ partner while the partner was right there and all up in the mix. That was different. What I just told you about was a whole very different thing with a lot of implications and a slew of consequences that included some that weren’t palatable but a lesson of when you’re an adult and you consent to something like this, you accept the consequences even if the worse-case scenarios never happen like, um, we talked about her getting pregnant and having to explain that one to our spouses. She didn’t believe in using condoms and birth control as a whole so it was on me to get out of her before the fact, but we were both also aware that my “pre-cum” could contain active sperm. And I knew that if I got her pregnant, I had to own it and accept whatever consequences that happened.

And I was prepared to “take the whooping” I could expect to get if she did get pregnant because, well, I’m an adult and I’m not a coward in that sense. You do the “crime,” you do the “time.” At the end of any day, it wasn’t about intent or one of those “shit just happened like that” moments that really do happen. The “moral of the story” – and I can appreciate the irony in using the word, “moral” – is that if you do it, what’s the real point in feeling guilty about it since both of you consented to do this and in defiance of The Code and how we go about having a relationship like you’re married and even if you aren’t legally bound to each other.

I can, in a way, cite “unexpected” because I never expected to fall in love with her and I knew – because she told me – that she was even more shocked than I was. She’s the one who taught me that there’s nothing you can do about the way you feel – you can only do something about how you act on those feelings and if we had a problem, it was that we knew how we were going to act on them and… okay. Resistance was futile but, again, we knew that, too. Not telling our spouses about it and, believe me – she was well worth having to break my promise to my wife and I’m not just talking sexually and, yes, I felt worse about that than I did over what the two of us did. Still, zero guilt in that regard, and I think that was because we both understood human nature and, yeah, again, we both got a lesson on what “having chemistry” with someone really means.

She talked about fate a lot. That this was meant to be and, as such, she accepted fate; I felt the same way minus “fate” but I will say that if I never believed in fate before, I had a damned good reason to believe in it. Still, if we consent to doing this thing we are never to do because (a) The Friend’s Code and (b) the way all relationships are handled like being married is, yeah – some seriously messy shit all across the board and, once more, the fact that reality, in the form of human nature… doesn’t give a fuck. We are designed to be sexually attracted to each other and while we do our level best to not be so attracted when we’re in a relationship, I honestly do not know many people who have never felt that attracted to someone they weren’t supposed to be attracted to. You can’t help but to feel it and, yes, you go out of your way to not do a damned thing about what you’re feeling but, um, yeah, sometimes we fail to abide by the rules and as we know them to be.

The worst example of this for me? That would be my best friend’s wife accusing me of fucking her when I stayed with them while in their city and looking for a job there. He was understandably livid and left his home and came to mine to face me with the accusation and he was ready to fight. I, too, was livid because I knew that heifer lied on me and, at the time, I was 100% about abiding by The Code and, sure, I might have done that to someone else… but never to him. He was ready to kill me and understandably so but cooler heads prevailed, and I got him to see the truth and I had assured him that if I had fucked her, I would have told him myself that I had – and then took the blame for it even if she somehow managed to seduce me and, yes, I told him this to his face. He had some shit to talk to his wife about but this is a situation where The Code was upheld and on top of the fact that I had zero sexual interest in her. Come to find out, she tried to use me to make him jealous so that he would divorce her and, well, that poor girl had… issues, to be nice about it.

And an example of how The Code and the other promises we make just aren’t proof against human nature. I should, even now, feel bad about that… and I still don’t. I know that I should have “been strong” and said no when she asked if we were going to do this… and I didn’t and I knew I wouldn’t and I knew I should because the rules say so. She knew it, too and she asked, and I consented, and we did it like neither of us had ever had sex before in our respective experiences. It felt right despite being all kinds of wrong but, shit, it’s all a part of being an adult and owning the decisions you make. You never really expect something like this to happen – I know I didn’t – but there’s a lesson in this, too: Always expect the unexpected.

Does it make sense to feel guilty over that which has to be? I really don’t think so but I’m sure there are those who’d read this and not be of a mind to agree with this… and that’s understandable because I know what the rules are and there were other times when I’d find myself sexually attracted to a friend’s partner and… nothing happened… but I never saw this coming and, in retrospect, I should have but it wouldn’t have made a difference because it’s way too easy to saw what you shouldn’t have done… after you’ve already done it.

But I understand human nature because I got schooled in it and beginning with my first day in junior high school and at a time when trying to establish a relationship with a girl was expected and this kind of stuff happened as a matter of course. It’s complicated but, on the other hand, not so much when – or if you can – look at the reality of things and I do not mean the skewed version we’ve all been fed.

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 02 October 22

I get to see a lot of guys talk about how closeted they are and while I understand what that means, it… sucks and not in a good way. Social norms have made us fearful of, well, a lot of things but especially anything that even remotely looks like homosexuality which is… stupid.

I don’t mean to insult anyone’s intelligence or beliefs, but it has always made me scratch my head to hear/see people going off about this and how it’s not supposed to be… yet they also know that not everyone is heterosexual. When they’re talking about bisexuals being invisible, it “simply” means that they’re not out of whatever closet they’ve had to put themselves into and out of fear of reprisals and being hated upon – and that can be closer to home than having to worry about what, say, a coworker might have to say about it if they were to find out.

The worse is being bi and in a relationship. When I’ve been asked what’s bad about being bisexual, this is right at the top of the list and while a lot of people have gotten… better about being in a relationship with a bisexual, there are still a lot of people who aren’t of a mind to be so accepting. When I’ve been asked what one can do about this, I don’t have any definitive answers. I mean, you can tell your partner, but history has proven that you do so at your own risk and it’s seriously fucked up because if you can’t tell them this, who can you tell?

And you feel compelled to tell them. You find yourself being unsure if you can tell them and more so if you’ve ever heard them making comments that aren’t all that favorable toward anyone who isn’t straight but what makes that worse is that they might spout such stuff… but they don’t really mean it. It’s like how I grew up hearing a slew of guys vehemently stating that they wouldn’t eat a woman’s pussy even if their life depended on it because, as “everyone” knew, Black men just do not eat pussy.

Yeah, you’re probably getting that look on your face, right? It’s bullshit, of course, and faking the funk but it’s also about… image. I caught all kinds of hell in high school because it became known that I eat pussy and the sexual Zodiac patch I wore on my jacket didn’t help things and I got hit with the nickname, “Taster’s Choice” and, yeah, after the instant coffee that had come out around the time I was in high school. I’d get da bizness on a daily basis from guys who proudly let it be known that they didn’t eat pussy but, privately? Oh, yeah – they were eating at the Y but to avoid getting razzed – and like I was experiencing – you… stayed in the closet on this one.

Your partner could be like this; totally against it publicly but in their private thoughts, well, the reality of things is right there to be seen and even they might have some trepidation to let you know that they don’t really “hate” on anyone who isn’t straight… and because they fear you going off on them and, well, it’s like you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I’ve seen relationships get damaged and utterly destroyed. People who once trusted each other unconditionally now have a lot of distrust between them and beginning with one partner finding out something about the other that they didn’t know about and now, not only is the bisexual in question a liar, they’re a cheater, too, because “everyone” knows that bisexuals are serial liars and cheaters, that they can’t commit to just one person and all that other shit that, sadly, has some truth to it but not a whole lot.

The best way not to potentially wind up being tarred, feathered, and boiled in oil is… to keep it to yourself and that’s a problem as well because, at some point in time, this is going to be discovered and, oddly enough, I know a lot of bisexuals who have outed themselves to their partner and didn’t know that they did. Now it becomes a matter of them letting you know that the know or, as I’ve observed, they know and they don’t let you know that they know or, as one woman told me about her bisexual man, “I’m just gonna give him enough rope to hang himself and he will hang!”

What makes this even more of a problem is that a lot of people… don’t give two fucks if someone is bi as long as they don’t include them in any way and that get extended to those who are close to them. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say that they don’t have anything against gay people – usually – but they’d better not fuck with them or their man/woman, brother, sister, or anyone else who is close to them. I’m as bisexual as the day is long and hearing this sentiment puts them on the list of people I will never tell that I’m bisexual, not because I fear any reprisals from them, but I don’t have the patience to listen to the dumb shit that I know is going to come out of their mouths… because I’ve heard it too many times before.

Your partner finds this out about you and… now it’s all about them. How hurt and betrayed they feel because you lied to them, and it’s automatically assumed that you’ve been cheating on them all along and “probably gave them an STD,” and how could you do this to me and… shit. I’ve told folks in a relationship that this is about the time that you find out that you really didn’t know your partner as well as you thought you did… and now there’s going to be hell to pay and, usually, there is nothing you can say to them that is going to keep you out of that pot of boiling oil.

The sad part isn’t what they say about how evil it is to be bi – and you’re in denial of really being gay, mind you; the sad part is hearing them going off on you and, yeah, telling and showing you some shit that you didn’t know about them as well… and it hurts right down to your soul. Now, as you’re listening to how something about you has totally fucked up their whole life, you might be wondering how and why you fell in love with this person and someone who is letting you know how ugly they can be.

I have found that this kind of response tends to happen and no matter if you were already bi before the relationship began or it’s something you discovered about yourself after the relationship got up and running… and this one can be really bad and that’s being really nice about it and more so when every relationship is run under the premise that you should never, ever want anything or anyone other than the person you’re with. They should be all that you will ever need. Now, as a bisexual, you’re doubly fucked because (1) you’re not as straight as they believed you to be and (2) you’re either already cheating on them or you’re going to.

I’ve had girlfriends who, upon discovering that I go both ways, give me grief and asking why I didn’t tell them this when we first met and I’ve said, “Because I knew that if I told you, this is how you were going to behave.” That tended to piss them off even more and they didn’t realize that by getting on my case about it, they’re proving me right – and I’ve pointed that out to them. You know the shit is bad when you have a girlfriend tell you that she’d rather you cheat on her with another woman than having to deal with you sleeping with some dude… and even if you’ve never had sex with a guy but the feelings are still there just the same.

Some women… do not have a sense of humor about this and, as I would sometimes find out, even if they were bisexual, too. Some women have outed themselves while getting in my case about me… being like them and – get this – being told, “That’s different!” and followed by how and why it’s different and, um, no, baby girl, it’s not different. Some men don’t have a sense of humor either, and things can get very ugly and, sadly, sometimes violent. Even I learned that logic can’t stand up to the very emotional response that’s about to land on you like the heaviest thing imaginable.

It’s a conversation that if you’ve ever experienced it, you’d rather not want to get into but ethically, letting your partner know this about you is important and more so if you’re of a mind to be or go back to being sexually active as a bisexual but it’s still one of those things where even if you had no intentions of getting into some same sex stuff – and that’s because you have no intentions on cheating on them – you can still be damned just the same. Now, I have seen things… calm down after the initial emotional rush but I’ve also experienced not being trusted going forward because I obviously lied to and betrayed them and, well, maybe it’s better if we just break up.

I’ve seen a lot of people throw some really good relationships into the trash because of this. I’ve sometimes found myself being a mediator in this “dispute” which usually had the addition effect of outing myself since the only way I should know about this problem is if I’ve been the one about to be boiled in oil… and now whatever I might say might not be trusted since it’s “clear and obvious” that I’m going to side with the bisexual in the soon-to-be-ended relationship. I’ve saved a few relationships and have failed to do so as well and it’s not that the person pitching a bitch about this can’t and doesn’t understand whatever I say about this because they can and do…

But it’s about what they don’t believe in as far as sexuality and relationships go. Tack on what “everyone” knows about those confused motherfuckers and bitches who go both ways and it’s usually an uphill battle trying to explain anything to them. You betrayed them; you lied to them; you cheated on them; you don’t love them, and you never did… and even if/when that’s not the truth.

As such, there are a lot of very closeted bisexual men and women. Not all of these situations go straight into the shitter and more and more couples are accepting and even embracing bisexuality in a partner because their partner understands that this really isn’t about them and instead of throwing it all away, well, let’s say that I’ve seen things get very interesting and not in a bad way and I’ve personally experienced it because it is what it is and breaking up over it really doesn’t make a damned bit of sense when the love for each other is both strong and real.

And, importantly, they’ve let their intelligence handle things rather than to let their emotions dictate things. Their intelligence allows them to accept that he/she is bisexual, either “before the fact” or, at some point in the relationship, they got bitten by the bisexual bug. Such couples have asked me, “What do we do about this?” and I’ve stressed that the only thing that has to be done is to accept that one of you is bisexual; anything else is… optional.

But this acceptance isn’t easy to get. Letting a partner know about this tends to no go well and there’s just nothing that can be done about it; between someone’s beliefs about such things and the rules of monogamy, a bisexual in a relationship can find themselves between the proverbial rock and hard place and the emotional impact of being there… isn’t nice. All understatements but the truth just the same. I had gotten to the point where if I was interested in a girl and for more than sex, I’d just tell her that I’m bisexual and if she lost her shit over it – and they usually did – well, she’s not the one for me.

It… sucks to have someone tell you that (a) you can’t be what you know yourself to be and (b) you’d better not be doing shit behind their back – and they probably already have it in their mind that if you haven’t cheated on them, you’re going to. You can’t prove that you haven’t cheated or that you’re not going to and that becomes a problem because if you tell them this, now everything you’ve ever said and done is now suspect. Everything. And getting them to believe that you haven’t been fucking them over and have no intentions of fucking them over is hard to do.

Messy doesn’t begin to cover this. It’s “easier” for a bisexual in a relationship to get into their closet and stay there. You can be damned if you stay there and damned if you come out of there and the very bad thing is that you really don’t know how they’re going to react to finding out that you’re not straight but you’re not gay, either. You love them and this is something you want to share with them and the real problem – and as if this wasn’t a big enough problem to begin with – is that it is all too well known that if you tell your partner about this, your relationship is going to be over and done with and you’re going to take a beating and, again, sadly, sometimes, literally so.

The advocates talk about the violence against bisexual women, but they don’t say much about the violence bisexual men are more likely to get subjected to… and at the hands of the woman they love and are in a relationship with. I know quite a few guys who have been beaten and even stabbed behind this. Sometimes and when you’re a bi guy, it’s not some dude you have to worry about getting violent with you – it’s the woman you sleep with every night. What makes this worse is the very well-known fact that if you’re a man, you do not ever hit a woman even if you’re trying to defend yourself. Damned if you do and getting your ass kicked if you don’t. How bad can this get? I know a woman who poisoned her husband because he told her about his bisexual feelings. He didn’t die but she did wind up in prison for attempted murder.

It’s… insane that a guy would rather risk a long jail sentence for beating on his woman because she’s bisexual than to accept that, well, this is her. You loved her before you knew this… and now you do and instead of accepting this and having a nice, calm conversation about it, the “only” response is to get physically violent with her or, even worse, being emotionally violent. Or both. It’s insane that a guy would go off on his woman because of this and think that she’s not going to do anything about it – and then get the shock of their life when she does do something about it and, usually, the moment homey gets in bed with her and goes to sleep and on top of believing that she ain’t got it in her to retaliate with some violence of her own.

And all because our social norms and morals do not allow anyone to be anything but heterosexual. I’ve gotten a raft of shit from guys who’ve asked me what would I do if I found out that my [first] wife was sleeping with women and my answer would be, “Nothing. I know she does. So what?” And then I get to listen to some shit that is not only bullshit but all about that which they don’t believe and the level of violence they’d bring to their woman if he found this out about her.

On the other hand, I’ve heard both men and some women say that they would rather their man/woman cheat on them in the same sex way than in the opposite sex way… and I’ll let you think about that one for a moment. It’s weird that a woman sleeping with another woman doesn’t seem to be as threatening than a man sleeping with another man is – well, sometimes since cheating is cheating and the reason why someone is cheating is because they have a need that their partner cannot – and very likely will not – take care of or, like I told my poly wife, “Baby, when I want some dick, you don’t have one.” And, nope, she wasn’t happy about the fact that I had permission to get some dick when I wanted/need it.

She thought that my sexuality had something – and everything – to do with her; I didn’t love her, and I hated having sex with her and all kinds of shit and, well, damn. I gave her the most eloquent explanation that I have ever given someone and… she didn’t get it and it was made worse because she knew there was nothing she could do about it other than to leave the relationship… and she didn’t want to do that. Sometimes in a relationship, there is… grudging tolerance. I’ve heard both men and women say that as long as things at home are being taken care of, well, okay. Kinda. They don’t want to hear anything about whatever they’re doing or not doing.

Messy. A problem that, intelligently, shouldn’t exist but it does. It puts and keeps men and women in the closet and for as long as they’re able to stay there. It’s not… nice being in the closet. It sucks to not be able to share this with the person you love and every fiber of your being wants to share this with them and they’ll accept it as you being yourself and, importantly, your bisexuality has nothing to do with your love and desire for them. And good luck trying to convince them of this.

We should be better about this… and we aren’t but we’re… learning to be better.

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 15 August 22

Because of a post Naughty Nora wrote about polyamory, it got me thinking about and remembering how bisexuality got me tossed into the world of polyamory as well as trying to recall all of the stuff I’ve read where it’s been “implied” that bisexuals are “naturally suited” to embrace polyamory which I don’t necessarily disagree with but you don’t have to be bisexual to be polyamorous because this is a… feeling that begins with understanding that, well, you have a lot of love to give and that kinda ugly feeling one can get because they’re not getting all of the love they feel is needed and especially with people who are already in a relationship more than the many single people I’ve seen and heard of embracing polyamory, not just for the sexual aspects but along the lines of a saying I heard: “Many hands makes quick work.” Which is the polar opposite of, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

Here’s the link to her post:(https://ourmarriageanddomesticdiscipline.wordpress.com/2022/08/14/polyamory-a-snapshot/)

Polyamory in a relationship defies every rule of monogamy. Every last one of them and especially for those who are married and are now in violation of their vows and specifically those parts that says to keep only unto yourself and to let no one/no man put asunder and until death do you part. It is… quite odd that when a married couple gets to that “how do we spice things up” part of their marriage, some… sundering is often thought about and only mentioned by those who are brave – or foolish – enough to say that one way we can spice things up is to let other people into our relationship. For the longest time, that meant opening the relationship so that, individually or as a couple, needs that weren’t being taken care of could now be taken care of but those they would engage with were… disposable, to put it like this. Such a couple could, in fact, have a single “extra” lover and be in a separate but long-lasting relationship but not, um, part of the whole relationship that made this relationship possible.

Then, at some point – and a point I’m not sure about – a couple found that they could have an open marriage but what made it better for one and all were to jointly be involved with people who could be an active part of their relationship and in every way that meant. I am aware that the famous – or infamous – hippies of the 1960s and their communal living mindset that had the Moral Majority highly upset and I’ve felt that it was this kind of living that probably gave birth to polyamory, but I also think – and as I’ve seen some experts in the field of how humans relate to each other – that we were very polyamorous before monogamy came along and effectively shut it down.

Call it a rebirth of sorts if those experts are right about what they’ve been discovering. We say that it takes a village and there is so much truth to this just as it’s true that we’ve gotten away from “village life” but polyamory serves to create this village life and, well, when it’s done right – and there is no hard-set way to define what “right” means – well, it’s the shit and as I’ve written many times, it is the ultimate relationship because it will push you to your boundaries and past them and in ways that makes being monogamous stupidly easy… but is well worth the efforts involved.

Like Naughty Nora said in her piece: If someone had told me the day before I got married that a day would come that I would still be married but I would also have a couple of other “wives” and raising two more children than my wife and I would eventually have, I would have laughed in your face, asked you what kind of drugs you were on, and told you how fucking impossible that would be and then told you to get the fuck out of my face with this nonsense because I believed in what everyone else believed in where the sanctity of marriage was concerned.

And I was wrong to do that and as I would find out in short order and, yeah, due to bisexuality… and not my own. What made this… break from those former beliefs was something my mother told me the day I told her I was getting married: Your marriage is only going to be as good as the two of you are willing to make it. And… she was right and here’s the funny thing about her being right.

I remember the day when she finally decided to say something about the, ah, extra people living with us and what she thought was going on between us and I told her how all of this came to be (but leaving out certain things) and she gave me this… look that I knew was her way of letting me know that she thought I’d not only lost my mind but I had gone against everything she believed in and what I was taught and I was a few moments from really getting preached to but I may have avoided that by reminding her of what she said to me that day and then telling her that this is the way we decided would work toward making our marriage as good as it can be.

She blinked and said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

And I said, “So do I.” Truth be told, I resisted opening up our marriage and I resisted the creation of our poly and extended family, too. And… resistance was futile because in both situations, I saw the sense in it and as it all related to our relationship and marriage. For the being open part, it took us, oh, maybe a month of some serious talking and planning to get it up and running but for the poly part? That took a couple of years before I figured out how this arrangement would work for one and all – and that it was 100% about all of us and including our children who thought we were fucking crazy and at one point, let us know how they felt about it but with the understanding that your objections, if any, are noted – but this is the way it’s gonna be until it’s not the way it’s gonna be. It wasn’t that we didn’t try to make this arrangement as beneficial to them as it was for us because we did and went out of our way to ensure this so, no, it was just about the three of us… because it couldn’t be.

But, yeah, my wife’s bisexuality is what got us into this “mess” along with wanting to be loved and/or fucked by a guy who… wasn’t me, not that she was unhappy with me in any way but having to be monogamous wasn’t taking care of all of her needs and she did what a lot of people do: She cheated. Made me so furious it wasn’t funny but when I called her out on it and demanded an explanation, by the time she got finished talking – and issuing the now-infamous ultimatum – I… understood. I had everything I believed and thought I knew about all of this shredded and flushed down the toilet and getting the answer to a question: What would you do for the sake of love?

And my answer was, “Anything I had to.” And it was an answer that also made sense given how many people are of a mind to say, “Baby, I love you, but…” and followed by some stuff they don’t believe in or aren’t going to do so on and so forth and, well, let it suffice to say that I learned some shit about the way things can be… now all I had to do was figure out how to make it work and keep it working.

Like I say about this, this was the most insane thing I’d ever done and have been a part of… and the most physically and emotionally satisfying thing I’ve ever done and been a part of. There’s a lot of… personal shit that has to get dealt with that a lot of people who have tried to live like this, well, they weren’t able to deal with their personal shit and it would, effectively and eventually, doom them to failure and in short order because one of the first things I learned about being both open and poly is that monogamy doesn’t work and whatever you think, feel, and/or believe about the way it’s supposed to be?

Forget it. The biggest thing I had to learn was a word that I’d not learn about for literally a couple of decades: Compersion. Simply being happy because your partner is happy. Without even knowing such a word existed, I, um, I learned that I could be happy with my bisexual wife even when she would be with someone else but I’ll be damned if it “made sense” but it would – and the moment I realized that being “monogamy-minded” wasn’t going to work and for me to keep feeling, well, territorial in these things, well, not only were we going to fail but keeping all of this inside of me was going to do some serious “internal” damages that, frankly, I wasn’t trying to have to deal with.

Things weren’t always about sex but sometimes just being able to… relate to someone. To feel whatever you felt about them and without the guilt that is inherently a part of being in a relationship and not keeping only unto yourselves – and that, by the way, wasn’t just about married folks; it’s a rule that non-married folks are made to abide by as well. When I say that I learned some shit about this, I really learned some shit and my biggest “problem” was assimilating all of what I was learning so that I could hold up my “end of the bargain” where making our marriage as good as it could be made.

This would be the second time in my life that I got… liberated from the status quo and just like the first time I got liberated from it, I had to learn it on the fly, so it became such a complicated and complex intellectual exercise for me and, really, for both of us to figure out how to do that which we literally vowed to never do. And, um, to be really honest? It was fun. We learned more about each other than we thought was even possible and, believe me – I learned some stuff about her that I wish I hadn’t and I’m sure she learned some stuff about me that she didn’t want to know about but, together, what we learned was that if we didn’t have this… full and honest disclosure, none of what we were trying to do was going to work.

Man… talk about shit getting messy. I would, one night and while lying between the two women I’d just spent the three hours having sex with, understand that things were messy because I didn’t know how to do any of this without it being messy since, from being open to being poly, there was no… “manual” for how to do this so it was on me to write the manual or, really, rewrite it. People who knew about us said I was crazy for not only having one wife but two of them and, yeah, really, three of them. And… they weren’t wrong about questioning my sanity because there was never a day or night that went by when I wasn’t questioning it myself.

But it worked. Oddly, a lot of the same bumps in the road one can experience being monogamously married (even without the license, too) and, well, I knew what that was like, so I had to adapt it for two other women and on top of the one I’d been in love with since the first day I met her and knew that she was The One. And having to accept that, well, that was right… and not so much and, yeah, I learned some shit. A lot of it. And having to actively be a part of something I barely had an understanding of how this was supposed to work now that we once again threw the rulebook out.

Whew. Yet there’s nothing else like it. Being in a poly relationship and/or having an extended poly family makes being in an open relationship look like the easiest thing in the world to do because what I had to think about each and every day was how in the hell was I going to deal with three different – but oddly similar – women and in every way “dealing with them” meant. From the day-to-day family stuff to the more personal sexual and other emotional things – and that didn’t include my own thoughts and feelings, but I had it easy because I knew what they were but, yeah, women.

Whew. As I learned it takes a… vision and one that all involved not only agree with but are also ready, willing, and able to do whatever it takes to share the vision and make it work for all of us and not just one of us. Hmm, I think that herding cats is easier. It wasn’t easy on any of us and we didn’t always agree on a lot of stuff but the main thrust of this was for all of us to work toward making this relationship the best we could make it since, um, this was very much about all of us.

And given what I know now? I’d do it all over again because… it just makes sense to given how, again, being in a poly relationship/family isn’t just about having mad crazy sex all of the time: It’s about becoming a village so that we can all prosper and, importantly, continue to grow as a person, too. Like I had told my mom that day, when it was just the two of us? We struggled with a lot of things but now that there’s three of us working on stuff?

We. Got. Better. Everything got better. And not quite overnight but close enough for government work because I was tasked with the responsibility to make this crazy-assed thing work and I was determined to not fail and, yeah, I did think I could handle both of them which, um, yeah, not gonna say much about that but what that challenge really meant and the one I accepted was that I wasn’t afraid to try and I wasn’t afraid to do whatever had to be done to make it work… I just wish that I knew then what I know now.

We went from giving a shit about what other people would think and say to not giving a shit and that happened fairly quickly because you quickly get tired of people telling you what you’re supposed to be doing and not supposed to be doing but, um, yeah, we’re doing it and… we’re happy and, by the way, how is being monogamous really working for you? I’ll bet it’s not working as well as you think it is, huh?

Don’t hate the players – hate the game. Man, the shit I’d get thrown at me and, yes, mostly by women who accused me of wanting and having a harem and that all of this was 100% about me – and refusing to believe that this wasn’t my idea to begin with, well, not until they went to the source – my wife – and learned some shit and some of them actually apologized to me for the horrible things they said to and about me and some, well, they felt they didn’t need to apologize and, really, I didn’t expect them to.

Men. You’d think that the guys would be 100% on my side but the truth was they weren’t. Yeah, some guys were… envious; some expressed that I was the luckiest motherfucker on the planet and, yeah, some of them were sure that I’d lost whatever mind I had that just being involved with one woman would have ensured I was going to lose. And some were of a mind that I was the wrongest motherfucker who ever lived to have turned my back on my honor and vows “just for some extra pussy” and, well, hmm, those guys found out that I not only have a temper, I have a very nasty one, not because they offended me with this sentiment but they offended the women I loved to imply that they were just pieces of ass for me.

And to those who objected? I would tell them – and in one form or another – “You’re just mad because I – we – can do something that you can’t, and you can’t because you believe in some shit that isn’t all that true and you’re too afraid to.” And I meant it. You have no idea the number of very dirty looks I’d get from people when the three of us would be out and about together – like going shopping – and we didn’t hide the fact that we were way more than just friends and, yeah, we kinda got a kick out of PDAing the shit out of peoples’ sensibilities to be openly being affection with each other and I do mean affectionate.

But the social shit was also something that had to be contended and dealt with and beginning with us not letting any angst thrown our way bother us. And the many times I’d find myself talking to one or both of them and letting them know that, well, haters were gonna hate but we should not and cannot let that fuck with what we were doing and trying to do for the benefit of all of us and including our children. Yeah, I’d be so tickled having two white children call me “Pops” and even more tickled when they’d introduce me to people – or I’d have to introduce myself and like getting them signed up for school – that, yep – I’m their daddy and seeing the look on their faces was beyond… precious.

I sometimes felt that the five of them got a kick out of having more than one mother, too, well, until they got their asses in trouble and in this, the thing I “knew” we had to avoid was that “you’re not my daddy/mommy” shit that usually went on in some relationships and the problems that shit can cause. They didn’t like this change in things, and it wasn’t like we didn’t understand it or felt like they weren’t supposed to have objections but, yeah, we handled it and to the best of our joint abilities and you can believe that those little motherfuckers had no qualms about trying to play one of us against the other… and just like they were expected to.

Whew. Seriously messy, right? Yes, it is but if you can do it and you have a plan – a vision – to make it work? The rewards are… priceless. And I’d be lying if I said that the sex wasn’t off all kinds of hooks because it sure the fuck was and, honestly, if you think being in bed with three horny women is da shit, allow me to disabuse you of that because the only thing that saved me from being totally and completely destroyed by them was that all three of them embraced bisexuality… and two of them weren’t before all of this came to be. So humbling that I can’t begin to tell you what that felt like but also humbling in the fact that they didn’t want anyone else other than me and as evidenced when I’d put in a “plea” for some help in this department… and it got rejected out of hand and with, “What, you can’t handle all of us?”

And they all knew that to really bring out “the best” in me, all that had to do was to challenge me like this even when, yeah, any of them could take me to the limit and, well, hmm. Just having sex with two of them on a daily basis almost put me in the hospital because I was exhausted and badly so – and that was just the one-on-one sex so you might be able to imagine what it was like being in bed with both of them and dealing with the problems I knew was going to happen and trying to figure out how to deal with them so that they didn’t destroy what we were all working hard to keep very much alive… because our lives depended on it now.

The most insane thing ever. And the best thing ever. You just gotta want and learn how to make your relationship the best it can be and be willing to do whatever is necessary to accomplish this very worthy goal. Naught Nora knows. DDJennifer knows. There are others here who knows like I do. It’s not for the weak or faint at heart and I’ve seen so many try to do this while holding onto the rules of monogamy and, yeah, that’s just not going to work and one of the things I’ve seen cause failure for single people is not having what’s called “the core relationship” that serves as an anchor point. Not that single folks can’t be polyamorous or create their own poly families but what I’ve observed is that lack of “me and you” that is the foundation on which things are built upon and, well, let’s just say that it’s my opinion that polyamory – as a way to live – works best when that core relationship exists and is deemed to be strong enough to carry all this extra “weight…” and one way or another, you’re gonna learn some shit about yourself, your partner, the other people who chose to be with you in this and, oh, yeah, that the way it’s supposed to be isn’t the way it can be if, bluntly, you have what it takes to make it work for you and those who would be with you in this.

I can’t tell you what to do to make it work for you, but I can tell you what not to do and maybe I’ll go over that some other time. Go read Naughty Nora’s post and especially the part where her poly “family” – and the joy she gets from it – doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex… and maybe all of this stuff I wrote will… make sense.

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 28 July 22

Today’s Thoughts are a kind of two-for: Bisexuality and polyamory and how one can beget the other. I was re-reading an old post about two questions that, in my poly relationship, I got tired of hearing and trying to answer.

The first was, “Why would you do this?” and the other was, “How can I do this?” and that old post, I can see, was more about how those two questions would frustrate me more than really answering them… and I’m not trying to answer them today, either. One of the questions I learned to ask those who were looking to do this – and depending on the makeup of their proposed extended family – was, “What are y’all gonna do when the girls/guys start making love to each other?” because I had learned that bisexuality can be quite… contagious in that situation and more so when the group has sex together and the more they do, the more likely it’s going to happen.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this since I had good reason to and I’m not going to get into all of that again but I will say that at the very beginning of my poly relationship, the “logic” strongly suggested that if the three of us kept making love together, something was eventually going to happen and more so when my then-wife was bisexual. And, boy, did it ever happen! I had expected a lot of shit to hit a very big fan… and it didn’t, and I was… “pleased” with myself to have foreseen this happening but it gave me more questions than it answered, like, what is the possibility of an extended family – and regarding of the makeup of it – having bisexuality pay them a visit?

On the one hand, it doesn’t seem to be all that probable when you consider that not everyone is bisexual or even has this on their mind in any way… but in creating the bond between them – and sex is the best vehicle for this – well, let’s just say that I’ve told people about this and they didn’t quite believe me and, as a result, everything fell into disarray. I learned that you can sit and plan something like this and talk about how it’s going to work and, yeah, agree to exclude some stuff but the “mistake” I’ve seen made is such a proposed extended family believing that no same-sex stuff is ever going to happen.

It’s not a guarantee that it will but from what I’ve learned personally and from so many others who were brave enough to accept and take on this very daunting, life-altering challenge, yeah, it’s a likelihood that should be talked about so that everyone is aware so that should it happen, no one is going to really be all that surprised.

I’ve had guys say that, nah, they ain’t like that and no shit like that would ever go down and this is quite typical and, well, I’d be thinking that they didn’t know as much about having sex as they thought they did and, yup, some of them got quite the surprise just the same and the biggest surprise would often come into play because the same-sex thing wasn’t something anyone planned on happening – it just did and now it was all about adjusting to it but I would think that if you were aware of the possibility and included it – but not so much as an exclusion – if it happens, then the surprise isn’t going to be all that devastating.

Not all poly families or groups have bisexuality pay them a visit… but the potential, I think, is always there. That and I’ve seen group sex situations have… visitations and, again, not expected but that level of intimacy and being wholly in the moment can open the door and even if for that one moment, like the guy my [then] wife and I had sex with along with his girlfriend and we had set the boundaries for what was to happen but once things got heated up, most of them went out the window but with agreement but imagine my surprise when I’m sitting there watching the two women doing a number on him while sucking his dick and he suddenly grabs my dick and shoves it into his mouth and started sucking me!

Now, um, I didn’t mind that at all but I was stunned because I knew he had no interest in such a thing, yet he’s sucking me like an old pro. The other surprise was when the women turned on each other and, well, I knew my wife was bi but didn’t know about the other woman but, wow. Later and during a much-needed break, they both said that they hadn’t intended on that to happen, and I gave them major props for admitting that it just seemed to be the right thing to do and, nope, it wasn’t bad at all. Let’s say that round two got very interesting…

But I was intrigued at how this could happen without any prior intention and learned more about the power of sex and how it can influence things once inhibitions get kicked to the curb. I was of a mind that this was just something I was seeing and in the early days of our open marriage, it was something I saw happen a lot of times, both intentionally and not so much so, hmm, there must be something to this; I could have been “wrong” about that first time but what’s the possibility of my being wrong in the other times I witnessed this?

Not all that likely and I would go on to learn some stuff about this and how, in a poly setting, sex can bind and in unexpected ways so why not expect it or, really, have a lot of awareness of the possibility since should it happen, it’s going to upset the whole dynamic of the extended family. I would learn that in this setting, forget all that shit you think you know about having sex and how you prefer to because anything can happen and if you’re not prepared for it, yeah, that’s a problem, ain’t it?

It would lead me to tell anyone who would be interested in this that they’d have to unlearn everything they know about love, sex, and relationships so they can learn a totally and whole new way to go about these things. And I’ve seen quite a few potentially good extended families crash and burn and all because of something they didn’t believe would or could happen.

Those two questions. Still not going to answer them the way I should and have answered them. That first one just mystifies people because it contradicts what we believe about relationships and monogamy, but I stand by what I say in this regard: Cheating wouldn’t be the problem that it is if needs are being attended to and/or met and when they aren’t, guess what could happen and more so when monogamy leaves no room or has any recourse that isn’t the dissolution of the relationship.

And it’s not cheating if you have permission. It’s called ethical non-monogamy or, my favorite, negotiated infidelity because you best believe that a lot of negotiation takes place to get to his point. To those who got mystified by this, it’s yet again one of those “Yeah, but…” moments where the mystified can intelligently understand the reasons for this but, emotionally? Just doesn’t compute and can’t “hold water” against what we believe about things.

As to “How can I do this?” well, I’ll partially answer this one: The best way you can and good luck. Seriously. I learned how to do it via OJT and trial and a lot of errors. There is no “one way” to extend the relationship like this and you just gotta figure it out for yourselves and, as I always say, come up with a vision of what the extended relationship is going to look like and work that everyone involved can be invested in and not just be a part of or being of a mind to think “me” more than “us.”

And then leave room for a visitor who just might come a-knocking. This isn’t, um, fuck, how can I put it? This isn’t about fulfilling fantasies as much as it is most definitely a way to live that has benefits other than some pretty amazing sex. It does take a village and the more people you have working toward common goals, the better the chance to have those goals met and exceeded and to the benefit of all.

And the more you can learn about yourself and those you love who are with you in this. I maintain that doing this is way harder than being married and monogamous but, yeah, it’s worth the efforts involved and there are a lot of them that must be endured and handled to ensure that the extended family works well all across the board and, yup, even if/when bisexuality drops in to stay a while. Fighting against the possibility is, in my opinion only, a mistake because it is… disruptive to the whole of the gestalt.

Unless this is going to be formed because bisexuality in the relationship already exists, it just does not pay or do any good to deny or insist that such… shit cannot be allowed to happen because this stinks too much of how monogamy is in that it doesn’t allow for people in the relationship to change and any changes tend to be summarily rejected out of hand because, well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Which also taught me to tell others that if you try doing this and hanging on to the rules of monogamy, you’re going to fail and that includes creating rules to protect the core relationship that will prove to be to0 restrictive and inhibitive and, again, will disrupt the whole dynamic and make it fail.

Okay. I’ve gotten this out of my head…

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 20 April 22

First, Happy 420 Day for those who partakes! Cheech and Chong’s “Up In Smoke” popped into my head for a moment.

Next, I was thinking/remembering a guy everyone called Denver – and why they did was something I didn’t know since I did know he was born in the same state and city I was born in and had never been to Colorado. I saw him walking up the street and looking aimless and not paying attention as he bumped into a couple of people and as if he hadn’t seen them.

To me, he looked like someone had stolen his lunch money after his dog died. I have an eye on him as he approached where I was sitting on my steps and mostly because I’ve seen people approaching the corner, where there’s a traffic light, and just keep walking and getting hit. He got to where I was sitting and I kinda waved at him and I guess it got his attention because he kinda waved, was going past me but then stopped and came back to me.

“What’s up?” I asked him – and now I could see that he’d been crying.

“Man, shit is all fucked up,” he said.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said. I wasn’t going to ask him what was “all fucked up.”

He stood there for a moment and like he was thinking; he lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and finally said, “Lemme ask you something, bro.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

He took another drag off his smoke, cleared his throat and asked, “Man, what would you do if you found out that your woman has been sleeping with other women?”

My first thought was, “Uh-oh…” and for a couple of reasons. One was that I knew his woman and that she was, indeed, sleeping with women and the other was that I knew that she was because she had slept with my [then] wife a few times and the last time was just a couple of days ago; I very much remembered seeing her coming from upstairs with a sheepish grin on her face as I was coming inside. For me – for us – it was no big deal given that we were open.

All of this had flashed through my mind in the space of a second or two and I even had time to think about how I was going to answer him… because he was waiting for one. My choices were to “lie” and say that I’d raise all kinds of hell or to tell the truth, which was it wouldn’t bother me. The “answer clock” in my head is running and I knew I had to say something one way or the other. I made my decision.

“I’d want to know why but I wouldn’t be all that upset about it,” I said.

He blinked. Kinda shook his head like he hadn’t heard me right. He frowned and took another puff. I’m thinking that he wasn’t “happy” with my answer and give me one of those “I ain’t got time for you” waves and keep on walking but that’s not what he did. He actually gave me a look that asked if he could sit with me and I just nodded. He sighed one of the biggest and heaviest sighs I’ve ever heard someone do before saying, “I came home an hour ago and I could hear that she was in bed with somebody. Man, I was ready to kill a motherfucker, you know?”

I nodded.

“I creep up the steps and the door is wide open; I peek around the corner and, damn, I almost shit my pants to find her in a 69 with another babe!” he said. “I started to break that shit up and throw both of those bitches out on the street… but I just left because I ain’t trying to catch a charge, ya know?”

I nodded. He lit another cigarette and that gave me time to think that it’s one thing to suspect that your lady likes pussy and seriously something else to catch her in the act and like he apparently had.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “What would you have done?”

Yeah… I knew he was going to ask me that. I shrugged and said, “Um, I would have seen what was going on and I would have left without saying anything… but I wouldn’t have been mad about it.”

“Why the fuck not?” he asked, looking at me like I’d lost my mind.

“Because I know my lady likes pussy,” I said and shrugging like it was no biggie… because it wasn’t.

“Shit! You ever catch her?” he asked.

“No, but, yeah, I know about it,” I said. I was praying that he wouldn’t ask me if I knew if my wife had slept with his wife but quickly decided that if he did, I was going to lie like a rug. I didn’t feel good about that but it was either that or having to listen to him going off on me and my wife and, shit, I hope he doesn’t ask.

“You a better man than me,” he said and with a small laugh. “I should go home and kick her ass for cheating on me but, shit, she didn’t do it with a dude.”

I nodded my understanding of this. I knew that a lot of guys and gals felt that if they were “doing some freaky shit like that,” it wasn’t really cheating. I almost laughed aloud about that one because I knew it was still cheating but, yeah, I understood why so many said it wasn’t – but they’d still be pissed off about it anyway.

“I should be all she needs,” he grumbled, flicking his butt into the street.

“Obviously not,” I said. If looks could kill, he “killed” me like three or four times after what I said sunk into his brain.

“What the fuck, man? Why would you say some shit like that?” he blurted out and, for a moment, I thought he was going to take a swing at me.

“Just stating a fact, Den,” I said. “The mistake we make is assuming that our man or women will only need us and nothing more than that… until we find out otherwise. I didn’t say that to be busting on you or anything like that but, yeah, if your wife is getting some pussy on the side, I’d say that it is obvious that you’re not all she needs.”

“But she cheated on me!” he said.

“I understand that but, um, lemme ask you something. If she had come to you and told you about this, would you have allowed her to do what she had to do about it?” I asked.

“Hell no!” he said.

“Well, um, that’s probably why she never said anything about it you,” I said. “So, um, whatcha thinking about doing?”

“I dunno. I should divorce her ass,” he said – then he turned his head to look at me so fast that I heard his neck crack. “But that’s not what you did, did you, when your wife told you about this shit.”

“Nope. You probably won’t understand this but I had to decide which thing was better: Knowing what she was doing and who she was doing it… or not knowing and thinking that everything is A-OK. I thought about divorcing her but… I love her; I didn’t see the sense in throwing away everything we’ve built together just because she needed something that I couldn’t give her.”

“Damn…,” he said. “You definitely a better man that I am!”

“I don’t know about that but what I do know is that she’s happier,” I said. “You know, happy wife, happy life?”

“And?” he asked.

“And what?” I asked.

“What do you get out of it?” he asked.

“I get to get all the pussy I want and can get,” I said with a laugh. “No such thing as a free lunch and if it’s good for the gander, it’s good for the goose.”

“Damn…” he said. “You for real?”

“As real as a heart attack,” I said.

“So what you saying? That I shouldn’t say anything to her?” he asked.

“Nope – not even saying that,” I said. “It’s all on you to decide what to do about this but y’all been married for, what, like, seven or eight years and I know y’all got kids?”

“Yeah… and?” he asked.

“And I’m just wondering if you’re really that willing to throw it all away and if you are, well, you gotta do what you gotta do,” I said.

Denver lit yet another cigarette and just sat there for a moment before saying, “Man, I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do! She lied to me!”

“About what?” I asked.

“She didn’t tell me she was into women!” he said.

“Is that really a lie?” I asked. “I mean, unless you talk to her about it, uh, this could have been something that she realized after y’all met and got married and, besides, I have a problem with that lie of omission shit.”

“Lie of omission? What’s that?” he asked.

“That where people assume that you’re lying to them because of something they didn’t tell you – and you believe that they should have,” I said. “I’m thinking that if she was, ah, like this when y’all met and she told you, it would have been over with before it got started.”

“You got that shit right!” he exclaimed.

“So now you’re thinking that she lied to you because she didn’t tell you about something that – and I gotta be honest about this – a lot of people have found out the hard way that telling someone about something like this doesn’t go well so the best thing they can do is to not say anything about it. Now, does that make them a liar? I’m not sure…” I said. “Lemme ask you this – you still hitting it with her?”

“Shit yeah!” he said.

“Has it been better?” I asked.

He had to think about that one but I was pretty sure that it was better.

“Yeah, now that you mention it, she has been throwing it on me big time,” he said.

“So, um, ah, it’s not like she ain’t handling her wifely duties,” I said. “And if she is and she seems like she’s happier…”

I let the sentence trail off. On the one hand, whatever he decided to do about this wasn’t really any of my business unless my wife’s name comes up and he wants to give me some shit about it; if so, well, I’d just have to deal with it.

“So I shouldn’t say anything to her about it – is that what you’re saying?” he asked.

“No, I’m not saying that at all,” I said and vigorously shaking my head. “But, yeah, y’all need to talk about this and I hope that if y’all do, it doesn’t go as bad as I’ve seen and heard it does because you two clearly love each other and belong together.” He sat there for a moment, plucked his butt away and got to his feet.

“Thanks, man,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “Shit… I dunno how this shit is going to go but you said some right shit. I love her and what we have together but, damn, I dunno.”

“I hope everything turns out okay,” I said.

“Yeah, me, too – later on, man,” he said and walked back in the direction of where he lived.

I sat on the steps for a long time and thinking about this. I knew that quite a few of the local ladies who had men were getting busy with each other since, again, my wife was all up in the middle of it as well. What I knew about Denver’s wife was that she wasn’t into this before they met but, over the time they’d been together, she had felt that there was something missing in her life… and then she figured out what that was. I even knew the first woman she has slept with – it was her closest friend.

Denver, if he went about this the right way, would find out what I had found out, not only about his own wife but some of the other wives in the ‘hood… including mine. But I was okay with her getting some pussy “on the side” and I hadn’t lied to him when I said that I felt it was better that I knew what she was doing and who she was doing it with. Seriously tough pill to swallow and that was being nice about it.

As I got up to go inside, I thought that one way or the other, I’d eventually find out what happened. Either they’d come to some kind of understanding, or the word would get out that they broke up or, worse, he got locked up for beating on her.

It’s a situation that people often don’t handle very well. Being married and monogamous, well, it is what it is and the way it’s supposed to be but as I’ve said here many times, the people who invented this were blind to the fact that people change; they really do have needs that appear after the vows have been said and sworn to but those same vows imply that the new husband and wife should be all that will ever be needed…

And it doesn’t really work like that and as I had found out. And while my wife and I had found a “peaceful” and agreeable way to deal with this situation, man – I’ve seen so many relationships and marriages get totally destroyed because people faithfully believe in monogamy… which is fine, but such a firm belief also tends to blind them to the fact that people change; needs change. Monogamy just doesn’t allow for this, and I even remember reading some stuff where experts are saying that we – humans – aren’t meant to be monogamous and being this way is unnatural.

I tend to agree with the assessment; I have known for the longest time that married people are bound by the rules of monogamy… and so are people who are in a relationship and not married. I learned a long time ago what happens to bisexuals who aren’t allowed to be bisexual and, yes, a lot of very serious depression happens to them and there’s no telling what they’re going to do at that point but one thing they might to is to go for what they know because it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission and, yeah, chances are good that they won’t be forgiven and asking for permission is a no-go kind of thing because it’s not that hard to figure out and/or assume that the answer is not only going to be no, it’ll be “Oh, fuck no!”

It’s a sad situation and that’s being nice about it. The good thing is that a lot of people are finding out that being able to take care of those “extra” needs and without reprisal is a lot better than taking a perfectly good relationship and throwing it all away. We get married and “for better or worse” and what causes the big problem is figuring out how to handle shit when it does get worse… like it did for Denver to come home, hear his wife having sex, and seeing that she was with another woman. Nothing prepares you for this… because it’s not supposed to happen. It gets… confusing because, yep, some sundering has taken place but instead of ruining everything, things get better.

It’s seriously messy. I know what it feels like to be a firm believer in monogamy and then find out that it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with people needed to be… themselves. I had had to remember what my mother had told me the day I told her I was getting married: Your marriage is only going to be as good as the two of you are willing to make it.”

Well, as always, she was right about that, and our solution was unorthodox in that we went in a direction that wasn’t getting a divorce and it wasn’t us fussing and fighting over the matter. As a guy, shit – it is one very well-placed and very hard kick in the balls to find out that you’re really not all she needs in order to be okay with herself and more so when you know that you can’t give her what she needs… because you’re literally not equipped to provide it.

I’m writing this and I can still feel the emotional hurt and pain I experienced. Many in this situation will say that they have no choice but to break up… and the reality is that it’s not the only choice but I’ve seen couples make the same decision my wife and I had made… and just fuck it up and wind up breaking up anyway because it is a busload of bitches trying to figure out how to do something that the rules of monogamy says you cannot do – and you’d better not do it.

What happened with Denver and his wife? One night, I go to answer the door… and there’s Denver and his wife, “Lisa,” and I just knew that they weren’t just dropping by to say hi and maybe play Spades. I invited them in, got my wife – and I got the impression that she knew something was “up” and I did see her and Lisa exchange… a look.

Denver says that they were there to talk to us about how we made it work for us to have sex with other people and it does not wind up being an even bigger problem. Yeah, Denver “got in my case” because I didn’t tell him that our wives were getting it on with each other and I had no excuse for not telling him but, yeah, I knew. He waved it off and said that if he had been in my shoes at the time, he probably wouldn’t have said anything either.

The four of us sat for hours talking about this. They had arrived around 7:30 and didn’t leave until 4:00 the next morning. The two of them “grilled us unmercifully” about what we did to make this not be a problem and while it was “easy” to tell them how we had decided to go about this, well, it wasn’t that easy to explain some things that, again, monogamy doesn’t allow for but I thought that the two of us did a good job of explaining to them that, if nothing else, we were responsible for each other’s happiness and if we weren’t willing to do whatever was necessary to make this happen then, yeah, it’s time to get lawyers involved.

And we weren’t feeling that at all. Here’s the “good” part. Denver and I are talking about things on the “guy side” of this deal and it had taken me a moment to realize that our wives weren’t there with us… and another moment to figure out and realize where they were and what they were doing. I got… stuck between not mentioning their absence and mentioning it but he noticed it.

“Do I wanna know where they are and what they’re doing?” he asked.

“Probably not,” I had said.

“This is weird sitting here talking and they’re, um, they’re…” he trailed off.

“I guess they figured that they didn’t need to be sitting here while we were hashing things out and, besides, we’ve been talking a lot about having sex and, well…” I had also trailed off.

“You were right about one thing,” he said. “It is better knowing what she’s doing and who she’s doing it with… but it sure the fuck is weird as shit. Do you ever get over that feeling?”

“Yeah, you do,” I said. “It’s… difficult because you love the shit out of your wife and you always and only want the best for her and want to provide whatever’s going to make and keep her happy… but you don’t see this coming and then you do. I mean, which thing is easier: Getting a divorce or trying to find a way to stay together? It’s not an easy decision to make and, yeah, it can fuck with your head knowing she’s with another woman.”

“Um, um, have you seen your lady with another woman?” he asked.

“Yeah, I have and, wow – it’s… something to see,” I said. “And before you ask, yes – I have been invited to join in and sometimes we get down with other couples and whatever happens, happens. It’s all good, well, it’s been good for us.”

“Damn,” he said. “This is a lot of shit to take in.”

“You ain’t said nothing,” I said.

“So we just sit here?” he asked.

“Yeah, unless you wanna get cussed out,” I said. “If they need us, they’ll call us.”

They didn’t need us. They came back down and appeared to be quite happy. We kept talking – and Denver was very keen to hear the very juicy details and, overall, I thought it was good that he could hear this from his wife and if he was upset about anything, it was probably because his dick was hard and bothering him… and I was feeling the same way, to be honest.

They finally went home with an agreement under their belts. We’d have a foursome with them a short time later and that was after we had another very long talk about that. I would wind up moving out of that neighborhood and we kinda lost touch with them… but I would run into him many years later and learned that he and Lisa were still married, and things were still going well.

Sometimes, the thing you’re not supposed to do is the thing that you should do and more so if you really and truly love the person you’re with and as much as you say you do and you’re about doing whatever it might take to keep the relationship working. It’s just not that easy to take everything you’ve ever known about love, sex, and relationships and get rid of it so you can learn a very different way to go about these things. Some people find that they can do it and make it work…

And some just can’t.

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 20 March 22

I was kinda/sorta “prepared” to talk about the emotional side of my bisexuality until I checked the forum for anything new and/or interesting and saw a “reminder” of the worst thing that a bisexual can experience:

Being bi and in a relationship. It doesn’t matter if the bisexual was bisexual before the fact or, as can happen, discovered it after the relationship has been up and running for “a while.” As an aside, when I say “discover/discovered,” it means that they either found reason to straddle the sexuality fence or they decided to figure out their thoughts and feelings and/or act on them – just had to finally clear that one up a bit. To continue, I can’t think of a worse situation and while a lot of the bullshit surrounding bisexuality can be dealt with, because of morality and social norms, we have yet been able to set aside monogamy as an inviolate standard for anyone who’s in a relationship: The rules, it seems, also applies to anyone in a relationship but not married or engaged.

“Keeping only unto yourself” is a motherfucker because it doesn’t leave any room for… things to change. When you tack on the taboo and sin of not being heterosexual, it becomes a perfect storm that has proven to fuck up many a relationship and sexuality isn’t solely responsible. You vow or otherwise agree to take care of each other for better or worse and all that and, realistically, when we’re in a relationship, we should be in it for better or worse but, yeah, we don’t do that all that well and as indicated by the fact that the United States has the highest divorce rates in the whole damned world and who knows how many relationships not involving marriage wind up being dissolved because we don’t want to deal with the “worse” part of things… which could include infidelity.

We are… inherently insane. We hold seriously true that infidelity should never, ever enter into a relationship but we know that it can; I know a lot of people who enter into a relationship and one of their primary concerns is being cheated on and stating the necessity of guarding against it and some of the stuff I’ve heard some folks say about what would happen if they got cheated on has given me chills to bear witness to how utterly vicious they say they’re going to be to the one who dared to cheat on them.

I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it: If you don’t take care of your man/woman, someone else can and will. People cheat when they have needs that are being ignored or otherwise not taken care of and they can usually both be emotional and physical. I’ve asked this before: If you’re not going to have sex with me, who’s supposed to?”

And the moral answer is, “No one.” And there you have it, the one glaring and major flaw in our beliefs because you don’t have to be married to figure and find out that it is virtually impossible for one person to take care of every need a person has both now and in the unforeseeable future. I think about the many times I’ve seen stuff written about cheating and a lot of it makes me roll my eyes and wonder – and sometimes ask – if they’re really that clueless and so much removed from reality that taking care of your man/woman – or else – is and has been a part and bane of our existence. It’s wrong and we infer in many ways that it cannot and should not ever happen but at some point, needs are going to be ignored and not taken care of because, well, we’re just fucked up like that and more concerned with our own asses than the ass of the person we’re supposed to take care of in all things and no matter when such care is called for.

I’ve seen the questions asked about what to do if someone cheats and how to prevent cheating from happening. I remember the first time I heard this question and I set my mind to working on it because a lot of people are of a mind that there’s nothing they can do about it when, after years of thinking about it and “collecting data,” I found that there is something that can be done about it:

Remove all of the things that can allow cheating to happen and even if doing that calls for the inclusion of, ah, external sources. Uh-oh. That one is 100% against the rule of “let no one put asunder,” right? Except, if/when some sundering happens, it first begins at home and with what someone isn’t going to do. See, the tenets of monogamy tends to look outward but never inward and, I think that despite the “better or worse” clause, infidelity begins at home and, again, when someone’s needs are being ignored or not being met as needed.

Most people “put up” with this… because it’s implied that they’re supposed to. You get into some shit about two differing points of view about how the relationship is supposed to go and there’s always that one person in the relationship who will do whatever they have to do to make sure that the relationship is run the way they think, believe, and wants it to run and this, too, is a problem that we’ve not yet figured out what to do about. I have heard both men and women say that whoever they’re with should not ever need anyone but them and we believe this… but the reality always begs to differ.

I’ve said many times before that I’ve had to tell women, “Baby, I love you and I love having sex with you but when I have that need to suck a dick, you don’t have one.” I have been told to get rid of that need and that I’m not supposed to have it… yet, I do and have had it way before I knew they existed; I’ve tried to explain that this is as much a part of me as breathing is and while I can do nothing about it, the need remains and I know myself in that the longer the need goes unattended to, the more a lot of things change about me that I don’t like… and you’re probably not going to like them, either.

Being bisexual and in a relationship is the bitch to end all motherfuckers. It is a need that one has or finds themselves having (and for various reasons) that leaves the bisexual in question in a very bad position and with few choices and the one choice they’re supposed to accept – without exception or excuse – is to suffer with that need not being taken care of or otherwise addressed. I have seen the nicest people you’d ever want to meet devolve into very bitter and miserable people who, yes, are often severely depressed because the rules of monogamy, both real and implied, gives no one any recourse in these things but there is something they can do:

Cheat. I think that there a lot of people who don’t know or consider that if their partner cheats on them, it’s because their partner feels that they have no other choice because continuing to go on with whatever else they need being ignored, rejected, and not addressed or taken care of now becomes a matter of their survival. No, they’re not going to “drop dead” behind this but it can be such a clusterfuck inside their head that it can become a matter of self-preservation for them.

This doesn’t include those people who get into a relationship, knows the rules and all that, but decide that they have the right to do whatever they want to do and fuck the rules and the other person’s sensibilities. A lot of people find out the hard way that they can’t be monogamous… even when they know that they have to be and they really want to be… but it just ain’t working for them. Indeed, a lot of experts in this are now saying that it is abnormal for us to be monogamous and they point back to a time before our morality existed and when mates were interchanged as needed because, well, it was part of them being able to survive and very much inline with our being social animals.

The rules had a damned good reason to make people monogamous: The continued survival of the species. The rules, however, never accounted for… change and people do change and, really, there’s not a whole lot that can be done about that other than to insist, demand, imply, or whatever descriptor you want to use that if you’re in a relationship, this is all you’re ever going to get and if you don’t get it, well, it sucks to be you and now the only recourse you have is to dissolve the relationship and start over again.

We do this. Many times in our life. Nothing really unusual about that except when infidelity becomes the reasons why so many relationships have met an untimely demise when, um, it didn’t have to be that way and more so when the relationship was going well… right up until needs started falling into a lot of cracks. Now, it’s not like we don’t know the “workaround” to this situation because we do… but it’s not allowed. Ever. So we learn that when you leave someone to their own devices, there’s no telling what they’re going to do and cheating can be the lesser devil; sadly, I’ve know and have heard of many people stuck in this man-made quandary that has suffered “domestic abuses” up to and including having their life taken from them.

And you have to ask yourself if any of this makes any damned good sense. It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. We enter into relationships with a huge list of things we’re not going to do for ourselves or anyone else and no matter how much we love or care for the person we’re with. We are very damned good at letting past failures dictate how our future actions will be or, in this situation, not so much. The moment and instant you decide that you’re not going to do (add something here) that your partner needs, you have implemented the sundering that you weren’t supposed to. But we tend to blame the one who has the needs more than we blame ourselves for “having reason” to not take care of their need.

Taking care of your man/woman isn’t just about any sexual needs they have – it’s their emotional needs, too. I’ve seen men, mostly and usually, deny their woman the right to better herself and that’s just as stupid and insolent as anything I can think of. If girlfriend has a need to, say, be better educated so that she can get onto the career path we’re all supposed to pursue – but homey tells her that she doesn’t need to do this or some other dumb shit along these lines – you’d think that he’d be concerned about how this denial is going to impact her but, sadly, that’s not the case so much. Men aren’t the only ones who can be guilty of such abject stupidity but, as we all tend to see and learn, a relationship isn’t so much about us as it is about me. What I want. What I need. What I’m not going to do. What I’m not going to allow, deal with, whatever.

It’s a problem that’s really outside sexuality. Bisexuals have major issues with it and just like everyone else can have: The rules do not allow any recourse in this other than to dissolve the relationship. Then you get into individual sensibilities, that belief that no one should do anything that resembles homosexuality, nor should they have any such feelings which, methinks, is humanly impossible. And while this belief makes it “sensible” to pitch a bitch (and then some) to find that their partner has some homosexual needs – and needs that will be summarily rejected out of hand – well, um, what do you think some people are going to do since this is a part of their self-preservation instincts – and even though it tend to take the form of making the decision to take this matter into one’s own hands because they have no other viable choice… and the one choice that is viable is considered to be immoral.

Open the relationship. Consensual nonmonogamy, negotiated infidelity, or whatever you wanna call it. The problem here is that, uh, we don’t know how to do this or we think we don’t. This gets complicated and in the situations where it’s known that people have tried this, it is always pointed out that they failed in some way and we just assume that it can never work… but many of us assume this because (1) this ain’t how shit is supposed to be and (2) we don’t want it to work. Well, unless we’re the ones who very much need it to work. When a relationship gets to the “how can we spice things up” phase, we go out of our way to spice things up without anyone else being involved but there’s a “wall” to spicing things up and it can become “obvious” that in order to continue being spicy, breaching that wall, logically, makes sense but, there’s the rules and our belief in those rules is an emotional artifact and so many people learn that logic tends to fail against emotional resistance. You can “argue” logic-based fact but you can’t do shit about someone’s emotions; you can’t “argue” about them (but we sure as fuck try to) because this is how they feel about what they believe and while not being so monogamous can make sense, it also doesn’t.

You don’t take care of your partner’s needs, guess what might happen? Either you’re going to wind up with someone who would be better off having a house dropped on them… or they’re going to cheat on you. We assume and insist that it’s the cheater’s fault when, in most situations that I know of, it’s the other person’s fault and all because of what they believe and what they’re not going to do for any reasons and they sure ain’t going to do something for the sake of love itself.

It’s a universal problem but bisexuals feel that they own this… and that’s not the truth of things. It sucks and that’s not even being nice about it. It feels 500% shitty to want something and you know that your partner is not going to allow you to have it and even worse when they insist that you don’t need it and you shouldn’t need anything that they’re not willing to provide and if you insist that you do, well, don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out.

A lot of good relationships get trashed and thrown away behind the strict adherence to a rule that, logically, doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. Then toss in our inherent fear of loss and rejection and, well, “messy” doesn’t even being to describe things. It stops being about us and becomes 100% about me. What I don’t like. What I don’t believe in. What I’m not going to do even if it has to be done to save your partner’s life in some way and, hopefully, not literally.

“What would you do if you found out that your woman was sleeping with other women?”

I’ve been asked this question hypothetically and, sometimes, because the person asking the question is trying to figure out what he should do because he suspects that this is what his lady’s been up to. My answer – and, believe me, I learned it the hard way and as many tend to do – is, “I wouldn’t do anything other than to find out what’s going on with her about this and then encourage her to do whatever she needs to do. “Happy wife, happy life” has a lot of deeper meanings that we kinda/sorta ignore because what we don’t know is what is going to make her happy at any given moment in time… and that includes her doing something that she was doing before we got all hooked up with each other.”

I know the rules. I once believed in them. And now I don’t. Sure, I might lose her to someone else but that was a risk that was always on the table and trying to prevent such a loss tends to make the situation worse than her getting some dick or coochie or both “on the side.” There’s a different set of rules for this that including preserving the relationship and some people create rules that often create even more problems because they never account for the fact that something might change and, well, to that end, a relationship “converted” to this way can be no better than being stuck with abiding by the rules of monogamy.

But, if it works – and the relationship remains intact and is working better than it was before, well, that works. It’s just that, man, some very serious shit has to be undertaking and gone through to resolve such things and, yeah, to keep one’s partner from cheating on them. In this, I think the worst part about cheating isn’t that they’re cheating – it’s not knowing what they’re up to whenever they’re not with you… and I’m not going to get into what some folks call emotional infidelity or, biblically, one of the Ten Commandments about not coveting thy neighbor’s wife nor his ass – that means the animal, not the body part. The gist of it is that you cannot and should not ever want anything other than what you already have… or don’t and the part of things that makes infidelity an implied sin.

And the messiness just gets worse. We have not done a damned thing to fix this error in our social contract and norms… but some people – and because they’re left to their own devices – find a way to fix it themselves. Hey, you know, there’s a way we can “cheat” but it’s not really cheating! Well, um, it is but that’s not the point because we do very much honor what consenting adults decide to do, right? So if “Paul and Sandra” decide that it will benefit them and their relationship to have certain needs taken care of by outside sources, well, let’s see how it can work because, in a lot of relationships, it needs to work or the relationship becomes forfeit, null and void.

It’s a flaw in the “better or worse” thing that a lot of people are finding that they can take advantage of since, if they can make it work, it avoids or heads off the “worse” part of that statement in the vows that, um, some folks try to get around by writing their own vows but, in fact, everyone who enters into a relationship is being held accountable to obey and no matter what happens after vowing or agreeing to be a couple.

The problem isn’t bisexuality… or any other aspect of sexuality: It’s us holding on to some beliefs that leaves no room or gives no recourse in the very human thing of things changing with us. It makes anyone who gets into a relationship static or, yeah, stuck and/or chained in place for the duration and humans don’t do well being static because we are dynamic critters that have the ability to adapt to change even though we kinda don’t like change all that much but being in a relationship puts a stop to being dynamic in one’s thoughts and actions and with a singular intent that’s supposed to work… and it doesn’t so much. Not for “everyone” and as is implied if not mandated.

Until society as a whole decides to modify or rewrite the social contract that creates this problem, it will always be a problem for anyone who has a need and one that the rules will not ever allow to be taken care of by a partner and when that doesn’t happen, guess what might and usually happens?

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 17 March 22

First, a Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to those who celebrate it!

Today’s Thoughts are twofold. The first one was a memory of sitting in my eighth-grade geometry class and our teacher calling the role and putting an “O'” before everyone’s last name and declaring that today, we were all Irish, which first confused us, then had all of us laughing. He said, “May the luck of the Irish be with all of you today!”

Then hit us with a surprise test that everybody failed except five of us who passed it (including me and reminding me how much I despised math) and since the majority of the class did poorly, we had to sit through a headache-producing review of the lesson the test was based upon. Not the best Saint Patrick’s Day I can remember.

The second one was all about my gay boyfriend who was obviously and proudly Irish. Even though he was born here, he spoke Gaelic like an Irish native (and probably because of the grandmother who raised him) and had tried to teach it to me and, uh, that didn’t go well but it meant so much for him to offer to teach it to me.

We awoke on Saint Patrick’s Day and he had announced that he had taken the day off from work as the wife and kids got ready to go about their day, leaving me home alone with him and as I sat and pondered where I could go to find a job that wasn’t a temporary one, he took it upon himself to show me how lucky he was on this day to be Irish… and so madly in love with me.

At that point in my life, I’d slept with a lot of men and it wasn’t that “all of them” were slouches or all nervous in the service but none of them could hold a candle to my boyfriend when it came to being sexual and so responsive. He was an amazing human being and an even more amazing lover; he was a cocksucking fiend and to the point and extent that he made me look like I didn’t like doing it and fucking him, wow – when I say that being in him was better than a lot of pussies I’d been in, I’m not exaggerating and there haven’t been that many men I can say that about.

It was a whirlwind of passion and sex and it began the moment I walked into the living room to get something and literally got tackled to the floor so he could get his mouth on me. It happened so fast that I don’t remember “losing” my underwear and I would later think that it was a good thing that I hadn’t gotten completely dressed because when I would have a moment to look for my underwear, they had gotten destroyed.

Hmm. I’ve written before about him and how emotional he was during sex but this day, he wasn’t as emotional as I’d come to expect. More passionate. A sense of urgency combined with a focus so intense that I was wondering if there was something wrong with him. Normally and when we had sex, made love, or just flat out fucked, he was the happiest with me having my way with him but that day? He was having his way with me. In the space of maybe two hours – and don’t quote me on the time because I could have been way off – he sucked me and rode me so many times that all I could do was lie there and let him do whatever he felt like doing while my beleaguered mind was trying to figure out how he was able to make me cum, keep me hard, and do something else to make me cum somewhere in him.

At one point, I had wondered if he had slipped something into my coffee that would account for it but he categorically denied doing something so “underhanded” and I believed him… kinda but the assault on my senses pretty much stuck my ability to think in neutral for the duration.

From time to time, he’d stop ravishing me to tell me how much he loved me and how lucky he was to have found me and blessed that I hadn’t rejected him or his feelings for me. “Being Irish is a good thing, my love!” he proclaimed as he sat astride me for the second or third time and working his ass on my dick and with, again, an intense focus that was starting to bother me because I’d never seen him like this before. While I was kinda/sorta used to seeing him cry copious tears of joy when we had sex, he didn’t shed a single tear this day but it wouldn’t be until I got my first “bathroom break” and got my head somewhat cleared that I would notice that he wasn’t displaying his happiness “as usual.”

Man, he did a number or three or four on me. He would alternate between “taking me” fast and hard and slow and easy. I would realize later in the day that he kept taking me the way he did because he knew that if he had let me off of my back, the table would have turned and he confirmed that there had been method to his madness and admitted that he wouldn’t have been able to do what he had wanted to do. I couldn’t be angry with him although I did let him know that if he had decided to take all of this to his room, um, that would have been better than me lying on the hard-assed floor that the thin carpeting didn’t do much to make any less hard.

Later – and when he’d finally run out of whatever “gas” was driving him – I felt bad having to attend to the rug burns he’d gotten and especially on his knees, which looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to them. “It was worth it,” he said as I busied myself cleaning his “self-inflicted” wounds.

At my first bathroom break, gods – I was a mess. I was covered with his cum and from him riding me and, honestly, I was impressed that he could cum when I fucked him to begin with and even more impressed with the amount of cum he’d wound up shooting all over me as he rode me as if his very life depended on it. I was… miffed because I would have preferred to have his cum in my belly but I was told – and in no uncertain terms – that on this day of Irish luck, I wasn’t going to be lucky to suck his cock at all. Indeed, I let him pin my arms to the floor – I could have easily broken free and he knew that I could – but as the ravishing got going – and I had a few clear seconds of thought – I didn’t know what the hell had gotten into him but, okay, if this is what was going to make him happy…

Yeah, I made the “mistake” later and during my second bathroom break of mentioning that I didn’t know what had gotten into him and he said, “You did, silly!”

I felt… helpless but not really. Being in love with him was… weird in that all I wanted to do was whatever it was that would make him happy but still trying to suss out exactly what that looked like other than the two of us being naked and going for it like wild animals. He had once said, “Just be you; be the man I fell in love with at first sight…” except on this Saint Patrick’s Day, I wasn’t “being me” so much as he took the measure of me and pushed me into a space that was unbelievable then and now.

At one point, I was worried about being hard for as long as he had been doing (and not counting the two times I was “allowed” to go the bathroom) and as he was sucking me – again – I was thinking about what a doctor had told me about how they fixed this very serious problem and even showed me the needle that would be used. Brrr. I didn’t wind up with priapism, thank goodness, but he just had some kind of “magic” going on that when I’d cum, I wouldn’t get all that soft before he’d start working on making me cum again.

It was good. It was scary, too, because I couldn’t figure out where “this guy” had come from. He was always passionate and, again, he loved sucking me off and having me inside of him but this was different. He wasn’t aggressive but more… assertive? than I had seen at this point in our relationship and a hell of a lot more intense, too. He’d be atop me and he’d look at me with those very pretty green eyes and say, “I love so you much…” time and time again.

I’d lost track of time. I can’t tell you how many times I came in his mouth and ass (or, again, how he even managed that trick to begin with). I had realized at one point that when I first went to the bathroom, I could have just gone into his room, climbed into bed, and wait for him but I’d go and retake my place on the floor and he’d begin again. His stamina amazed me. Shit, I was duly impressed with how much cum he was shooting and the science nerd in my head insisted that what I was seeing was impossible but because it obviously wasn’t, the science nerd just shut the fuck up and “sat” with the rest of my ability to think as he kept having his way with me until, suddenly and while once again riding me, he collapsed onto me… and started snoring.

His body was fever hot and as my brain came back online, I noticed that he was no longer sweating and I became very concerned that he was now seriously dehydrated. I got him off of me, checked his pulse and expected to find it racing like the wind… and it wasn’t. I stumbled my way to the bathroom to wet a washcloth with cold water and as I gently – and lovingly – wiped his face with it, he opened his eyes and said, “Hi, lover. God, I love you so much! Shit, my knees hurt!”

Once I was convinced that he was really okay and had tended to his rug burns, oh, yeah – we talked about it because I wanted to know what the hell had gotten into him other than me and how he managed the magic trick he laid on me to keep me hard and cumming over and over. I put it all out there for him to answer and he just smiled and said, “It was the power of my love for you. All of it. Well, except the luck of the Irish that brought you into my life.”

Wait… what kind of answer was that? And, you know what? I didn’t say anything about his non-answer. I blinked. I felt the power of his words and his love for me. I kissed him, told him that I loved him and got in my bed and went immediately to sleep. Upon awakening, god, he “infuriated” me because he was acting like all that had occurred never happened or. to be more accurate, he kept telling me that he didn’t know what I was talking about; nothing “unusual” happened because all we did was have sex, make love, and fucked and it was the best ever so what did I find so unusual about that?

I left it alone. Every time I thought to push the issues that were swarming my mind, he’d just smile at me and “dazzle” me with his green eyes and, again, act like he had no idea what I was talking or even thinking about. I still don’t know what went on with him that day, let alone the “magic tricks” he pulled that had the two of us, combined, spilling a whole lot of sperm.

I’d later talk to my wife about it and, I guess, looking for some sympathy or an explanation or whatever. She listened, would nod every now and then and when I finally ran out of things to say, all she said was, “Well, he obviously loves you, huh?” and said nothing else. I left that alone, too; obviously, I needed answers that I wasn’t going to get. Did I know that he loved me? I did. I could feel his love for me like a comfortable blanket and even intertwined with the love I had for my wife.

Could I explain what happened earlier in the day? Hell, no I couldn’t. I still can’t. Was it some Irish “magic” borne of the day? Fuck if I knew – maybe. The next day? He was back to his usual self when we had sex including him happily crying. I never saw “that side” of him again and, yeah, it just irked me because he had nothing to say about it. He’d shrug. Or just smile. ARRGH!

My wife put it all to bed by saying, “Sometimes, honey, if there’s an answer to something, you don’t need to know it; just accept it for whatever it was and leave it the hell alone.”

So I did. He was, hands down, the best male lover I’ve ever had. I had to come to grip with him being, in today’s terms, a submissive bottom; he didn’t just want to be “the girl” in our relationship – he was the girl and, often, annoyingly so. The sex we would have was… stellar but what being in love with him taught me outshone the passion and raw lust we’d both display with each other.

Ya know, you get used to how a woman can love you; how she can be affectionate with you and, yeah, how she can get on your last good nerve at times. I can admit to myself that despite all of my prior experiences with guys, none of them had prepared me to deal with him emotionally or physically. Did I know effeminate gay guys? I did but knowing them also hadn’t prepared me to deal with him and his very powerful love for me. Yeah, it had exposed some flaws in me that I hadn’t known existed and flaws that being so very much in love with him got rid of while making me seriously question what I thought I knew.

It just fucked me up having to learn how to take what it’s like to be in love with a woman and “applying it” to being in love with a man. I’d get un-fucked but that’s not the point as much as what the power of love can bring to the table and that love is unconditional and driven by “normal” manly lust and, shit, yeah, he was seriously lusty. I’d sometimes watch him blow me and he would be so focused on it; so very much into it and, yeah, so happy that I had to get used to him blowing me and crying at the same time. It hadn’t “made sense” but I hadn’t known or understood just how happy someone could be and how much joy could be felt. I knew that about myself as a cocksucker but he “took me to school” on that one and, indeed, changed the way I go about sucking dick.

He could bring out a level of passion and lust that I learned I was keeping in check. He made me want to screw him and maybe you know what I mean by that. Whether it was “low and slow” or “fast and hard,” I would feel… compelled to screw him and, sometimes, even when I didn’t “feel” like it. His eyes. His smile. The way he moved. I could do one of his “numbers” and just pounce on him and get my dick into him and he loved it. I would feel bad about taking him like that and on top of not understanding why I wanted to when, before I laid eyes on him, I wasn’t even thinking about having sex with him. He never “complained” about it. He reveled in it and in way that it took me decades to be able to understand and, nope, can’t even explain it but I know it and still feel it in my heart and soul.

He’d sometimes say, “Ooh, look at you being the man I love!” and I admit that it took me some time to figure out what he meant by that but all I had to do was think about how he responded to me screwing him and, yeah, he taught me that if you’re going to enjoy being screwed, enjoy the fuck out of it – and he most certainly did. I understood him… and I didn’t. He was way outside of my experiences with men but, oddly, when I’d think about the girl he was, he made perfectly good sense but, yeah, it’s hard to think of a guy who does guy things like shave and all that in terms that apply to women but I found that I could. I’d see the man that he was… and the girl that he was, too. My wife would laugh her ass off at me whenever I tried to make sense of this and like I really didn’t know what was going on and I wasn’t sure that I really did at times.

It wasn’t about him being a very effeminate gay man; it was about him being… him. His ability to let his love show unfettered. We’d just be sitting and talking or whatever and he’d say, “I love the way you love me…” and if I weren’t already baffled over the fact that I was in love with him, well, saying this didn’t “help” matters because I couldn’t get my head around how I loved him, you know, other than having mad crazy sex with him. I had asked him about that and he just said, “It’s you being you and I love the you that you are.”

Yep, that was helpful, wasn’t it? I think back to that Saint Patrick’s Day that took place so very long ago now and can see how deep his love for me really went. The lust, well, it was always there but what happened that day, and no matter how strange it was to me, wasn’t about lust. It was about love. Raw and pure and to the extent that I saw him a way I’d never seen before and, yes, it scared me. Okay, sure – I’d had guys just take me like they owned me but this? This was different and in ways I still can’t put into words other than to keep saying that he was so intense and focused showing me how much he really and truly loved me. Yeah, they say that you shouldn’t use sex to prove that you love someone but that’s what he did that day and it took me a long time to figure that out.

He changed my perceptions about being in love, too. It wasn’t impossible to fall in love with a guy and because it was possible, it wasn’t really about being bi or gay or however one identifies in these things: It was 100% about being in love with someone because they were who they were. Not “what are you gonna do for me?” or anything like that; that day, it was him showing me, “This is how much I love you…” and wow. Did he ever! It just bugged the shit out of me that he was so… blaze about it. LIke it was no big deal even though it was, at the time, the biggest deal in my life.

Here’s the thing. It would be a whole lot of years before I’d come across a woman who not only made me feel the same way he did, but who loved me unconditionally and despite the fact that we were both very married. The day we consummated our love and very forbidden relationship? I made love to her for five straight hours and my dick stayed hard the whole time. Something about her made me want to keep making love to her even when I was aware that I had pushed her past her limits and to the point where she told me that she couldn’t take anymore – and I was still hard and ready to keep right on giving her more. God, I loved her so much and I still do but, later that day and as I sat and wondered what the fuck just happened, it clicked in my head that what the two of us had done wasn’t all that different from a long-past Saint Patrick’s Day spent with a man who I also love so very much… and his love for me eclipsed the love I had for him.

The moment I realized it, all I could was say to myself, “Huh.” I got it. Sure, it was lust and all of that but lust that was driven by the full power that love can bring to the table. When I talked to her later, she had said, “If I had any doubts about whether you really loved me or not, you most certainly put them to bed! Telling me wasn’t enough and you had to prove it to me and, by God, you did. I still hate the way you make me feel…”

It’s something that anyone can experience if they’re open to experiencing it but as a bisexual, I got a “double dose” of what it means to be in love with someone and being loved by them. Not specific stuff like having mad crazy sex or doing other things but feeling the power of love inside of you like the thunderstorm to end all thunderstorms. Loving for real. I found out about that by being in love with an amazing guy; then got reminded and re-schooled with a woman. It’s not about what love is supposed to be like; it’s about… love just is. It’s like, shit, how can I explain it… it’s like that first time you fall in love with someone… but it never wears off or gets dulled or blunted by anything. Every day is like that very first day. There’s no need to say, “I love you!” and you don’t need to be told that they love you because you damned well know it; you feel it. It’s as much a part of you as an arm or a leg is.

That day, I felt the power of his love and through the incredible sex we had, I saw him. I felt him deep within me and I still do even as I’m writing this. There’s “I love you” and then there’s “I love you” and, yeah, it’s different. Powerful. Without question or doubt. Truly unconditional. Holy shit. I never really thought or believed that I would feel love like this then I did. Felt it again, too, and to that end, I consider myself to – wait for it – be lucky to have experienced love that strong and powerful.

Now, you might wonder if I felt… weird about loving him and my wife… and I didn’t. I loved them both even as I was learning to understand that I did so “differently” but that was because they were different people… but love was the constant. It just was… and it took falling in love with a man – and being surprisingly ravished by him – for me to be able to understand it the way I do. It’s loving without being “afraid” to love; it’s forgetting all of the times someone crushed the shit out of your heart and soul because the power of the love being experienced just makes you forget those awful moments. You’re either going to be “all in” or you’re going to be… reserved. Guarded. Thinking about all of those time when you dared to love and got burned, crushed, and just thrown away. Letting those moments make you afraid to love or to love with conditions attached.

Putting you in that frame of mind that makes you say or thing, “I love you…” but there’s an unspoken “but” attached and whatever that happens to be. It is insane to experience love like this and finding out that there’s no “making sense” of it and I often think that if I weren’t bisexual, I would have never experience it the way I did with both a man and a woman… but first with a man who was, by his own admission, “all girl.”

Amazing. Unforgettable. I understand how and why we can love someone and in whatever way or “reason” we do; I understand how love can wind up being diminished, blunted, and even subdued because we just have reason to protect ourselves against those moments when love turns into something other than what we want, think, feel, or need it to be. And then, there’s being exposed to love in a way that just stays with you for the rest of your days. Unfettered. Unconditional. And, yes, unashamedly lusty as all get out. Sex, as it turns out, is the “best” way that love uses to speak to us but, yeah, we want proof of love without sex and if there really is a way to prove it, I’ve never learned what that might be and, no, “the little things” don’t always lend itself to proof of love and that’s something I think we all find out.

There’s love the way we think it’s supposed to be for us… and then there’s love that defies all of that and just changes the way you think and feel about it… and it can be pretty scary, to be honest about it. I’ve experienced it and it still scares me but in a very good way.

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: Are Bisexuals Likely to be Polyamorous?

Well, yeah, given the nature of being bisexual. It’s one of those almost “duh” kind of things where one can reasonably assume that if you can have sex with anyone – male or female – you can be in some kind of relationship with either or both. What makes it not that much of a “duh” thing is how people think about sex and relationships and men, in particular, tend to be more about the sex than a committed type of relationship when hanging out on the other side of the fence. But it has to be mentioned that a lot of guys are looking for an FWB with or without exclusivity.

Polyamory – and like bisexuality – isn’t just a thing to do: It’s a way to be. It’s a feeling that one can have that tells them that loving one person is all well and good but being able to love more than one person is what they’re capable of – I’m not sure I can really explain it all that well and when I say being able to love more than one person, that includes pretty much everything that being in love with someone comes with. Of course, the rub comes into play because we barely know how to have a loving relationship with one person and being in a loving relationship with multiple people will most certainly put one to the test and in a great many ways.

To say it gets complicated is another of my famous – or infamous – understatements. You’re gonna feel whatever you’re gonna feel but doing something about those feelings can feel 100% right but, more often than not, fails in execution and again because of our long-held beliefs about how relationships are supposed to be – two’s company, three (or more) is a mess you don’t want anything to do with… and bisexuality may make being poly easier or it might add complications to an already complicated state of existence.

At this moment, I don’t think being single or in a relationship has much of an impact on being bisexual and poly except, of course, who you choose to partner with in this. One of the things I do know is that being poly can “open the door” and let bisexuality join the party and, yeah, I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Nah, that would never happen ’cause I ain’t like that!” and all that tells me is those who’ve said that have severely underestimated the power of love as well as how sex has a master key to our emotions. I’ve known couples who’ve become quartets and they’ve gotten blindsided when bisexuality shows up and, yeah, I’ve known couples who have explicitly forbidden any same-sex activities but, again, not taking into consideration how, in this situation, being a poly quartet comes with levels of intimacy (that isn’t all sex) that can make the impossible very damned possible.

There’s an odd kind of logic that says if we’re all in this together and doing everything together and including having sex together, um, why just limit it to the boy/girl stuff when we do have feelings for each other? If we’re gonna do this and be all into it, well, why not? This odd logic tends to fail at times because it can’t stand up to the emotional impact it can have on someone who is not so inclined to go both ways for any reason and not even for the sake of love. It’s not to be said that bisexuality is going to just invade things “automatically” or as a matter of course but, yeah, it can happen and, as it tends to happen, when it’s not expected or there’s a rule to prevent it.

I do think that bisexuals who are amenable to being poly do have an advantage given the dual nature of their attractions and I’d have to say that the “ideal” poly quartet is one where everyone is bisexual but not all bisexuals are of a mind to be in an ongoing relationship with more than one person at a time and many have a hard time making the adjustment to include an FWB when they’re already in a relationship. As odd as it may sound, a lot of bisexuals are… monogamous and moving from being monogamous to non-monogamous is either out of the question or not an easy transition to make.

And a lot of it, I think, has to do with those negative emotions I mentioned in my last scribble and the illusion of all things being equal, which isn’t impossible, mind you, but falls into that category that makes some people say that bisexuality is and should be a 50/50 kind of thing. Bisexuals have forever been welded to group sex and, namely, the dreaded threesome and not completely because they can be all hot and erotic but it shows an… expansion, for lack of a better word, that makes sharing sex with more than one person a logical and sensible thing to do and, no, I’m not 100% sure I understand why – I just know it can be like that. But one-on-one sex has been ingrained into our mindset and even bisexuals can have some difficulties having sex with more than one person involved and, if so, being in a loving and full-blown poly relationship can be even more difficult.

Hell, just the thought of having sex with “spectators” is usually enough to make most people lose their minds, let alone having those spectators participating in things… which is, again, the reason why I say that when considering polyamory, you really do have to unlearn all that stuff you’ve learned in order to learn a totally different way of doing them and one of those different ways could be bisexuality. I can’t say that “everyone” who goes for this does so with the potential of activating their bisexuality in mind; some actually do, but I’d say that’s the exception rather than the norm. When you put bisexuality and polyamory together, the adage of “never say never” comes to mind and I’d even go as far to suggest that if you’re planning a poly group, well, you should make this part of the discussion and then don’t be surprised if/when it actually happens.

And never assume that a member of the group isn’t going to have or find reason to change their mind and based upon how they’re feeling and how the other members are feeling about them. At a high level of thought, polyamory is sharing love with everyone involved and then with attention to detail toward how each member of the group wants/needs to love and be loved as well as what that means to them and what it entails and, yeah, how committed they are to the group. There are, of course, things that someone just isn’t going to do and that is always to be respected… just don’t be surprised if, again, the power of love within the group changes their mind. One of the funny things about being in love is that thing that’ll make a lot of us say that if we love you, there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for you – short of doing some highly illegal shit like, oh, robbing a bank or something along those lines… then it’s discovered that there are some things that you’re not gonna do, loving them or not – it’s just how some of us are about it.

Sigh. At the least, bisexuals have the potential to embrace polyamory and one can potentially become bisexuality in a poly setting and there’s just no way to definitively say whether a bisexual is going to be onboard with being poly or someone isn’t going to discover something about themselves that the group bonding has brought out in them. For many poly groups that I know or knew of, bisexuality never showed up and, at the very least, it was hinted at… and for some, oh, yeah, it arrived with bells on and totally shocked the shit out of everyone involved, not just because something “forbidden” happened but, usually, because they didn’t see it coming and didn’t think it could just happen like that.

As a bisexual, did I find being poly easy? Oh, hell, no. Given the makeup of our triad, did I foresee bisexuality paying us a visit? I most certainly did; in my mind, it wasn’t a matter of if it was gonna happen but when it was gonna happen and until it did, I spent a lot of near-sleepless nights thinking about damage control because while I knew it was gonna happen, I didn’t know what was gonna happen after it did and it scared the shit out of me. All late and wrong, I realized that, um, shit, maybe this was something we should have talked about when we sat down and talked about it and I can easily blame myself for this oversight and even when I started seeing the signs that told me what was going to eventually happen.

Which is why I’m telling anyone who wants to embrace polyamory to make double damned sure that when the group gets together to hash out how the relationship is going to go and look like, don’t forget to talk about this and for no other reason than forewarned is forearmed and should bisexuality arrive on the scene, no one gets blindsided by it. It gets weird in that ya might not want to expect it to happen (or want it to) but, yeah, don’t be surprised because, again, you just never know when someone – and even you – just might change their minds and dependent upon how the group gestalt is flowing and working.

It’s just not a given that bisexuals are more likely to be polyamorous. Like I said, a lot of people have a hard time dealing with their bisexuality and now we’re talking about the ultimate relationship and, well, you do the math. People are just… funny about how they go about forming and having relationships and going about the business of being in a relationship and, yup, definitely funny about having sex… and being poly changes all of that and no matter the shape of your group. I’d even go as far to say that if you’re already in a relationship and y’all are considering being poly, there’s a question I’d like to ask: Could you see your loving partner having sex with someone else? Most people can’t and some people think they can handle it right up to the moment they discover that they can’t handle it. One of the words even I learned was compersion, which, as I understand it is being happy because the person your with is happy. Yeah, some of us say, “If you’re happy, I’m happy!” and being poly can make one think twice about that and whether they really and truly meant it. It’s just not seeing them having sex with someone else – it’s knowing that they are and, whew, that’s just not an easy thing to adjust to and even more so if your partner is being truthful with you and telling you that when they have sex with another member of the group, they’re having a grand time and, yeah, I’ve heard couples trying to convince each other that, yeah, they did it but they didn’t enjoy it all that much when, um, that’s not the way things went down. And if a partner is having sex on the bisexual side of things, shit, well, lemme put it like this, if I may: You can feel some kind of way when the girls in the group are getting busy and they tell you that you’re not as good at going down on them as the other girl/girls are (or the guys in those situations I knew of).

Yep, heard that one and more than once. Did it bother me? Yeah, a little but in my mind, it didn’t matter as long as everyone was happy with each other and, oh, yeah, good luck with that one. It didn’t send me into a tailspin because, unbeknownst to me, I had embraced compersion and before I even knew there was such a word. I learned to embrace something that Bill Cosby once said (before everyone started hating him): “I don’t know the secret to success but I know the secret to failure is trying to please everyone.” And when poly relationships fail, well, this is why they do and why none of this is ever about equality but all about equity and whether bisexuality is involved or not.

It all gets… messy because feelings are involved and it 100% bad form to fuck with someone’s feelings, oh, like saying that you know you all agreed to this but you don’t like it all that much or griping about someone getting more attention that you are or everyone else is and other things of that nature. Polyamory is a journey of discovery and if you don’t understand that everyone involved is going to discover things in their own way, I’d advise you not to even think about being poly. You just cannot love everyone equally. You can try and I’m just gonna sit over here and wait to see how long it’ll take you realize that you can’t do it. You’re just not dealing with a “group” thing – you are also dealing with the individual personalities of the group as well and you cannot interact with everyone in the exact same way because people react differently about loving and being loved. Some may want “a whole lot” and some are okay with not a whole lot – and, again, they can change their mind about that – and now we’re right back to being able to openly communicate and effective so.

Even this doesn’t mean that bisexuals are more likely to be poly because, again, being poly is much more than having sex. Even we run into those moments when we know there’s something not quite right with whomever we’re with and we ask them what’s going on and they say, “Nothing.” When, ideally, when asked what’s going on, you get told what’s going on and then being able to listen without getting all bent out of shape… and bisexuality doesn’t necessarily lend itself to such a high level of calm objectivity.

So the answer to the question isn’t much of an answer: Bisexuals can be more likely to be poly… and not. The poly “rabbit hole” is, no joke and I shit you not, deeper and more involved that most can imagine and bisexuality just makes the rabbit hole even deeper. If it’s already there, you really don’t know if it’s going to “spread” or if it’s not there, you don’t know if it’s going to remain absent from things. And considering – again – that a lot of bisexuals are monogamous, well, you get the picture, I hope.

 

Life, Living and Loving: Being Poly

This is something I don’t write a whole lot about these days but being poly is forever etched in my heart and soul. I know what’s good about it – and it’s more than just the sex – and I know what’s bad about it and how/why a lot of people who give being poly a shot, more often than not, tend to fail more than they succeed.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people embrace polyamory and a lot of them have been single and, well, for the longest time, I would wonder, “How does this work for single people?” and more so when single folks are actually free and clear to engage with whoever they want and as many as they can manage… and then I thought about some stuff that made going poly for single folks not so easy to do:

It’s what we think relationships are supposed to be like and an inability to break away from the prescribed behavior of one man/one woman. I gave a lot of thought to this and saw that when it comes to relationships, single folks are held to the same standard as married people are – relationships are monogamous and can’t be anything other than that. Having been married and poly showed me that while this doesn’t make being poly any easier, what it does do is provide an anchor point (for the lack of another way to put it); married folks often find it’s “easier” to be poly because at the root of this, their core relationship is the anchor point and provides the strength, love, and trust to make branching out “easier.”

And an anchoring point that single folks don’t have. The biggest mistake I found and learned about this is when you attempt to be poly while invoking any of the rules of monogamy, yep – that’s gonna be a problem. Then toss in and for good measure that many folks aren’t too keen about sharing and, of course, the rules of monogamy says, “Thou shalt not share anything with anyone else – ever!” The way we’ve always gone about relationships makes us… territorial and, yeah, possessive which brings me back to the thing I say about this: In order to be successfully polyamorous, you must forget and unlearn everything you know about love, sex, and relationships so you can learn a whole different way of doing these things… and not many people can do this.

It’s one thing to think that you can; it’s one thing to see the sense that polyamory brings to the table and, again, just not exclusively a sexual thing. It’s a whole different thing to actually get into it and saying it this way doesn’t even begin to cover how intensely difficult it can be; it’s not as “easy” as getting together with a bunch of people who thinks and feels the same way you do… because almost everyone has their own idea of how a relationship is supposed to work. Not only do the ever-pervasive rules of monogamy make being poly one hell of a clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks, there’s the other thing I’ve said that comes into play: All those negative emotions like envy, jealousy, possessiveness and obsessiveness? You can’t allow them to be a part of this – ever…. but it’s a combination of human nature and the rules of being monogamous that makes this a difficult thing to move away from and eliminate from one’s heart and soul and, yes, their minds.

I’ve seen a lot of written material about this and I’d not say that it’s bad or anything like that but, shit, how can I put this and have it make sense? Being poly isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing so while there are experts who write and talk about the “best ways to be poly,” there’s much more to it and beginning with the people involved and if you’re the kind of person who thinks or otherwise believes that being able to openly love more than one person at a time is the “big problem” everyone says it is, you’re not going to do well in a poly situation. You have to know, without any doubts in your mind, that you do have the capacity and ability to be “madly in love” with more than one person and it never made sense to be limited to loving just one person at a time. And then you have to be able to find people who are like this, too. I’ve said that to be poly, you have to be seriously grown up and, sorry to say, a lot of people find that they’re not as grown up as they thought themselves to be.

This isn’t about sharing sex with a lot of people: This is about sharing every damned aspect of your life with a lot of people. In a piece that DDJennifer wrote about this very same thing, she accurately pointed out an inherent flaw and cause for polyamory to utterly fail with some folks: Expecting equality rather than equity. Many find out almost right away that trying to treat their poly partners equally just doesn’t work. Indeed, one of the qualities needed is the ability to multitask and with attention to detail about those in your poly group because, um, everyone is different and while that sounds like yet another Captain Obvious statement, you probably can’t imagine how this means so much when considering polyamory and right along with the fact that people do change and I do not mean “over time” but literally from one moment to the next.

Most attempts at polyamory fail because of a lack of planning and by this, I mean there is no plan that is – and should be – a shared vision of how this crazy relationship is going to work and what its goals for everyone involved are. Even I learned that if you don’t have 100% buy-in to the shared vision by everyone involved, things are going to get interesting. There are different… flavors of polyamory: Open, closed, triads, quartets, so on and so forth and then the shit gets deep and I do mean really deep within these flavors and it does make a difference whether or not a poly group is living together or separately and, yeah, if anyone has children. I’ve seen people apply rules and, with married or existing couples, rules that more often than not serve to preserve their core relationship. It’s not that it doesn’t work because it can… but it’s usually a recipe for disaster when, I’d say a lot of times, those rules are severely locked down and not subject to change or even discussion.

Which brings me back to another part of this and some skills that, if you don’t have them or suck at them, you’ve got some work to do. Communication is everything and once that fails to be established in effective ways and among all involved, failure is imminent. The other skills are time management, conflict resolution, and problem resolution as well as an ability to be more objective than subjective when you wind up having to “play” referee and peacemaker and not having these skills and abilities is yet another recipe for disaster.

I’ve said time and time again that being in a poly relationship makes being married look like child’s play… because it’s way harder than being married and if you’re single and thinking about embracing a poly lifestyle, hah – if you think dating is a major pain in the ass? You ain’t seen nothing yet because being poly makes dating look easy and problem-free. I’ve said that the moment anyone involved starts thinking “me” more than “us,” things are going to get shaky and, again, it’s just human nature for someone to think about what they want and need and it becomes the basis of their “agenda” and one that carries a lot of urgency and must be front and center… and that’s yet another fatal mistake those who fail at this tends to make – that “my way or no way” thing that has killed the shit out of relationships time and time again.

As such, if you lack the ability of the art of compromise and negotiation, well, hmm. It’s not just “what’s best for me” but it’s all about “what’s best for all of us.” It’s “what can we do together and as a ‘whole’ while attending to each other’s individual wants, needs, and other stuff like that. Whether your single and trying to do this or you’re already in a relationship, eh, it’s not so much a thing of “management by committee” so much as someone probably – or should – bear the responsibility of maintaining the group gestalt and keeping everyone focused on the shared vision that you better had established. It’s not so much a thing of being “the leader of the pack” but, yeah, it kinda is but doing so in an objective way and minus any personal biases and that’s incredibly difficult for a lot of people and, usually, I think, because of what they think relationships should be like and not what they can potentially be, you know, if you can get and keep everyone involved on the same page.

The sex. I’m not gonna bullshit you: If you think the sex is a secondary concern, you just screwed the pooch. The sex is important because sex binds and even in this, if you have a long list of things you’re not going to do for love or anything else, yeah, you might wanna do something about that. In this area alone, failures occur because someone will invariably start feeling like they’re being left out or they’re not getting enough of the action or, with existing couples, one person is having way too much fun than the other and many find that the more rules put in place to, um, contain or suppress sexual activities, the greater the chance of failure. Even in this, a lot of people tend to think more about what they want and need more than what can be possible and eschewing what I think is a “simple” premise: Everything is negotiable. It’s just that not many people are of a mind to negotiate and in that “my way or no way” mindset that we all tend to have. It might sound counterintuitive but the sex must flow, whether it’s one-on-one or if it happens in a group setting and if you have inhibitions or other hang-ups about sex and, yeah, sexuality, hmm, ya might want to work on getting rid of them and beginning right now.

And then, if all of this doesn’t load your plate up to beyond overflowing, you still have to go about your daily life and those things that are connected to it. One of the things that is a benefit is that if you’re struggling in day-to-day stuff, you hopefully have people around you who are ready, willing, and able to jump on in and give you a hand with it; poly relationships are “one for all and all for one” so it’s not just about the sex and the other things that go along with being in this very extended and complex way to be in a relationship… and one of those things also involves children and whether they’re youngsters or adults… and that just makes all of this even more complicated. It’s funny in that there was a time where we’d say that it takes a village to raise a child but these days? Yeah, not so much and no parent likes or wants to be told how to raise their children and other related things and, yep, a lot of folks tend to forget that their children do have a minds of their own and, yep, one big mistake a lot of folks make is trying to hide this from their children – and children who are a lot more observant that we’d like to believe.

Then if all of this hasn’t baked your noodle to a very crispy crunch, there’s what other people are going to see and think… and some of that isn’t going to be a good thing. I learned that when you try to keep this on the DL, yeah, that just ain’t gonna work and if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what the hell was going on, my money problems wouldn’t be a problem. They’re going to notice it and some will be intuitive enough to know exactly what you’ve gotten yourself into and some of them are going to read you the riot act and like you’ve never heard it before. Sure, it’s none of their goddamned business what and how you’re living your life in this and, yep, they’re gonna preach to you about the way you should be doing things and the important thing that you and all who involved should keep firmly in mind that this is your life and lives and you have a responsibility to yourselves to live it the best way you can manage to do so and if that means there’s a “bunch” of you living and loving together and it allows everyone to flourish, that’s just the way it is and if no one else likes it, all they can do is not like it… and being prepared for repercussions is a very smart thing to do.

Shit… I remember when my mom figured it out and I was kinda/sorta prepared to get read the riot act to end all riots acts when all she said was, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” My response was, “I hope so, too.” I did have to “correct” her on one thought she had: This wasn’t my idea to begin with but I was both challenged and tasked to make it work and it actually made sense since we were already open to begin with and there were certain… needs that had to be met to maintain continuity – and peace in the valley – in our marriage and relationship. I knew before I accepted the challenge that this was going to be one hell of a mess… but one I felt I could deal with. I didn’t expect it to last very long… and it lasted way longer than I could have ever dreamed of and, nope, it wasn’t as smoothly as it could have idealistically been. We all made mistakes and, yeah, if you wanna know how I know what I do about it? It’s because we screwed things up as well as made them work and since I had the “job” of being the gatekeeper, well, I learned some stuff about what it takes to live a poly lifestyle that I’m glad I learned… and kinda wish I hadn’t.

It’s like “any other relationship” in that what works for one probably ain’t gonna work for another which is why if/when you’re considering this, you and whoever chooses to be with you in this has to sit down and “design” the foundation of the poly relationship and keeping it as simple as humanly possible. Being in a poly relationship is the ultimate relationship; it defies everything we know and believe when it comes to love, sex, and said relationships. Monogamy and it’s hard-set rules will not work in this and trying to hold onto to those rules can turn this into an “us versus them” kind of situation that will lead to its demise and in a hurry. It’s being committed to each other but also being committed to that shared vision I mentioned a while ago and if you or those with you aren’t of a mind to be that committed, well, ya might not wanna get into this or you can keep your nose to the grindstone and find those who can be this committed… and with the sure and certain knowledge and understanding that nothing is forever.

Being poly – and very much like being bisexual, as it turns out – isn’t just a thing to do: It is a way to be and it’s a life-changing way to be. It’s not all about having a group of lovers or sexual partners; this is about, again, sharing every aspect of your life with people you love and everyone being in love with everyone else, not equally because that’s impossible but with focus on equity, the quality of the relationship and with those who are willing to do whatever’s necessary to make it work and keep it working.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Research it; see what others are thinking and saying about it both pro and con and then take a lot of time to search deep within yourself and see if you can be up for the great challenge it is most definitely going to present. It is worth it because if nothing else, you learn some stuff about yourself; you learn what being in love can really mean and that love doesn’t have any boundaries except those we put in the way of it. There’s just so much work that has to be done, personally and especially if you go forward to embrace polyamory.

And I do wish anyone considering this all the luck in the world because if you do this, I can almost guarantee you that it’s going to be the most insane thing you’ve ever done… and ya just might be glad that you did it anyway.