Socialness? What's that?

Last weekend we actually had people in our house...that weren't us!  Now, I understand that for many people this is an everyday occurrence, but for my wife and I, well...not so much.  Don't get me wrong, we have made many friends over the years, but we've moved away from any we knew before and all the rest have been over the internet.

Ryan came over early to have some time with Susan.  They snuggled up on the couch mostly, and when they weren't they were watching me prep food for later.  Erik and Angie showed up later on, right about the time bellies were starting to grumble.  Erik and Angie are a married poly couple, and Erik has been Susan's contact with them for the last several weeks.  This was our first chance to all meet up and actually have some adult conversation for once.

We made sure the kids were occupied, and for the most part they stayed well out of the way.  Lunch was in two phases; first, a build-your-own salad buffet, then some homemade pepperoni pizza puffs.  For the most part, lunch went off very well, and we finished the get-together off with a hard-fought game of Pirate Munchkin, or whatever it's called.  (Side note: if you like games at all, get any of the Munchkin variants!)

Erik and Angie had to take off, since they had other plans for later that night, but they apparently liked us well enough to invite us to their own poly meet-up later this week.  Even the kids were invited, which is good since we have no reliable babysitter.  Their main comment to Susan later was that "It's obvious you've been doing this for a while, it felt like a poly household with no drama!"  Susan and I had to laugh at that; maybe we really were meant for poly after all!

We had another first that evening.  I made sure the kids stayed downstairs while Ryan and Susan had some alone time in our room...that's the first time I've been anywhere near the two while they did anything more than hug and kiss.  Still no appearance of the big green monster, and in the words of Susan, "is this really working?"

So far, it is.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Starting about a month and a half or so ago, my wife has been in talks with Ryan in pursuit of a relationship outside the one we have and love.  They had met up once halfway between domiciles, had chattered away on IM frequently otherwise, and seemed to be hitting it off well.  So a few weeks ago, she set off to his house a couple of hours away for their first true date.  It was already established that this was to be a "no-sex" night, just a night to get to know each other.

All three of us expected me to have some issues with the whole thing.   I ended up having two.  First one:  I was bored.  Don't get me wrong, I'm normally (read: always) home on Saturday nights, because I really have no local friends at this point in time.  Constant shifts in location with the military and my own semi-reclusive lifestyle don't exactly help me gain friends, and while I like some of the people I work with, I don't like them that much.

So while I am normally at home, the key is that I'm home...with Susan.  She's there to watch a show with, or to sit in bed and read together with, or to...do other things with.  But for the first time in a looooong time, she wasn't there.  Now, I'm fine with (well, not fine with, but at least used to) me not being there, due to lots of travel for the military.  But I'm not accustomed to being at home, in my sanctuary, without her being there.  It wasn't jealousy; I know what that feels like and it wasn't that.  It was just a sense of...detachment, I guess.  Things weren't normal.  They weren't bad, they just weren't what they should be for a Saturday evening.  I tried to distract myself with online games, and books, and a bath, and researching recipes for the next day's dinner, and, and, and.  Bottom line, I moped.  Didn't like that much, but it got better the next weekend when she did the same thing.

Second issue I had:  As I said, he lives a couple hours away.  She was supposed to let me know when she got there, then after dinner and movie to let me know how much longer she was planning on being, then when she left so I knew that she was alright.  (Regular communications thing with us, not related to poly...we let each other know when we're leaving and when we've arrived if we're traveling long distances anywhere.)  She sent me a text when she arrived, so yay...then nothing after that.  So I texted her.  No response.  Gave it another half hour, texted again, no response.  Gave it another twenty minutes, then called...voicemail.  Hmm.  Now what?

In the end I did nothing, except hope that she hadn't gotten randomly hooked up with an axe murderer.  I figured, if anything, that they were probably necking (or more) and I was being a mood-wrecker.  Either that, or her phone was muffled by a pile of clothes in another part of the room.  I will say that it didn't really help my mood out at all.  She did finally see the texts and missed calls about an hour and a half after that, when she let me know that she was on her way.  Turns out she'd silenced her phone for the movie and completely forgot to let me know her plans after, so the phone's sound never got activated after.  Crisis averted.

She made it back safely, we talked about the whole thing, and she apologized for worrying me and promised to make sure that I didn't have a reason to worry next time.  Yay for communications!

When is Kink Not Kink?

My wife and I recently managed to find a babysitter (rare event for us in particular) and we used the night off to attend a local poly group discussion.  Different location from before, so we had no idea what to expect.  We had one person who had attended previously that said that since he wasn't on time for the discussion during a previous event, he wasn't able to get into the circle. Thankfully that wasn't the case; we did get there at the start of intros, but everyone smooshed over nicely, and that carried throughout the night when more stragglers showed.

Everything went fine for the most part; much closer age spread to us and not as many...questionable characters.  The one gripe I had was that the discussion was supposed to be lightly moderated by the organizer, but every topic that came up was a forever-long monologue from her before (and sometimes after) anyone else spoke.  I'd have loved to see more of a chance to open up by not only us, but the other participants as well.

In our area, the poly group makeup and that of the local kink group is a fairly large overlap.  Think thin crescent moons left not overlapped on a Venn diagram of the two.  The organizer did bring up that they were thinking of making a specific poly group to handle both poly and kink within the same group, and letting the poly group focus more on the poly side of the house.

During the bit of discussion following, it was asked who at the table identified as kinksters, and my wife and I were the only ones who kept our hands lowered.  Which didn't pose a problem; we felt that we got a lot out of it, and made some contributions...someone even mentioned that we had all coexisted rather well.  But it did spark a thought in my head...when is kink not kink?

To be fair, my wife and I do engage in BDSM play.  Restraints, a selection of floggers, "fun"ishment hand spankings, to the point of reddening, hair pulling, choking; all these have been used by me on her to the fun and enjoyment of us both.  In many people's eyes, this would definitely be considered kinky sex, and even in our own eyes, it's definitely not anywhere close to vanilla.

So why don't we identify ourselves as kinksters?  I'm not really sure.  At this point, I think both of us like it too much to forgo it for the rest of our lives; we'd need to enjoy the rougher side of sex at least once in a while, if only for variety's sake.  But it's not a lifestyle for us.  We aren't in a DD relationship, we're not even in a D/s relationship.  I am far more dominant than she is...and since I realized that she is actually submissive rather than dismissive, that dominant side to me has come out more.  But it's not a D/s thing as we define it.  We don't engage in enough BDSM sex in order for that to count, and at that, what we do is fairly tame when compared to the vast majority of those who view themselves as kinsters.

If I had the ways and means, I would set up a dungeon in our house.  I would furnish it with a St. Andrew's Cross, a padded sawhorse, and at least one or two other items of dungeon furniture.  Floggers and paddles would be hung up on the wall.  I'd even have a violet wand and accessories floating around somewhere.  If this was the case, I would have no doubt that she would be a willing participant and let me exercise, and exorcise, myself on her.  But even if all that were to happen, I still don't think we'd identify ourselves as kinksters.

It's a state of mind, I think.  When it's time to talk about it, or plan it, or participate in it, we're fully engaged, wholly focused in the moment and in the scene.  But when it's over, or it's time to move on to something else, it all gets folded away and stored somewhere in the backs of our minds.  We don't eat, breathe, and live BDSM for the sake of BDSM...and at least for the two of us, that makes all the difference.  Doesn't make us any better, or any worse, than the others at the table...just a difference of mindset.

Past Experience

More on the failed experiment that we had several years ago with poly...and, though I didn't know it at the time, the genesis of our own pursuits of light BDSM as well.

So growing up I moved around fairly frequently.  The longest stretch of time I spent anywhere was about six years in one particular state on the East Coast, and even there we changed houses three different times.  I got there shortly after the start of my 5th grade year, and ended up completing 10th there before moving.  The last three years there I made friends with a couple of girls in the grade behind me.  When I moved, I tried to keep up with them, but ultimately lost track of them and pretty much all my other friends in rather short order.

Fast forward about ten or eleven years later, and, having nothing better to do, I set about looking up various names of my childhood friends and seeing if I could track them down.  To my amazement, I actually managed to find one of the two girls I was closest to, and not only that, she was only living about three hours or so away...not a bad drive at all.  I got in contact with her, and she revealed that she was seriously dating a guy (might as well throw identifiers in here, Erica for her and Daniel for him.)

We met up with them a few weeks later, and got caught up and everything.  Ten years plus had done a lot to change her, in my eyes at least, and I'm sure that time had done similar work to me for her as well.  Meanwhile, Daniel and my wife hit it off fantastically.  Finally, we all met up and the topic was broached regarding extending Daniel's and my wife's relationship to a more personal one.

Approval was granted all around, with some hesitation on my part at the very least, but the weeks passed and Daniel and my wife definitely used their time well.  To my knowledge (or at least lack of memory), they never had full intercourse, but she did experience him tying her up at one point during a solo trip out to him, and they had regular webcam discussions, with all that entails, when they couldn't meet up.

Everything was going well until a trip to their house where we all watched a bad movie on their bed together, and there was some unspoken and subtle pressure for myself and Erica to come to some sort of arrangement as well.  Neither one of us was feeling it, and it wasn't too long after that incident that Erica decided to rethink the whole poly situation on their end.  Shortly after that, I fell out of contact with her once again.

I'm not exactly sure what I could have done to make things easier.  They did live far enough away that it wasn't a simple task for anyone to jump in a car and just meet up for an hour or two, or lunch, or dinner, or whatever.  Add a very young kid to the mix (about two years old or so at the time) and the logistics got even worse.  I gave my wife enough freedom to do what she felt she needed to do, and during this time she also got at least a little involved with the local poly group and even attended a very interesting party that one of the group's founders threw at her house.

I tried to get with that same poly group...but I just didn't like the vibe that I got from them.  There's more to it than that, but suffice to say that none of the people were our age, or even within a decade of it, and there were a couple of the guys that I would not be surprised to know were, shall we say, registered somewhere.  In the end, we both decided to table the poly discussion for a while, and the realization that she was pregnant with our second child certainly helped that along.

That brief sojourn into the realms of poly were enough to start the ball rolling, however, and I think we both learned a lot from that experience.  Hopefully, we'll be better equipped to handle situations in the future, especially if a member of another couple becomes involved with either of us.

There's a First Time for Everything!

Where to begin?  I could begin at the beginning, but truthfully that was rather messy, ten years in the past, not very exciting, and besides, the wench is dead!  Well, okay, she's actually sitting across from me pecking at her own keyboard.

I guess I'll have to jump right into the good stuff.  I am very happily married to someone who has, for whatever reason, put up with my foibles and idiosyncrasies over the years without a qualm.  A couple of years after we got together, she started to broach the idea of polyamory with me.  For many and wildly varied reasons (including a failed attempt with a couple we knew), poly was very quickly put on the back burner...but never quite out of mind.

The kids are older, most of the reasons we had earlier no longer apply, and this past spring and summer we started moving back into the realm of poly.  I've gotten older and wiser and, perhaps most importantly, more secure in our relationship.  She's gotten herself on an even keel, and our communication on the subject has never been stronger.

So how has it fared?  Well, for her things seem to be going great.  She's gotten mixed up with a guy she really likes...his only bad point is that he lives about two hours away.  This pretty much means that to make it worthwhile, if she goes off to visit him, it pretty much has to be an overnighter.  Now, in addition to everything else, I'm military, so the kids are used to me disappearing for anywhere from a night to several months at a time.  When SHE does it, however, you can see the confusion on their faces...like, "wait a minute...something's not right here!"  They've handled it well so far though, thank goodness.

We both keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.  We had set up an agreement prior to their meeting the first time of "no sex"...on my part it was really just because I wanted to make sure that she was comfortable with him and not just jumping into bed because she could.  That hurdle met, they went out an additional time or two, and then the subject was brought up again.  As a matter of fact, he insisted on meeting me...not the other way around.

So we set up for a late breakfast, so that I could interact with him on more than a "Hi, My name is Ryan, and I'm off to go jump your wife's bones now" basis.  I made bacon, eggs, and pancakes, and while he wasn't in my "instant like" of people, I didn't have any real problems with him.  So we enjoyed our meal, some conversation, and then I could tell my wife was starting to get antsy, so I bid adieu to them and they went off on their way for the evening.

I expected to be far more jealous than I actually turned out to be.  Really, the only negative for me is that I currently have no local social outlet other than my wife, and with her gone, I get bored very quickly.  If I didn't have the kids to worry about, I could head for the poker room at the casino, or go to a coffeeshop, or go on a wombat shaving safari, or something...but alas, kids need baths and food and bedtimes.

That's all well and good for her...as of yet I've gotten exactly zero interaction.  I'm just starting out though, and who knows when my luck will change?  In the meantime, all I can do is to be there for my wife and be supportive.