Photo by DeMorris Byrd on Unsplash

When I met my husband I kissed him first. I dragged Jack home to my apartment on our first date, and we stayed up most of the night. The next day we met for a hike and wound up sneaking off the trail for a quicky against a tree. Here was a man with a sexual appetite tantamount to mine! Jackpot! His sultry blue-green eyes were just icing on the cake! Jack and I had to slow our relationship down. We both had children and didn’t want to risk their emotional lives on our new relationship. So, we made rules about when we’d talk about “us” and relationship stuff, we set timelines, and we (mostly) stuck to them.

Fast forward 7 years, and we were a well-adjusted blended family. Unbelievably, Jack and I were still going at it daily like a couple of …mid-thirty-somethings. We are, what we would call, socially monogamous. This means that to everyone else we appear like your typical suburban parents. We both have professional careers, and we take turns picking our pile of kids up from extracurricular activities. We pressure our high school senior to finish college applications and roll our eyes at our preschooler’s tantrum over the wrong color cup.

We are a phenomenal team in every way. You should see how easy it is for me to hook him up with a new partner! We didn’t start this way, but now, I’m not sure what took us so long to get here!

My husband embraces every part of my sexuality. I love sex; every part of it; every type. I love slow, passionate, deep-kissing lovemaking, and I love grabbing, screaming, panting, down and dirty freak-sessions. I am a sexual being. I enjoy dressing as a sexy-professional and hiding scandalous lingerie under my pencil skirts.

There was a time that I hid my sexuality. I felt ashamed of it, and so, I squashed it way down deep inside. Then, I tried to screw the lid on. No matter what some of that pesky sexuality would seep through anyway. I couldn’t seem to get rid of it. My ex-husband used to tell me that I must be a sex addict because I seemed to want it all the time.

After my divorce, I entered what I still refer to as my super-slut phase. In the brief period between my divorce and meeting my husband, Jack, I dated 8 men. I liked all of them, I loved one of them. This brought my total of bed partners into double digits, and I felt both elated at my newfound sexual freedom and scared to let anyone else know. I never even told my family I was dating again… good little catholic girls shouldn’t be having extra-marital sex or premarital sex, and they shouldn’t be talking about sex at all, right?

One night, during foreplay, Jack began whispering about how he’d love to see me with another man. He had always loved stories of my conquests and celebrated my sexuality in a way that I’d never experienced with a partner before.

The dirty talk led to some playing around. We’d go out and I’d sit at a bar, get hit on, flirt a bit, and then we’d be spun up talking about that night for a month or more. We did this a few times, there was a dentist in town for a conference who was clearly in need of some post-divorce attention, and a man who was probably still married, and much more aggressive than I like a man to be.

It was just fun, and very low stakes until I met Ade. He was a young Nigerian man with impeccable manners and delightful biceps. He picked me up in a bar, we danced to the 90’s R & B, and, when I let him know that was all he could expect from the evening, he gave me his phone number and a very low-pressure invitation to reach out to him.

That night, while reconnecting with Jack in our queen-sized bed I took a risk.

“I met someone tonight who was pretty exciting,” I whispered in his ear.

“Yeah? Did you flirt with him?” Jack’s voice rasped.

“I did.”

“Did you like it?” he probed.

“I did. He gave me his phone number.”

“Well, then you should text him and tell him you’d like to see him again.”

I froze. “Really?” I pulled back and looked into my husband’s eyes for signs that he wasn’t serious, that he was just engaging in pillow talk.

“Yes. I think it’d be exciting. I can’t be married to someone as hot and sexual as you and not expect other men to notice. Try it. If it doesn’t work for us we can just not do it again.”

This conversation repeated itself many times over the next week, and each time, Jack encouraged me to reach out to this 26-year-old military sergeant. The idea excited and terrified me. I worried that it would change the dynamic of our marriage in some fundamental way. I worried that it would expose a piece of me that I was still keeping hidden from my husband.

See, I had been white-knuckling it through the last 7 years. Monogamy did not come naturally to me, and I would often find myself wanting to flirt with other men (and women, but that’s another story entirely) wondering what they’d look like naked. I never told my husband this. As far as he knew I was blissfully happy with our monogamous marriage and never wanted anything to change. In his mind, he was the first of us to consider this type of exploration.

Opening this door with Ade would unmask this last hidden piece of my sexuality and open me up to more intense shaming. I was scared.

My curiosity, combined with Jack’s plentiful reassurances and encouragement had me reaching out to Ade via text one Tuesday afternoon while my toddler played with her puzzles on the living room floor. His reply was instantaneous and we bantered back and forth for a few hours that evening, in between making dinner, doing homework, and the lead up to bedtime. Ade and I set a date for the following Friday night. That evening I told Jack I had set up a date.

“Are you wanting reciprocation for the open thing?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

“Not at all, I’m just getting a rise out of you being so sexually charged up!” Jack grinned.

I’m not sure I believed that, but at the time it was what I needed to hear. I had some abandonment issues that I’d yet to deal with and wasn’t sure I could handle him saying he wanted to explore his sexuality with other women.

The week passed quickly and, after changing my outfit half a dozen times I left the house after putting the kids to bed and prepared to meet my potential lover for a drink. No pressure, he had said. Just good company. I was going on a date with a man who wasn’t my husband….

My date with Ade went well, he was a perfect gentleman, and respectful of my boundaries. I think his being raised by an incredibly successful mother and four older sisters in the deep south may have had something to do with that. I’ve seen Ade a few times, but his schedule and mine make getting together too regularly quite difficult, and, anyway, I think it is probably better that way.

Jack and I have expanded our horizons and explored the swinger scene, which we love as well.

Now, we are both involved with other people on a regular basis both together and solo. We even have Tinder accounts. Sometimes I like to swipe on his account and hook him up with someone. We take turns managing the homefront while the other is out playing. The rest of our relationship is just as solid as it’s ever been. The communication between the two of us is astonishing. I can talk to Jack about everything.

As a woman who is pushing 40, it’s quite flattering to have a man in his mid-twenties lusting after me. The attention is invigorating, and feeling like a desirable, sexy woman has added so much to my sense of self. The way this has ignited passion between Jack and I is something I hoped for, but couldn’t have predicted. There isn’t a single marriage I see or hear about that I envy.

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