First Kiss

There are so many thoughts running through my head, as usual. Let me offer some context: George has, for the last few weeks, been working on a small side project with an old acquaintance. They dated briefly many, many years ago and hadn't seen each other since. When they got reacquainted and subsequently started working on this project they seemed to reconnect almost immediately. So much so, that we were forced to rethink the boundaries that we had set for ourselves.

Initially, we had agreed that extramarital sex was OK, provided we didn't form relationships. The ideal scenario would be a hookup for George while on a business trip or for me after a night out dancing with girlfriends (an idea I've still not fully warmed up to, but that ironically has been an option since before we read Sex at Dawn).

We now found ourselves in a situation where George had made a connection with someone, and because of their history, the relationship was already in place. They met together on a couple of occasions within the context of this project, but the conversation would drift, which led to meetings  longer than they needed to be, meetings which also always ended with an embrace that George felt was different than when friends hug goodbye.

During George's last meeting with this friend, they ended up having to redo much of the work, which included some down time where they had nothing to do but wait and talk, sitting next to each other, constantly closer as the evening progressed.

At one point she asked him, "You seem to be very comfortable with me physically, is this normal for you?"

"Are you uncomfortable with the contact?" he responded.

"No, but you're married, and I'm married. This isn't how married people normally are with each other unless they're planning to hook up."

George's explanation was that when we left our religion, we left the forced values behind and instead adopted the scientific method as our value system. He said we both recognize that sexual exclusivity is not the natural condition for human beings, and we decided that being exclusive was not going to be something we required of each other.

She took it all in (and didn't run for the door!). Shortly thereafter, work completed, they went to the parking lot to load up their things and say goodbye.

George had his first kiss not-with-me since he married me. It didn't move on to other things, at least not yet, maybe not ever, who knows? But I've been anxious for this, really. Anxious to see if everything I thought I would feel and he thought he would feel was right.

It was. I was comfortable with the idea before I ever gave my consent, and I was comfortable after it happened. A little anxious to know how it went, how it felt for him. It felt totally natural to him. Totally natural! Also, a little thrilling. Actually, a lot thrilling. (I would hope so!) Also, there was no guilt!

It blew my mind. It's all I could think about as I was falling asleep, and again getting ready in the morning. It felt totally natural. That's exactly what I'd thought would happen, what I hoped, and I'm in awe that such a taboo idea could feel so natural. George had the same reaction (mind blown) by the absence of guilt that he'd been taught his entire life would be there if he did anything outside the norm. It's not like we're still religious, and not like we didn't guess what it would be like, but theory can be different than life. It feels like we're scientists that came up with a hypothesis and just tested it, finding no evidence to the contrary. I'm sort of giddy.

George is a little giddy, too.

Jealousy

I'm an introspective, analytical type o' gal. I like to take the crystal sphere of my thoughts out, metaphorically of course, hold it in my hand, and look at it from all directions to figure out why I'm feeling the way I am, and where something went wrong, if it did. (By wrong I mean any emotion I'm not happy to be experiencing, like sadness, hurt, hopelessness, insecurity, jealousy or anger (some people may like being angry; I'm not one of them).) We've all probably done this on one level or another at some point, and I just do it very deliberately. Like taking time to breathe deeply.

I never felt jealousy in my relationship until after our Sex at Dawn reading and subsequent discussions. I think I never worried before about what I meant to George, since he made it pretty apparent (and still does). But I wasn't wrong when I thought such a life-altering transition might be scattered with small complications. It's only natural, really, and I don't mind the complications as long as we continue to work through them together. Luckily, George never minds working through them, either, be they my complications or his.

For the record, I do feel like I'm writing this from a naive position. We're young in our open marriage, and I don't intend to come across as a 22-year old who tells a random 40-year old mother how to raise her young children, since she obviously knows. I'm still learning; this is just what I know so far.

So, at this point, jealousy is a feeling that seems to crop up whenever I'm not really paying attention, and I do think a lot of it is related to the newness of sharing him physically and emotionally (theoretical or literally). Thus, it's a subject I've paid significant attention to, spending more time than usual staring into my own glass ball.

Jealousy for me stems from insecurity. Let's say, for an earlier example, that George looks at a picture of a beautiful girl, or someone walking by. For the most part, I don't care. If that picture is of a girl looking seductively at him (the camera) or the girl walking by smiles at him (not me), I'm more likely to be jealous. There's a risk there, albeit small in these examples, that George could choose to have sex with one of these women. There's a strong likelihood that he's going to feel at least a small bit of excitement by the encounter, especially the latter encounter.

Embedded in that possibility is the additional risk that he may choose to walk away from time he could be spending with me to spend time with her and the risk that he could feel a level of excitement with her he doesn't feel with me. Ay, there's the rub.

So it comes down to fear. To insecurity, really. I'm afraid there's something better than me out there for him. Insecure in my ability to be...not enough per se, but as good as it gets. I'm afraid that an interest in pursuing other options may be more important than time with me, with familiar, known-quantity me. And I'm insecure with my own body, everything from my fair features to my size to the tightness of my vagina (not always insecure, to be clear, just momentarily; I usually think I'm fairly sexy and working my way up the hotness scale).

A sidenote: I try to quickly eliminate any feelings of "I want to be enough" as fast as they come. Since reading Sex at Dawn, when the term "enough" refers to "only", it's no longer allowed. By nature, humans, and perhaps to a greater extent penis-endowed humans, crave variation and thrive from it. So I deny any assertion that I should be the only. I no longer believe that's the healthiest lifestyle, or I wouldn't be writing this blog. I do believe it's possible to be monogamous your whole life, but not the happiest option.

Great! Do you see how amazing it is to look through these thoughts and figure out exactly why I have this jealousy? Do you know what that means? It means I have the root of the problem, and when I have the root it means I can fix the problem. I'm a problem-fixer by nature (and go crazy when I can't fix problems, which is an issue for me at times), so I'm practically at victory here. But just practically, because another hard part is coming (did you think all that analyzing was easy? ha!).

I've tried to do the next part on my own, and it doesn't work. The next part is reminding myself

1. That I'm as amazing as it gets for him, which is why he's with me.
2. That he's not going to give up time with me that I don't offer to pursue other subjects (I do try to be generous), and
3. He's madly attracted to me, which is why we have incredible sex all the time.

I've tried telling myself those things, and they're good reminders on a regular basis, but if I have a real moment of jealousy that doesn't go away after a little while (6-48 hours, depending on what happened), I have to talk to George. Lucky for me, George is happy to talk to me. In fact, he always says he likes it. We haven't been the type to have those crazy emotional talks throughout our marriage because we've always been pretty happily married, with a few normal ups and downs. But I think we both like the communication because it's comforting to know our relationship is important to the other person, and we really, really value feeling secure in knowing both how I feel about George and how he feels about me. (Probably if we didn't like each other, the knowing would not work out so nicely.)

So my method is basically to remind myself of what I already know, and if/when that fails, don't waste time asking for a minute to talk it out. My fears of being too high-maintenance are really overblown, and sometimes it's just my turn to need something in the relationship. That's allowed in a relationship, and it's good to remind myself of that.

I admit it's scary to me to feel jealous. I feel a disconcerting level of threat to my security in life and my opportunity to love my husband. The fear, though, makes me anxious to figure out what went wrong this time and what to discuss. And George, well, George is a strong 50% of why our relationship is so beautiful.

More History

My life has been crazy busy the last four months. During that crazy busy time this shift occurred, and processing all of that while trying to keep my head and my family's heads above water has been a monumental task for me. However, I'm not one to back down from a challenge. I realized that I might need to reprocess some things once my head was clearer of external stresses and told myself not to get frustrated (with myself) if I find my head swimming and going through questions and concerns all over again. It turns out I've only done that a bit, but maybe I should back up and explain what that shift was like in the first place.

George finished reading Sex at Dawn before I did and asked me to please, though my life is busy, please finish it quickly because he really wanted to be able to talk to me about it. Being the awesome wife that I am, I finished it within a few days of his request. I asked him what he felt about the book. He said it was like this huge weight had been lifted from him, this guilt that he had carried for years on end could leave. There's a biological and evolutionary reason that he naturally thinks of other women when he walks by them. He doesn't spend hours after fantasizing about them (at least not that I know, or at least not typically), but it's something he's never been able to help – those initial thoughts of seeing and touching other women. Honestly, he seemed like he was letting out this huge sigh of relief that he'd been holding onto forever. It made me sad for him, that he carried that guilt so heavy and so long.

I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a second on something really important to me and my marriage. Two huge shifts have occurred in our marriage – leaving our religion and leaving our monogamy-only beliefs – and both have been initiated by George being willing to talk to me openly and from a vulnerable standpoint. It makes me love him intensely that he's so good to me that way. Communication is not only essential to maintaining a good marriage, it's essential to growth together as well. It eases my fears when I'm hesitant to mention how I feel about anything but need to let him know. God, I love that man.

We talked more about some interesting points in the book relating to both males and females, and we had some fascinating points to explore in an analytical/scientific sort of way. Then I asked him what it means to him literally, how it translates into what he wants in life. He said he didn't know, that he was just processing it all and didn't know what it meant yet. I didn't either, but I felt it was less necessary for me to figure that out right away than it was for him.

A few days later he figured it out. He asked, very gently, if I would extend him the same courtesy he had once mentioned in passing to me (when I was headed out dancing with girlfriends): if I found someone I wanted to go home with, go for it, since he knew I would come back to him no matter what. The request blew me sideways for a good 10 seconds. Then, because I recover quickly and it sounded entirely logical, I said okay.

Over the next couple of weeks, we continued to have conversations on the subject. I felt a strong need to figure out who I am sexually, if that makes sense. I've always really, really enjoyed sex with my husband and didn't know how to even think about other men, or if I wanted to. (I'm still processing this, still not sure what I want, FYI.) I wanted, though, to feel like Marilyn Monroe when I want to. To just feel beautiful and pleasurable outside and in whenever I want that. I know Marilyn had issues, so I'm not referring to a permanent state, just the idea of feeling sexy to myself and to others.

As far as George goes, I wanted and want things. I want to feel like he likes me the most and longest and always wants to come back to me. I want him to feel like he can explore who he is and what sex feels like with someone else and tell me about it, because it interests me scientifically and sexually. And I want him to not obsess over any encounter he has until it becomes better in his mind than maybe it was, because I fear that possibility could ruin our marriage. That last point led me to conclude that having a one-time-in-your-life experience is more dangerous than having multiple times. If you have one experience with sex outside marriage, that's monumental. If you have several experiences, it's less monumental. Well, so my logic goes, anyhow. In any case, he was maybe a little surprised with my decision but understood. Ha!

Then the pressure sort of went away to hurry out and have sex. George was really busy with work (no, really), but he told me that knowing he was free to participate when he wants took a lot of immediacy away. That's when it started to feel normal to us both, I think. If he was on a business trip, I'd sort of be rooting for him for something to happen, but he was busy working with distant colleagues and couldn't really be thinking about it anyhow.

So here we are now. We are still both monogamous, and yet we don't feel tied to monogamy anymore. I would even say I/we don't feel monogamous because it seems like a way of life that includes guilt for extra-marital thoughts, and that's gone. I don't expect George will be sexually exclusive for too much longer, but I don't know. And the jury's out on me. I haven't decided yet. I have a lot of self-evaluation left.

That's what I love about blogging, especially with a bit more time on my hands these days (hooray!!): I can think through things so much better by writing them down. I want to post about the whole subject of jealousy – so important, and so related to fear – and everything I'm wondering about myself. And who knows what else. But, like I said, this won't be a fast novel. It's my real life, and real life is usually pretty normal. Well, depending on your definition.