Prof and I have been all over the place. Geographically. Emotionally. Relationally. It is pretty damn cool.
The hard part about being all over the place, is we haven't been here writing. The cliché that we ethical sluts have to be excellent time managers is true. You've heard this from me before here in the blog. But we will triumph over the time crunch! Prof and I have too much fun sharing our perspectives here with you to let it fall off the radar. And, indeed, we have evolved so much since we started this entertaining little diversion, if anything we want to share more here for our own reflection. If you enjoy in the meantime, all the better!
So geographically we have been indulging in travel that takes us to hotbeds of sexiness in the most literal way possible. With two upcoming trips to Desire, presenting at the Open SF conference and catching up with hotties at places like Trapeze, there is no shortage of fun to be had. The beautiful thing is Prof and I get to do all of this together. In our day-to-day dynamic vanilla lives (which we love every minute of!), we unfortunately are drawn apart often by circumstance. It is a choice we make everyday to embrace our lives as they are, but also to maximize our opportunities to have fun together.
So a trip to the Trap or your local club is awesome for each of you, I'm sure. For us, it takes on a whole other dimension, not necessarily an urgency, but a chance to both be at a place where we can let go of the world for a while and just be. You may identify with this too. It is a demonstration of our commitment to each other that our relationship comes first.
As bizarre as that may sound to the non-swing set, the time when we can let our hair down together in the midst and company of ‘our people' is when we feel the most at ease. When we can embrace our nature and cut loose together, Prof and I connect in the deepest way. The fact that we are flirting with other people, building other relationships, sometimes being intimate with other people and enjoying the compersion of the whole process openly helps us feel whole.
Which brings me to the fact that emotionally we have been all over the place. As we evolve and experience deeper and deeper immersion into the ethically non-monogamous world, it is getting harder and harder to keep up the vanilla facade. I'll speak for myself here: After six plus years of an awesome, beautiful, fulfilling open relationship, feigning vanilla seems more and more obsolete. I'm tired of telling most of the story.
I'm moving closer and closer to being ready to tell it all. (Much to the relief of all those friends we have who are out and have led the way for us.) Of course, I want to do it on our terms in our time frame in consideration of those around us that we love who deserve to hear it from us first. But as I recently texted to Prof: “We have nothing to hide.” Our relationship kicks ass. We love each other deeply. We have other partners. And it is awesome and complex and simply how we roll.
I remember having a conversation with Prof when we were about nine months into our open relationship and saying, “When we have been doing this for two years it will be easy to say to friends and family, ‘This is just how our relationship works. You've known us this whole time. We are no different. Take it or leave it.'”
And it has been more than six years now. Six years. As exhilarated as our relationship and our other relationships make me, the experience of not sharing that with those we are closest to has worn me down. As it should, really. Everyone deserves to be who they truly are with everyone they love.
With our evolution and maturity of understanding of what energizes us about our open relationship, now relationally we are all over the place. We have some amazing couple friends we have been close to for over five years and have continued spending lovely time with them. We continue to party with a fantastically fun cast of characters with whom we text and flirt and dance and flirt some more. We also enjoy and get an erotic charge from just having them in our lives. We have a network of geographically remote friends that enrich our lives that we look forward to seeing when schedules and travel allow.
And now Prof and I have both begun, almost by accident, to embrace the experience of having erotically-charged friendships individually while still keeping each other informed. The process we moved through to land at this place has contributed a richness to our already incredible relationship that is impossible to describe. It is mind-bending to discover that we hadn't summited the mountaintop. And likely we still haven't, which thrills me.
Thanks for following us all over the place. You are truly excellent company. We look forward to sharing the next leg of the journey too.
