Single Men: The Peter Pans of the Lifestyle

My husband and I have been in the Lifestyle for almost ten years now.  We’ve made the increasingly common migration from swingers to poly.  These days, we are an early forties poly couple looking for a husband. I’ve spent the summer seeking, but without much luck.

Over the years, we have learned that I am the pickier partner. Time has shown us that my husband is usually willing to be with any man that I would be interested in having sex with.  The reverse is not true and this led to a few awkward dates in our early swinging years.  As a result, I now act as the initial filter and gatekeeper.

We live in a very conservative town, so I do admit that our options are limited.  We believe in ethical non-monogamy and so decided to limit our search further to single men who are already in the Lifestyle.  We figured there would be less drama…and that part turned out to be correct.  My summer has been largely drama free.  The only exception was a night of increasingly demanding drunk texts from a man I broke it off with after two dates.

SDC is the most commonly used dating site in our area.  We focused on single men who were ‘validated’ – this means that another SDC member has met them and validated that their profile is accurate.  Sometimes a validation is just a confirmation that they are ‘real’ and other times it can mean that the single man is ‘really awesome in bed’.

Our search on SDC turned up pages of validated single men.  I did a first cut based on height (must be taller than me) and fitness (must be somewhat fit) and sent out a slew of emails.  I did a second cut based on responses to these questions:

-Are you drug and disease free?

-Do you always wear a condom?

-Do you have a job?

-Do you have a roommate?

-Do you have a wife/girlfriend?

I didn’t have the questions in the beginning of this adventure, but after a date with an unemployed hunk and another date with a married man with a wife who believed in ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’, we decided some additional screening was in order.

Over the past few months, I’ve had a coffee with most of the single men in town (and some travelers) who made it through the first and second cuts.  I’ve had dates with a much smaller subset. And yet I have not met a man that I would even consider bringing into our marriage.

What we’ve learned is that single men in the Lifestyle are single for a reason.  I have come to think of them as a lot like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.  These men, at least the ones that I have met, are attractive, smart, and good in bed.  But there is always something that prevents them from being ‘the marrying kind.’ Sometimes it is a job that involves insane amounts of travel, sometimes it is the passion of an entrepreneur with a start-up, and sometimes they just can’t be bothered.

It has been a strange experience to meet so many Peter Pans in such a short period of time. I am sure they do well within the strict confines of the Lifestyle (show up with a smile and a ready hard-on and do what you are told), but outside of that, their skill in dating falls off at an alarming rate. Both my husband and I find ourselves shaking our heads in disbelief a lot.

These validated Lost Boys are a breed apart – it is not every man that is willing and able to have sex with a strange woman and her husband ‘on command.’  During our coffee dates, most of the men I met commented on how nice it was to get to talk and get to know me.  They said in most cases, they are just asked to show up at a hotel room and perform. But what they are not is interested in (or sometimes capable of) wooing a woman.

For the typical Peter Pan that I met, the Lifestyle suits them to a T.  They enjoy the thrill of it and they love that they get to have sex with women without any of the emotional or financial investment in dating.  While it is heady to have an attractive, intelligent man interested in taking you to bed and treating you as best he knows how, in the end, both my husband and I learned that we are actually looking for a guy who is a ‘stud’ and is interested in courting me outside of the bedroom.  It all seems so old-fashioned, but what can I say?

I find myself more and more convinced that I am very lucky to be with a man of my husband’s caliber. And having such a fine man in my life makes me very reluctant to settle for less with a second husband.  But we have made progress this summer; now we have a much better idea of what we are looking for in our male Unicorn.

The next step is to figure out where else to look for him…