Author: Kat Stark

Like most couples in long-term marriages, our sex life has encountered some serious ups and downs–phrasing!–over the course of our 21 years together. We’d been in one of those down slumps approximately 2 years ago when I discovered the rich web of slash fanfiction dedicated to a TV show I was obsessed with at the time. I couldn’t believe there was so much out there. Even more so, I couldn’t believe how much of it was really good. I started devouring everything I could get my fingers on by a few discovered authors, and gradually I started branching off to…

I spent some time recently reading through some blog posts I wrote early this year. Those memories, plus a few experiences I had this week that have reminded me how far I’ve come in my open relationship adventure. I was recalling our first swing date with another couple and remembered how freaked out I’d been about being naked in front of people. I wasn’t (as) nervous about the sex; it was really about the nudity. Sex is about doing. I’m good at doing. Nudity is about being. I’m terrible at being. Before becoming non-monogamous, I was rarely naked, even when…

I’ve been trying to work out a new approach to my secondary relationships because some of what I’ve been doing hasn’t been working for me. I’ve been spending too much of my time riddled with self-doubt and angst–and sometimes bouts of ugly-cry tears–based on the communication whims of my partners, who are sometimes very engaged, and at other times, very distant. I want to be feeling joy and fun and sexiness from those relationships rather than stressing because I didn’t get a text the day after we last slept together. I feel like I’ve got a couple options as far…

Read Part 1 here. Once we decided to go looking for a threesome in earnest, we had to figure out where to start. Neither of us had ever used any online dating site (we hooked up before that was really a common thing) and we’d heard single friends complain about creepers (their word) messaging them to ask for threesomes. We didn’t want to be those people. So I did the other thing single women complain about. After a generous application of beer and whiskey to my nerves, I asked one of our friends I knew was openly bisexual if she’d…

Let’s blame it on Dan Savage — or more accurately, send him a thank you pie — that Flick and I opened our relationship less than a year ago. We’d had 21 years of mostly successful monogamy, but after seeing a live recording of the Savage Lovecast last October, we started discussing our relationship and what we wanted it to look like in a way we never had before. We were in a really great place in our relationship, celebrating 18 years of marriage and having better sex than we’d had in many years, perhaps ever. There’d been the usual…

Flick and I decided that we needed to go check out more of the local swinger club events and we were very pleasantly surprised to find one happening downtown in one of the full-time sex clubs. I’d been wanting to check out that space for a long time, and although it wasn’t one of their regular nights, I was happy to at least learn where it is was located. The club is in a former bath house and many of the events hosted are men-only, so the swinger event was a great chance to see the place. The party we…

My sweetie and I took a recent trip to Chicago. I’d been wanting to go to the city since, oh, around the time I’d started chatting with a sexy friend from there, but I didn’t imagine it would happen. It’s an expensive trip from the Wet Coast, but we realized we had enough points to do it, and there was a musical based on one of our favourite books that Flick really wanted to see playing only there. It wouldn’t be a trip entirely based on getting laid, so we decided to go for it. I’d been chatting with Will…

I had no idea until very recently that I am a squirter. It wasn’t something that had ever come up in partnered sexual experiences or solo play. When I’d heard it talked about, I figured it was something that you either could or couldn’t do, like rolling your tongue (can’t) or liking cilantro (also can’t, yuck! why would you sprinkle soap on your food?!). If it was something I was capable of, you’d have thought it would have come up at some point in the previous twenty-six years of my sex life. The change began (along with so many awesome…

Scheduling is possibly the most complicated thing about my open relationship, and very likely, it’s the same across most open relationships. Between working a couple jobs, hobbies, appointments, my husband’s dates, and social events with our ‘mundane’ friends, trying to schedule my dates is an exercise in juggling and judicious use of a shared google calendar. Add the spouses and partners of said dates into the equation, it’s amazing anyone ever gets laid. So when the spouse of one of my partners doesn’t co-operate, and insists that he and I only get playdates when she has a date, it adds…

We stood pressed together, three bodies, three mouths, three sets of hands, kissing, touching, exploring. They moved closer to each other and I noticed they had an easy rhythm in their movements and caresses, a rhythm learned with experience. I was met with the shocking realization that I felt like the outsider in a threesome with my husband and our friend. My sweetie and I have been lucky enough to get to be part of several ffm threesomes simply by asking a couple of our open and bisexual female friends if they’d be interested in joining us. I always see…