Welcome to my virtual therapy room!  I am Dr Lori Beth Bisbey and this is Sex Spoken Here.  Today I answer the question ‘What is being poly (a swinger, having an open relationship) really like?’ with relationship stories I have gathered over my years as a non-monogamist, as a therapist and as a coach.  Remember that this podcast deals with adult themes so if you don’t have privacy you might wish to put on your headphones.
 
Personally, I never understood why someone would expect one person to meet all of their needs.  It seemed to me that I could easily love more than one person at a time and that doing so meant that I got to have variety and a more stable support network.    But I grew up in a family with parents who were not only monogamous but my mother had never had a sexual relationship with anyone other than my father.  She met him at age 16 and they married when she was 18.  My grandmother (her mother) had three husbands and at least one other relationship and urged my mother to find her one man and stick with him.  My mother has often said that I am much like my grandmother and associated this with having a harder life and making poor choices.  Whereas I see this as having a rich life albeit with more complications than the average person coming from a heteronormative background.
 
I was actively encouraged to adopt my parents world view and to look for the one person I would ‘settle down with’ and have a family with.  For a variety of reasons, this didn’t appeal to me.   But the pressure was intense.  So much so, that I had a monogamous marriage as my first marriage. 
 
Many of the people I have met, shared life with, interviewed and worked with over the past 37 years (I was 17 when I was in my first proper consensual non-monogamous relationship) have experienced the same pressure to conform to their family’s and society’s expectations.  AnnMarie has been a swinger for the past 25 years.  She was in a monogamous marriage when the subject first came up.   She and her husband had little exciting sex together.  She described it as their rhythms not matching.  She enjoyed leisurely sensual sex and he liked rough intense sex.  The lack of agreement made for sex that was less than satisfying for both of them.   She said they both always felt compromised which made her very sad.  AnnMarie said that they spoke of breaking up but that they got along in every other way so they both felt it would be wrong to do so.  At the same time, neither wanted to give up sex even though sex with each other didn’t work terribly well.
 
AnnMarie described looking through a local magazine that ran ads for escort workers, professional dominatrices and personal ads together trying to see if they could come up with something that would excite them both.  She said they came upon an ad for a swingers club.  ‘The place looked cool and we were excited reading the details.   We decided to try it that weekend.  We were so excited getting ready and it felt like it did when we first got together.  We made an agreement that we would only watch the first time and play with each other and off we went.    The night was amazing.  We had some of the best sex of our relationship when we got home so we decided to go again.  This time we agreed that we might ask another man to join us for some fun while we were there.  At first we didn’t meet anyone that either of us was interested in but after midnight, Roger arrived and it was like a spark hit both of us.   I hadn’t known that my husband always fantasised about sharing me with another man.  That night, he was able to act out the fantasy and we all had a great time.  One explosive orgasm after another.   And when we got home it was even better sex.   So that was when we became swingers.  After that,  we created our own ad for the magazine.  We joined our local swingers club. When the internet arrived, we created a profile on all the main swinger sites.  We went to the club twice a month at...