Our Decades of Open Marriage:
A True Story
Before I start I must say these are recollections of our activities over the years. I have written this as accurately as I can without embellishment, though as you read it you will see it would have been more erotic with some changes, but this is what really happened. The initial material was written around 1998, therefore is based on memory that I won’t claim to be perfect. However, most of the text covering the events after that was penned within a week of the actual events. Thus from chapter ten onward there is a higher degree of detail and accuracy. In particular, you will find the narrative becomes quite explicit when discussing sexual experiences. This was not because I had, at the time, intended to make this public, but rather that I knew my memory would fade and jumble up what really happened. As it turned out I am very glad I did it this way because when rereading these stories I realize how much I did indeed forget.
One last thing. I know that my dear wife, Paula, will not agree on some points (but of course, my telling of it is the right one); however, the larger facts are not in dispute. I should also note that I know full well that compared to some people, our experiences are not particularly exotic, but they are the experiences of a very ordinary couple who have now been married for almost 40 years. That alone perhaps makes this tale, extraordinary.
I hope you find this narrative both enjoyable and instructive.
(1/1/2025)
1
How We Came to Have an Open Marriage
I consider myself about the luckiest guy in the world. I have never been much of a stud. When I was young I was skinny and uncoordinated, I’m now in my early 60’s and a little too heavy and still uncoordinated. I had a 25+ year career in Christian ministry, education, and social work before earning my PhD and moving to higher ed. So I’m kinda dull and not rich. Yet for all that I have been blessed with the most amazing wife in the world since 1986.
I was raised in a very progressive, upper-middle-class home. I would describe it as “Leave It To Beaver” in its simplicity and “Love American Style” in its outlook. Until I was in high school my mother was a stay at home mom and my dad earned plenty as a senior executive in a national design-construct firm. My parents joined the PTA, we took annual family vacations and we went to church regularly. It wasn’t until I got married I realized my family was so liberal on sexual issues. I guess I knew our family was a little different. As far back as the late 1960’s, while I was in elementary school, I knew my parents took the Playboy and Penthouse magazines off the living room coffee table when my grandparents came to visit. My older brother and I were told not to let our friends see those magazines. At the time I had no idea of the significance of that. When I was in first and second grade I didn’t ask why Grandma and our friends shouldn’t see them. After all, I wasn’t interested in the photospreads, I liked the comics.
As a Junior High student in the mid 70’s things were very open. My parents stored a huge box of old Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and OUI magazines upstairs in the closet opposite my bedroom and I thought nothing of having several in my room where my mom would know they were there. Speaking of my mom, I remember every Christmas my dad would get my mom a new negligee and she would put it on before we kids could open any of our presents. For Dad, there was always the Playboy calendar and a box of cigars in his stocking.
On Christmas morning after we opened our presents she would wear her new negligee and drink coffee and he would smoke his cigar. This had been the tradition as long as I remember and from looking at old photos I think it predated my arrival in 1962. I distinctly recall at least one Christmas night that we put together a big Playboy centerfold puzzle.
I really did think all mothers wore negligées around the house when only the family was around. In public during the 1970’s she wore the smallest bikinis, shortest shorts and halter tops that showed lots of cleavage. As a kid, I honestly thought that was how all mothers dressed. I didn’t understand why my friends liked it when my mom was at home.
My father had been taking lingerie, topless and nude photos of Mom since photo processors first began to print them in the late 1950’s. When we converted the old 8mm movies to video we found one reel from a trip to Yellowstone of mom nude soaking in a hot spring in the woods with us kids just as naked running around
My pubescent friends must have loved my house and they told me they thought my mom was great looking. It wasn’t until several years after I was married that my mom told Paula she had gotten some of the first silicone breast implants in the country back in the mid 1960’s.
It was shortly after that the Debbie Does Dallas movie came out. In the Dallas area where we lived, it was front page news as the Cowboys sued because in the porno the star played a Cowboy cheerleader and wore a real Cowboy cheerleader uniform in the movie. I remember the “Wild Bunch” (as my parent's group of friends called themselves) were right up front with us kids that they were going out one night as a group to see the movie.
In the summer of ’75 (or perhaps ’76) my parents went for a week to a nude resort in Jamaica. When they returned and started showing the slides they made us kids leave because “You’re not old enough to see the ones from the nude beach.” Mom was right up front that she loved the nude beach and that she was excited about showing the photos to her friends. Of course, I was not going to be denied and I went snooping. Sadly, only a handful of the photos had been printed, most were slides. But it was the first time I ever recall seeing a nude picture of my mother.
It was seeing those photos that got me interested in my parent's lifestyle. It was not that I thought what my parents did was unusual, but because I was growing up. I eventually found the big box of nude photos of my mother in their closet. It was quite an eyeful for me. To her long-term regret in a fit of anger one day after my father remarried, my mom destroyed 20 years of nude photos of herself. The only photos that escaped destruction were some outtakes that were in a large cache of slides that came to me after Mom passed.
When I was snooping in my parents closet, I also found a stack of 8mm reels that were not our home movies. One night when they were out I took the movie projector to my room and saw my first hard core porno. Of course, they were just “blue loops” of silent 8mm film, but I saw sex for the first time that way. I suspect I’m not the only guy of my generation who had a similar experience.
For my Dad’s 40th birthday my mom threw a luau party and his cake was a nude woman with a cherry baked in…. well you can guess where that cherry was found… and yes, Mom made sure that Dad got that piece of cake.
As time went on and I moved through junior high school I began to get a better idea of what was happening with the parent’s gang. One Sunday afternoon the Wild Bunch failed to lock the door for their “adult time.” A couple of us walked right in on them, when we arrived in the living room the adults began scrambling around hiding things and began yelling for us to leave. I didn’t get a good look but I saw, in the second before we were aggressively shooed back out the door, magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, OUI were opened to photo spreads and strewn all over the floor, almost to the door where we stood. That was not what they were trying to cover up though. The big throw pillows that were very popular at the time were not used to cover the magazines; but rather they were used to hide the torsos of the women. Since I could see the sides of the four moms in the room, it was apparent to me that they all were topless. While it was interesting, I wasn’t overly surprised.
I got more information about what they all were doing one evening when I was asked to baby-sit while the Wild Bunch went out to celebrate one of the member’s 40’th birthday. The party had started at the house at which I was sitting, and what they left behind was all new to me. Sex jokes and toys I hadn’t known existed and did not know what they did were left strewn around the living room.
After our father passed away, my brother sister, and I compared what we knew about our parent's lifestyle. It does not appear that they were swingers per se, however, there was at least one skinny-dipping party and there was more than a little sleeping around. It appears that my mother had been having sex with other men pretty much through the 70’s while my Dad pretended not to know. In the last month of his life my father told my sister that he knew that our mom had sex with many men.
From the evidence It appears that when our family moved to the Dallas area in 1972 and Mom enrolled enrolled in college and developed a social group of young unmarried people, that she blended into the sexual ethos of the early 70’s college scene. I recall that around 1975, she spent an entire summer on an archeological dig living in a tent with mostly men. The dig was a native American site about four hours from our home. We went up to see her and at the time her living arrangement didn’t mean a thing to us kids, but my father had to know what that meant. If that wasn’t enough, she openly told my brother and I they students named the site “Deep Pit” after the currently popular movie “Deep Throat.” While she directly told us that the movie was “X-rated” I did not understand what that meant. Do I know Mom was fucking her brains out that summer? No. But now it appears that not only was she having sex with her fellow students, but that Dad had had to deliberately not see it.
As we know, a child’s perception of what is “normal” in a family comes as much from what is not said as what is. And what was not said was that it was a problem for Mom to spend a summer living with a group of men.
But it was not until my parents split up that Mom came fully out into the open with her free use of her sexuality. Though I had gone off to college, according to my sister, there was a never-ending stream of men in our mother’s bed. For several years she became a distributor of sex toys which she sold at private parties. She also became a belly dancer and danced at private events and unsurprisingly, nude beaches became and annual event. When my sister graduated from high school, my mother hired two male strippers to entertain my sister’s friends at her graduation. party.
Additionally, the normal nature of “men’s magazine’s” continued in my home. There is no way my parents could not know that by putting all those magazines in the upstairs hall closet (their room was downstairs) they were in effect giving them to my brother and me. Thus when I was about 12 (my brother was 14), we had unrestricted access to all the erotic material we could imagine existed. Though this kind of access is the rule in the internet age, in the mid-1970’s it was extremely rare. To this day my favorite images are from that early 70’s Playboy style . In time I read every word of every magazine in that box and masturbated to every nude photo. I love Playboy cartoons and “Little Annie Fanny” to this day. One year Paula bought me for Christmas the collection of every centerfold from Playboy from the first edition until the 90’s.
As I said, this was however, long before the internet or even VHS porn. So I wasn’t “shown” how guys were “supposed to” masturbate. I didn’t know what I found enjoyable was not ‘the norm.” By the time I was thirteen or so, I found I very much enjoyed using make shift dildos (no I didn’t have that word yet) to put in my mouth or up my ass while I masturbated. In time I found the perfect substitute penis in a 16” long bean bag snake. It was firm and flexible. Covered with Saran Wrap, I could suck it pretending it was my penis, and by putting shampoo as a lube, I could fuck myself with it. It seemed the most normal thing in the world.
Sure I knew guys called each other homo or fag as an insult, but I really had no idea that guys actually sucked other guy’s penises, or were fucked by other guys. To me, when I did those things with my homemade dildo, I always just imagined it was my own penis. I have no doubt if a guy had introduced me to male-male sex at the time I would have jumped on it, but it would be many years before that bean bag snake method of masturbation became a real man’s penis in my mouth. So, though it would be decades before I seriously considered the label bisexual; from the beginning of my sexual life, my interest was in women, blended with my desire to be penetrated by a penis.
All that to say that I grew up in a sexually liberal home; so when I chose to rebel against my parents at age 17, I became an arch conservative rather than a liberal. In my conservative rebellion, I became involved in the fundamentalist Christian movement of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. For several years I became radically conservative.
I met my Paula senior year at the very conservative Christian college at which we were students. When Paula and I got married in the early 80’s I was still a virgin and clueless about actually having sex. Though from my earlier years, I was well versed in the writing of Xandra Hollander and the other writers in Playboy and Penthouse, and had even read a good part of “Everything You Wanted to Know about S*x but were afraid to Ask”, I found on our wedding day, there was so much I did not know. To this day she teases me about how little I knew about the female anatomy.
After only dating 3 months we were engaged and by the time we had known each other less than 7 months we were married in November 1986. Our wedding night was not the first time she would have sex, but she was still very conservative and guilt ridden about her past.
It was only years later she admitted that she got married because she wanted sex and at the time she thought the only guilt-free way to have sex was in marriage. Guilt was the controlling force in her sexuality when it came to guys, but, like all people it was complicated. Her Christian fundamentalist parents did not acknowledge sexuality even existed unless it was in a condemnation. However, Paula had developed a taste for sexual gratification when she was quite young. By the time she was six or seven, she had learned to masturbate to orgasm (though she had no idea this was sex). Her favorite method of masturbation was to wrap her legs around the post of her four-poster bed and ride it until she climaxed. To the best of her memory, she did this regularly for several years until she was caught and told that what she was doing was BAD. So she stopped masturbating for a very long time.
Significantly, her first forays into sexual pleasure with other people was with girls. Her first real sexual experience was perhaps far more common in years past when it was normal, even in middle class homes, for siblings to share both one room and one bed. This was the case with Paula and her sister.
Her sister was (is) 7 years older than she is. As a child that age difference is immense. It was the late 60’s and early 70’s and both the sexual revolution and the youth culture were in full swing. However, she lived in the very isolated rural farming world of the Deep South. In many ways, she was among the last children raised in the world that people think of as the Old South. Her Grandfather was a wealthy plantation owner and political leader. Yes, she had a “Mammy” and everything.
Her father had married his best friend’s sister and as such their world was filled with aunts, uncles and cousins. Nearly all the cousins were, like her sister, significantly older given her dad and all her uncles were WW2 vets. And, like so many of the baby boom children during the late 60’s and early 70’s; her cousins were very much into sex, drugs and rock and roll. But in this Paula was a bystander, as a nine year old in 1969 when her cousins were in high school getting high and fucking like rabbits. Her sister however, has always been somewhat socially inept. Despite the fact she is pretty and had a killer body well into her 50’s, as far as Paula knows, in high school her sister remained a virgin and did not use drugs at all. However, she swam in a sea of sexuality. Her two closest friends, (who were both cousins) were fucking like mad and from what Paula could piece together, her sister would be around and see a lot of the sex, but did not participate.
What her sister did do, was to get her little sister to play with her when she got into the bed they shared. By the time Paula was ten she was giving her sister oral sex several times a week. As far as Paula recalls, her sister never reciprocated, but that didn’t bother my wife. She enjoyed giving her sister cunnilingus and playing with her breasts. She particularly enjoyed bringing her sister to orgasm. It was something special they shared between them. I’ve asked her about it and she does not feel in the least bit traumatized by the whole thing. Though she does point out that eventually she began putting sugar on her sister so as to make her pussy taste better. To Paula, eating out her sister several nights a week was just a normal and enjoyable thing they did together for something like three years, until her sister went off to college.
From what I understand, they never had sex after her sister went out of state for her education. I say Paula wasn’t traumatized, but her sister, without a doubt is. She became involved with a hyper conservative Christian group and is as sex-negative as it gets. From things that have been said, I think she is wracked with guilt to this day about what she “did” to her sister. Things would have likely been much different if they had lived in the world of hyper-sensitivity to sibling sexual contact.
Though she and her sister were never sexual again, not long afterward Paula began making out with a local girl her own age. In all this there was simply no understanding that what they were doing counted as the sinful thing called sex. The simple truth was, just like I had no idea of the homoerotic nature of my early sexual life, the idea of being a lesbian wasn’t even part of her vocabulary in the early 70’s.
What she has always known is that she is sexually attracted to girls with equal intensity as her attraction to boys. When she was in college, her friends at the place she worked part-time clearly picked up on this because she told me how they were confused about her sexuality. They would say that she must be a lesbian because her interest in girls, but they also said she couldn’t be that because she REALLY liked guys. Even in the 80’s the idea of being fully bisexual was not part of the common discourse. Had she been able to conceptualize she was bisexual back in her late teens or early twenties, perhaps she would have begun her free-love life much earlier.
All in all, when Paula and I met in January of 1986, we had many pieces of sexual undemanding, yet completely lacked any knowledge of how to use it in our real lives.
Um wow. I hadnt read this before. thank you for resharing this glimpse
Thank you for starting at the beginning again. You’ve had an exceptional childhood in a time of major change in the evolution of consciousness. The baby boomers, those born after WWII, stepped into the sexual revolution of the Sixties like a duck takes to water. (That mindset never reached South Africa. We are still 20 years behind the West.)
The beauty of reading about your childhood is how you used your experiences in In Search for the Final Freedom. Lamar’s experiences with dildos and other boys reflect a little of your background and Paula’s oral with her sister is played out between Bethany and her sister Haley. Even your mother has a role in your novel. You may not realize…
I've always wondered how many people had to clean out attics and all after their parents had passed only to discover a stash of blue movies and pics.