Everybody has sexual fantasies. Some people are fortunate enough to be able to fulfill some of them, others choose not to, and still others never take the risks necessary to experience them. Not all fantasies are meant to be played out; knowing which ones to risk trying can be difficult to discern.
My wife Sarah and I had for many years talked about sharing our sex lives with another person or couple. Sarah was very bisexual, and had been exclusively with women for many years before we met (I like to joke that I "saved" her from lesbianism, and she often referred to herself as a "wasbian"). We both enjoy reading erotica together, as well as the occasional porn video, and we both found ourselves turned on most by stories involving women together or a threesome among two women and one man.
These thoughts had remained as fantasies for many years, primarily because of the hurdles posed by children, jobs, family commitments, and the like. Even without those hurdles, I doubt we would have turned fantasy into action earlier in our relationship, because we were not emotionally secure enough to try it out earlier. But we finally reached the stage where the hurdles were low enough, and we were emotionally and sexually secure enough, that the fantasies began to evolve into discussion of possibilities.
The more we discussed the idea of sex with another person or persons, the more we both realized we wanted to give it a try. We weren't sure how to go about it, or exactly what to expect, so we went into it with an open mind. After surfing the web a bit, we discovered a few swingers websites, posted a profile on each, and began corresponding with some couples.
Besides being interested in sex with other people, there was another part of our sex life that we had been exploring. For about a year before deciding to embark on swinging, Sarah and I had been experimenting with dominance and submission, or D/s. I had known for a long time that I had a submissive side. I was always turned on by stories and videos that portrayed strong women who asserted their control over men (as well as other women). I had never shared this feeling with Sarah, though I suspect that she had begun to realize how I had felt based on my response to specific stories and videos.
It was not until about a year ago that Sarah began to playfully assert control over me while we were having sex. It started with her teasingly telling me what to do to please her, and as she quickly realized how turned on both I and she were by this play, it escalated to the point where she was into full femdom mode. She would tie me up and force me to service her sexually, with occasional "training" sessions where she would spank and verbally humiliate me into submission. Our D/s was not so much about punishment, however, as it was about her asserting control (and my giving it up) in order for me to please her sexually. It was a practice that we've seen referred to as "sensual dominance."
In many of our D/s sessions we would spend much of the evening with me paying attention to her body, which could include starting with my bathing her in our oversize bathtub, moving to giving her a nice warm oil massage, and then on to an intense session of bringing her to orgasm every way imaginable. If I did a good of pleasing her, she would reward me by allowing me to masturbate in front of her. And if I did an especially good job, I would be rewarded by being allowed to have sex with her. The D/s sessions were not an everyday thing with us, they were something we engaged in occasionally and were very special to us. Most nights (or days, as it were) involved more vanilla sex between the two of us. We were definitely not into 24/7 D/s, as were some people we had met online. Children, job responsibilities, and other things made it impossible for us to pursue it, and to be honest, neither of us was truly interested in a 24/7 relationship like that. But we certainly did enjoy it in the bedroom.
So as our discussions about swinging became more concrete, we obviously discussed just what role the D/s should play in it. We decide to be somewhat circumspect in our profiles on the swingers sites, because we didn't want to turn off any couples or women. You would be surprised how many profiles say that the person or couples are not into "BDSM," though it is not always clear what that means to people. Through conversations with people online, we determined that the majority of people respond to the BD – bondage and discipline – or SM – sadism and masochism – in the term BDSM. To Sarah and I, however, it was the DS that was at the center of our sexual role playing. We decided not to mention anything about D/s in our profile, and we would see how things progressed as we met people.
We had a number of responses to our profiles, and messaged some people – both couples and single women – on our own. We were primarily interested in finding bisexual women, as sexual contact between the women was going to be an important part of the relationship for us. Our experience on these sites, I suspect, was similar to that of many others. Ninety percent of the contacts that we made led to nothing; either we realized that we weren't compatible, or more commonly, the other couple really weren't interested in swinging but were on the site for the titillation factor or to collect nude pictures of other people.
Some of the connections we made did turn into actual meetings with people, and some of those meetings turned into "dates." We had some good experiences, where Sarah and I really connected with the couple on both an emotional as well as a sexual level. And we had some not-so-good experiences, but the one thing we always tried to do was learn from the experience.
One thing we had not had any success in finding was a single woman with whom to play. Many couples on these sites refer to single bisexual women as "unicorns," because they are as rare as the mythical animal. But like other couples, we kept searching and messaging women in the hopes of finding one to bring into our bed.
After about a year on the sites, we saw a newly listed profile for a woman who called herself "FunnGrrll." She didn't live too far from us, and was about the right age (we tended to stick with people around our own frightfully-close-to-middle-age range). There was not much information in her profile regarding her likes or dislikes, and just one picture that didn't show very much of her, but we figured "what the hell, we've got nothing to lose," so we went ahead and composed one of our witty little messages and fired it off. Based on our previous experiences (can you say "struck out" in 47 different languages?) we did not have very high expectations.
Like many others we messaged, we didn't hear back from her so we removed her from our "friends" list and went on with our lives. Then about two weeks later, we had a message in our inbox on the site. When I looked at it I saw it was from FunnGrrll. I quickly opened the message, expecting to find the familiar "Thanks, but not interested" message that we considered to be one step above those people who never replied at all.
But much to our surprise, I found a short note thanking us for our message, explaining that she had been out of town on vacation, and that she would be interested in finding out more about us. She shared her Yahoo ID and invited us to look for her online for a chat. I had Sarah come over and read the message over my shoulder. She was surprised also, but not particularly optimistic given our lack of success in this department. But she said, "Well, go ahead and look for her online and see what she sounds like." I tended to instant message more than Sarah, who had little patience for it, so I was the one that usually made the first contact with couples we met on the swingers' sites. I replied to FunnGrrll, giving her our Yahoo IDs and first names, and telling her I would look for her online.
I sent a request to add her to my friends list, and Sarah did the same. I didn't hear back from her in a few days, so wrote her off and figured we'd never hear from her. And then about five days later when I logged on to Yahoo I received a message that FG (as Sarah and I now referred to her) had accepted me and added me to her friends list, as she had Sarah. I checked to see if she was online, but she wasn't. I messaged her anyway, in case she was signed on in invisible mode, but didn't get a response.
A couple of days after that, after we had put the kids to bed, Sarah was on the computer checking her e-mail. Her computer beeped and she saw the flashing icon that indicated somebody was messaging her. She clicked on the icon, and up popped a window titled "FunnGrrll." The window said, "Hi Sarah, Jill here." Sarah called me over to the computer to read over her shoulder as she began to chat with her. They chatted for awhile, engaging in the getting-to-know-you kind of banter that we had gotten very familiar with over the last year. Most of these initial contacts led to nowhere, but we had learned that it was a requisite step in finding another couple or person online.
As Sarah and Jill chatted, aided by my occasional question I suggested to Sarah, they got to know each other a bit more. Nothing too deep at the outset, but they exchanged enough information to determine that there may be a possibility of a connection among the three of us. After awhile they signed off, Sarah shrugged and said, "Well, we'll see," and we went back to our activities.
The next day I looked to see if Jill was online, but couldn't find her. I checked the next few days (as a college professor, I tended to spend long periods of time in front of my computer), but never saw her online. I concluded that she was one of those people who either was never online or always signed on in invisible mode. After a few more days of this, I checked in with Sarah to see if she had heard back from Jill at all. She said that in fact she had, and that she and Jill had chatted for a short while every day so far. I was surprised, but not stunned, and decided she was just somebody who liked to chat with women. We had been very upfront from the beginning that we were only interested in her as a couple, and that Sarah did not play alone, so I wasn't too worried about this.
I asked Sarah what they had been chatting about, and she replied, "Not much, the usual chitchat, getting-to-know you kind of stuff. But I think she would be interested in meeting us, and she definitely seems to have some interests in common with us." I was a bit surprised to hear this, simply because I had assumed we would never find a single woman interested in us, and had little hope that Jill would be our unicorn. So I said to Sarah, "Great, I'm all for it. Is she willing to share some pictures?" Sarah said that Jill was supposed to send some in the next day or so, and when she did, Sarah had promised to share some of ours (we had only body shots in our profile; we were careful not to share pictures with our faces until we got to know somebody a bit).
The next day, I was in my office working on grading papers, when I received an e-mail message from Sarah. There was no text in the message, just a subject line that said, "Take a look." After making sure my office door was closed (didn't want any pesky students coming into my office and looking over my shoulder) I opened it up and found three attachments. Clicking on the first, I opened a jpeg file that contained a picture of a blonde woman who appeared to be in her late 30s or early 40s. She was not what many people would describe as pretty, but she had the kind of look that both Sarah and I liked – short hair, with a look that some people would describe as "dykey," and she definitely would fall onto the "cute" page in my book. It was, in fact, a look that Sarah carried off quite nicely. She always joked that she could still walk into a lesbian bar today, after almost fifteen years of being a "wasbian," and do very well for herself. And I would never dispute her on that.
