Sleeping in on a beautiful weekend morning, coffee was the logical choice to help us clear the cloudiness and cobwebs filling our heads the morning following a late night into early morning concert experience. Always fun enjoying live music, but it was becoming ever more difficult to recover from the partying included as part of the fun package. Now it nearly guaranteed that the possibility of post-concert frenzied sexual adventures was virtually nil. These days the skin-to-skin fun had to be postponed until we refreshed our bodies with some sleep followed by strong coffee and breakfast.
I'm Walden and my partner's name is Jeannie. We've been together now close to 15 years. We "found" each other when we were both single for a few years following long-term, conventional relationships. I had been married for 22 years then single for around 5 years, while Jeannie had lived with her partner for a little over 8 years when that relationship was mutually ended due to incompatibilities they couldn't resolve.
When we came across one another, neither Jeannie nor myself was looking for any new or permanent relationship. We knew what we liked and knew we could find it in just enough measure to satisfy our sexual needs. Not the most exciting or stable way to scratch our sexual itches, as we both experienced our share of some much less than satisfying encounters, some of which were a bit frightening or dangerous. The scintillation of hooking up with relative strangers was tempered by the need to also guard against situations that could leave either of us exploited or hurt in some way. As much as it felt good to throw caution to the wind, that wind held the potential to begin as a sexy breeze suddenly morphing into a Category 5 hurricane. Measured caution was the key to navigating through our chosen life path.
Near misses in pursuing gratification ranging from women in relationships, women still pursued by exes, women who turned out to not be women, women with alcohol and/or drug addictions, women who were seeking revenge against all men, women who found me to be too sexual, women who were seeking father figures, women who just wanted to talk, etc. left me wanting for an answer to how to find someone with whom I was more fully compatible in a non-committed relationship. (Whew! That's one long sentence!)
I figured you could find just about anything on the internet, so I began searching for a forum that had some dialogue about how to consistently find more compatible hook-ups. I guess for many people a hook-up is supposed to be a physical thing. I had always needed more of a connection, more mind-melding to enhance the hook-up. In the back of my mind I liked the idea of always having the potential of a repeat performances, great hook-ups to be duplicated or expanded upon. So I sought out and found a forum that worked for me and lead me to Jeannie.
Named "The Satisfied Life Experience" (SLE), the forum was a revelation. When I saw it in my Google search results, I figured it was some new age or religious site. I dug a little deeper discovering that it was more about how people realized satisfaction through intimacy. There were several categories of discussions within the forum with seemingly hundreds of different topics touching on the different ways all sorts of people experienced intimacy or wanted to experience it. Nothing was taboo or inappropriate. It was just people sharing with people. I found a forum titled "One Night Stands +" and dived in.
A post by a person going by the name "Scarlett" posing a question about how someone could feel a deeper connection with someone that was presumed to be just a hook-up. There was quite a bit of commentary pointing out that one-night stands by virtue of the term aren't intended to bring about deep connections. Scarlett countered by saying that even in a presumed one-night stand, a person never knew whether or not that hook-up could be so good that it became much more.
Being a romantic, I agreed with Scarlett. Finding fuck partners was an enjoyable pastime, very easy to work a life schedule around, then experiencing the thrill of heated, no-strings sex was the cherry on top. The problem was for me that when I needed some other intimacy as a complement to the physical, the one-night stand left me wanting. There was some void left that I knew I needed to fill with a more complete physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy. As we first exchanged post comments, then IMs, we began to find a commonality in our thoughts, both in sexual desires and in how we wanted to fully live our lives, that soon lead to exchanging phone numbers and email addresses.
