The kitchen was bright with sunshine that Sunday morning as I checked the laptop screen one last time before taking a deep breath and anxiously clicking on the 'submit' button. There was a pause, the cursor span in little circles and then the 'thank you' message appeared.
I breathed a sigh of relief. It was done; the fruit of two weeks' work would, I hoped, soon be published and after that my new online friends would increase in number helping me further along the journey I had so recently undertaken.
If I had known then how far that journey would take me and my husband Pete, or how quickly we might get there I might not have been so free with my writing and sharing my emotions.
But at that moment I had no idea β and the first few steps had certainly been fun.
***
After my fuddled mind had adjusted to the extraordinary realisation that my attractive husband of twenty years was actually serious about watching me having sex with other men, my next thought was that I had to learn a lot more about what I could only consider a very strange and unnatural fetish.
Shared fantasies were one thing; actually having sex with another man; actually cheating on my husband for the first time since our marriage was another thing altogether. At the time I had no real thought of doing what he had asked but I loved my husband very much and wanted to understand what strange thing was happening to him to make him want this.
After all, men do have midlife crises, don't they?
I had expected the idea to revolt as well as shock me - after all, it's not the sort of proposal you expect from someone you have been married to for so long β but to my surprise I found myself more curious than repelled and thought about it at first in an oddly detached, almost scientific rather than a passionate or lustful way.
I had always been dimly aware of the 'swinging' scene and over the years had seen many TV programmes in which wife-swapping had featured, though more in comedy than in drama. Indeed at least one village not far from us had a reputation for this sort of thing dating back to the 1960's but in my naivetΓ© I hadn't really imagined that it was still going on.
I had had even less idea that it involved the affluent, professional classes to which my husband Peter and I belonged at least as much, if not more than 'those kind of ' families living on the 'problem' estates.
I had so much to learn.
I suppose Pete and I had lived fairly sheltered lives. From School we had both gone on to University in the Midlands where he had studied Medicine, I had studied Biological Sciences and we had met through mutual friends in the hospital.
Pete was and still is slim, handsome and athletic. Neither tall nor short and these days somewhat thin on top of his head, nonetheless he is still fit, confident and attractive, not least to me.
I'm as tall as my husband to the inch β taller when I'm in heels - with dark eyes and dark brown hair (most of the time). I'm still slim and fit though I have to work hard to stay that way, and have always had very small boobs, even when feeding our two kids.
Our eldest, now in his mid-twenties, lives and works in London and our two younger children were away at University at that time so Pete and I had been living the life of a couple again for nearly a year before these events took place. It had, I must confess, been a lot of fun being a couple again with evenings out, evenings in, weekends away and, of course, a great deal more sex thanks to vastly improved privacy.
Pete's vasectomy some years ago had helped too, removing the need to worry about my long term use of the pill. Neither of us liked condoms and my menopause was only beginning so some form of protection was still needed.
We have both prospered in our careers too. Pete is a Consultant at a major hospital in the city near where we live. I work in a senior role in a medical-related field in a city nearby but I'd better keep the details of that to myself or it would be far too easy for a persistent reader to work out who we are!
But back to Pete's astonishing proposition.
As a trained researcher, my first instinct was to find out much more about what I had originally considered an exciting fetish, but definitely one for the fantasy zone alone. The idea of turning that fantasy into reality was both frightening and exciting at the same time but not something I was taking seriously. If I'm honest, the idea of my own husband not just accepting me being unfaithful but actually trying to persuade me to have sex with other men though unthinkable in practice was highly arousing in principle.
But there was no doubt Pete was sincere about it. This was something I found deeply unsettling and at first my number one concern was for my husband's mental health.
My first port of call for research was of course the anonymous internet so, with feelings of misgivings, I trawled the net for some time, looking for anything remotely scientific about a man's desire to allow or even watch his wife having sex with another man β the desire to become a Cuckold.
There was plenty of porn of course, much of it badly written and entirely unbelievable, but there were a few genuine studies out there too which I analysed assiduously. I even joined a forum or two under false male names and tentatively joined in a few threads, but soon discovered most participants were either frauds or fantasists or both.
Overall I learned a number of things that both worried and reassured me:
That cuckoldry was a surprisingly common fetish in the western world, affecting perhaps a fifth of men in the USA in some form. One report suggested up to half of all American men had at least fantasised about their partner being with another man. British men couldn't be all that different, I reasoned, rather shocked.