"Did you have sex with Jill? Did you sleep with her?"
Those were not entirely unexpected questions from my wife Laura. I'd been wondering when they would come for many months. You would have thought I'd have been better prepared to give the answers, and indeed I had thought about all the various ways I could answer them as well as all the excuses and rationales.
Although tempting, I could have said that I was having one of those age crises, the kind that hit on certain special birthdays that end in a five or zero. In this case, I'd hit sixty. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I'd been having an age crisis every year since I turned sixteen. I didn't plan to use that as an excuse for my burgeoning relationship with Jill.
All the other rationales were complicated.
Laura and I had been married about ten years. It was my third marriage and her second. We both had kids and grandkids by previous spouses, and for me, in one case, a girlfriend. In between our various marriages we'd lived with other people, and even while I'd been married previously I had special friends for long time periods with whom I had intimate relations.
At first I'd felt bad about my infidelities, but increasingly I realized that no one person was going to provide everything that I needed in terms of mind, body, and spirit in our relationship. I defined myself with that trinity, and also always thought of my relationships as connecting in those three realms, and for each space there were multiple dimensions. I was a spiritual person, so the concept came easily to me, and I lived it daily.
I also acknowledged my own high sex drive, coupled with the fact that the women I married tended to be at the opposite end of that spectrum for some reason. I had thought my three wives were rather obvious cases of 'bait and switch;' lots of wild and crazy sex in courtship and on the honeymoon, and then slowly everything sexual or physical all but ceased to exist in our relationships. I suppose I was ripe for outside relationships on many counts.
I'd met Jill about three years prior. She was forty, married, no children, and cute as a button. I resisted seeking her charms for almost a year, and that ultimately worked in our favor. We became friends - really good friends, and because she had a lot of free time and I was semi-retired, we found ourselves on the same town committee to build a new library for our rapidly growing town, as well as just able to get together routinely for coffee and to talk. We were in North Carolina, near Chapel Hill, and soon the word was out that we were heading the library committee. Every contractor within a hundred miles wanted to meet with us, present plans, and get an inside track.
Our friendship blossomed during long design sessions when we'd go over requirements, suggestions, and specifications from hundreds of people in response to a town-wide questionnaire we mailed. We were allocated town funds to hire an architect, so we also spent many hours with the small firm helping us on that front. There were obviously some core requirements, and then some 'nice to haves' that we could use as options depending on what the town fathers eventually decided as our ultimate budget.
In our frequent meetings that first year, Jill and I found we could talk about anything and we did. After rushing through our library work, we'd just talk about anything. We learned each other's history, and then peeled back the veneer we often hide behind with most people. I opened myself to her, and she did to me.
I fell in love, and so did Jill.
Our relationship blossomed because we became so mentally and spiritually intimate. All that we were lacking by the end of that first year was a physical relationship. Several times we both carefully expressed our frustrations with our spouses and their lack of physicality. We were both careful for a long time not to use that a springboard into the bedroom. This topic was just one of the many things we talked about.
Saying that, one might expect that I fell out of love with Laura, but I didn't.
To add to the potential awkwardness of the situation, as I befriended Jill, so did Laura. Jill's husband Tom wasn't absent in our friendship either. Laura and Jill would go off and shop or do girly stuff together. If the three of us got together, I might wander off to do some tasks or errands for an hour or two only to find the two women talking a mile a minute when I returned home.
One day Jill and I found ourselves on her living room sofa with architect's plans for the new library and rulers spread out in front of us on the coffee table. Suddenly, the library became a distant concern. We kissed, but it was kiss unlike any other we'd shared. One kiss led to another, and then another, and then there were clothes scattered about, and then we consummated that love we grown between us right there on her living room sofa.
I hadn't had such an intense partnering with anyone in my entire life. I hesitated to think about the term 'soul mate,' but in those first few minutes when we connected in all the dimensions of mind, body, and spirit, I was left wondering if perhaps I'd been wrong, that perhaps there really was such a concept in the universe of love, and I'd just mated with mine. Jill apparently felt the same way.
As we lay there panting after several orgasms, I asked Jill, "When did you know?"
I could feel her grin against my chest as I held her. She kissed my skin again. "Pretty much right away the day we met. I told you I hadn't had sex with my husband for the past six years. He's older, but that's not an excuse; you're older than he is and you just turned me inside out with four big orgasms and I don't think I've ever been so full of man stuff ... and ... I don't know how to say this, but I've never felt so close to anyone as I do to you right now."
