a non-monogamous start to marriage

[Numex 2,415]

My wife and I were out with another couple who is almost certainly vanilla.  In telling us how they met, they both admitted that when they first started "sleeping together" they were both in relationships that included sex with someone else, she even living with another guy.  They got things sorted out, fell more deeply in love, moved in together, got married.

 

So I was was wondering, who else among us started this way?  It's probably not all that unusual even among non-swingers to transition to new love interests while overlapping with an old sex partner.

[Numex 2,415]

My poll, so I go first.  When we met and later when we started having sex, Daniela was still in relationships with two other guys (married) who she fucked regularly, and one woman she saw occasionally.  I and my ex-wife still amicably got together after our divorce to discuss the kids and other matters and would end up screwing.  Later, we just got together for sex when we wanted.   After Daniela and I started having sex together and knew it was love, over a couple of months she started having less sex with the other guys, then stopped seeing them.  I just told my ex that I found someone else and although the sex with her was great, I didn't want to do it anymore.  She understood.

 

All that made it easy for us to go back in the other direction and start having sex with others again after we got married.

Edited October 10, 2022 by Numex

[PeterJ 948]

My now wife, Kathy, and I had been good social friends for 16 years when we became sexually and romantically involved. At that time we were both seeing other people. Kathy had been with a married man for more than a dozen years, but there had never been an expectation on his part that she would not be exclusive with him.  That relationship was winding down in any case and she was ready to move on.
 

I had been separated for more than a year from my then wife and in the meantime had rekindled a former relationship with a woman in Boston whose husband dumped her for his secretary. She took a post-doc in NYC so we could spend our available time together. It didn’t work out any better that time than the two previous times we’d tried. We had agreed that our relationship would end when her post-doc did. I began seeing Kathy about a month before then. For her part, Kathy continued to occasionally see her married boyfriend until she moved in with me about a year later.

[bbarnsworth 2,637]

For my wife and I, it was neither of us. She was ~6 months into a divorce, and I'd been single for 9 months, except for a brief encounter with a married woman who was playing with permission of her husband. I was friends with both of them, and everything was on the up and up. When I told me (not yet at that point) wife about that, she was aghast and felt I had contributed to them breaking their vows. I noted that wasn't possible if both knew about it and approved. Fast forward 8 years, and we got into swinging. Color me shocked.

[couplers 4,638]

I had called off the wedding with my fiancé Red and moved out, but we still loved each other and continued having sex.  I met the man who would become my husband, David, and would talk about him with Red whenever I saw him.  I had told David about Red from the beginning, but not specifically still having sex.  David and I started having sex, and I would run back to Red for consultation (and more sex).

 

Eventually David confronted me about what was going on with Red and I admitted that I was still screwing him.  David said that he was ok with it.  Eventually, they met, got along, we started having MFM threesomes, and David and I got married.  We're still together, having added two other women to our family. 

 

BTW, when this all started Red wasn't fucking any other women, while David had two girls he was fucking after we got involved, but quickly gave them up.  Both Clair and Lora were sexual involved when they joined us, but gave up their outside sex interests when they joined our family. 

Edited October 10, 2022 by couplers

[couplers 4,638]

10 hours ago, Numex said:

My wife and I were out with another couple who is almost certainly vanilla.  In telling us how they met, they both admitted that when they first started "sleeping together" they were both in relationships that included sex with someone else

Among our married vanilla friends, I would say at least six or seven admit to at least one of them having been still fucking somebody else when they first started sleeping together.  It doesn't seem to be a sensitive topic either.  The sex isn't specifically mentioned, but the husband is like, "Didn't you get lost that the time you and John went to New York?"

[EastInWest 1,524]

Mrs. E married early and was a couple of years into her divorce. She'd only been with a few men before that and hadn't really had a ton of "grownup" single life experience. She was dating but disappointed that she was sort of looking to revisit some of what she missed, and most men she was meeting were either trying to marry or remarry. One brought his bank statements to a second date thinking that would impress her. So she had an on-and-off boyfriend she was seeing, and dates here and there, but was generally disappointed. She was raised with a fairly traditional background and actual casual sex without the formalities of dating struck her as pretty taboo.

 

I was single, dating casually, and - relative to her, though not radically so - the more experienced one. She knew that I usually had multiple women going and was interested in spending time together but thought it was too wild for her, so we were just coffee friends for a while. We'd talk openly about our dating lives and flirt a little.

 

The tipping point was a very frank conversation on a Sunday morning at the coffee shop, where she admitted she was having a little identity crisis because she'd woken up with her pseudo-boyfriend Saturday morning and went on a date that night that ended in unexpected oral sex. She was scandalized by it and kind of fixating.

 

I politely explained that that was really nothing, and that that's what it's like sometimes if she's going to actively date. Admitted that I'd once worked through three women in my rotation in one day - woke up with one who knew I had a lunch date and went for it anyway, brought the lunch date back to my place, then had a dinner date at the third's place - and that hers was really just not a particularly shocking story.

 

Something clicked for her there that I really wasn't judging her and that she wasn't expected to take herself so seriously. We ended up going out for some live music that night, debated what to do next in the car, and she spent the night at my place, we screwed twice. Kept going after that while continuing with our other activities.

 

Never had some big "what are we doing" conversation. We just both liked spending a lot of time together and kind of tapered off of other partners over about 18 months. Had some adventures in there but never really thought of ourselves as "non-monogamous" as much as just single together, until we weren't.

 

 

52 minutes ago, couplers said:

Among our married vanilla friends, I would say at least six or seven admit to at least one of them having been still fucking somebody else when they first started sleeping together.  It doesn't seem to be a sensitive topic either.

I'd wager there's probably a small generational/regional cultural gap, here, too. Some people on this board are in an age group where it was taken for granted that being single implied doing whatever you wanted until you found a new relationship, and that most women have someone to call. Others took it for granted that being single meant you probably weren't getting laid regularly, or at least either fell for it or cooperated in playing make-believe to be polite.

 

Notably, the poll results are currently pretty divided between "neither of us" and "both of us". I'll bet it'd correlate with some other demographics.

[couplers 4,638]

21 hours ago, EastInWest said:

I'll bet it'd correlate with some other demographics.

 

On 10/9/2022 at 7:17 PM, Numex said:

All that made it easy for us to go back in the other direction and start having sex with others again after we got married.

My guess would be that people here on the Swingersboard are predisposed to feeling that being non-monogamous is normal, even before they formally got into the lifestyle. 

[Numex 2,415]

On 10/9/2022 at 8:05 PM, PeterJ said:

there had never been an expectation on his part that she would not be exclusive with him.

The double negative has me confused.  Assuming that the two negatives cancel each other out as they supposedly do in English, are you saying,"... there had been an expectation on his part that she would be exclusive with him." ?

[PeterJ 948]

Just now, Numex said:

The double negative has me confused.  Assuming that the two negatives cancel each other out as they supposedly do in English, are you saying,"... there had been an expectation on his part that she would be exclusive with him." ?

Numex, I agree, that passage was confusing — garbled even. 😳🙄😂. I managed to covey the opposite of what I intended. Although they had an emotionally close relationship in addition to their sexual one, her married BF had no expectation that Kathy would refrain from sex with others. (She didn’t date much though. Indeed, this was from the mid-70s  through mid-80s, when there weren’t as many out gay people, even in NYC publishing, and many of her colleagues assumed she was a lesbian.)

[Tomy Nikki 62]

Our Story started when we were in the University I was 20 and Tomy was 22 and we both have had lost the virginity and I was dating a guy at her hometown before moving to Houston. the first year of college Tomy was  dating some and had my fun and sex with them but I was not dating any one by that time I broke up with the guy at hometown and then in the second year we started dating and as soon as we started dating, we kissed and had sex and after a month or so we had our holidays and I was back home and met my ex and we were having sex and when i returned back told tomy what happened he accepted and from then till now 15 years after we grew in the relationship and had opened to become swingers and then open relationship.

[EastInWest 1,524]

On 10/11/2022 at 7:29 AM, couplers said:

 

My guess would be that people here on the Swingersboard are predisposed to feeling that being non-monogamous is normal, even before they formally got into the lifestyle. 

Certainly true. I guess what I'm really getting at is that the situation described in the OP might not be considered "non-monogamy" by a lot of people, as much as just "not yet being exclusive".

 

I remember a discussion on here with a kind-hearted gentleman who was genuinely surprised to realize that vanilla women he was dating might be allowing him to buy them dinner despite already having undisclosed casual sex partners, apparently believing there was an unspoken etiquette there that both sex and picking up the check naturally implied exclusivity.

 

That isn't just generational. I recall some fairly substantial differences in casual sex norms regionally, too.

Edited October 12, 2022 by EastInWest

[couplers 4,638]

49 minutes ago, EastInWest said:

the situation described in the OP might not be considered "non-monogamy" by a lot of people, as much as just "not yet being exclusive".

I agree with everything you said.  I find the above quote particularly thought provoking.  It is an observation that implies, correctly in contemporary thinking, that having more than one sex partner isn't being nonmonogamous so long as there is no relationship beyond the sex.

 

Which leads to the interesting conclusion that two people in a sexual relationship, with both having other sex partners, are not considered nonmonogamous unless they develop feelings between them and continue to have sex with others.

[couplers 4,638]

11 hours ago, EastInWest said:

the situation described in the OP might not be considered "non-monogamy" by a lot of people, as much as just "not yet being exclusive".

That's the important thing.  Not only do most people now believe that having lovers before marriage ok, but also more and more people are beginning to believe that having multiple lovers at one time is expected and ok, at least before marriage.

[couplers 4,638]

On 10/10/2022 at 7:35 AM, EastInWest said:

the poll results are currently pretty divided between "neither of us" and "both of us".

Once again, I am the odd one with the one way answer.  My husband and my boyfriend were monogamous with me while I was with both of them.  I never turned either of them down and enjoyed every time.

[NerdsAreFun 226]

Neither of us were having sex with anyone else when we first started having sex with each other.  Unless maybe you want to count text based cybersex of the late 90s.

 

But as far as a "non-monogamous start to marriage" we did start swinging before we tied the knot.

[couplers 4,638]

On 10/13/2022 at 7:43 AM, NerdsAreFun said:

Neither of us were having sex with anyone else when we first started having sex with each other...

But as far as a "non-monogamous start to marriage" we did start swinging before we tied the knot.

That's impressive.  What was it about each other and your relationship that resulted in such a transition? 

[kittyswinger 260]

I was in a relationship when i started dating my present partner but it never occurred to me i was being non-monogamous during that time. But later, i realized it was 🙂

Edited October 16, 2022 by kittyswinger

[couplers 4,638]

9 hours ago, kittyswinger said:

it never occurred to me i was being non-monogamous during that time. But later, i realized it was...

... and as it should be.   A new normal.

[Numex 2,415]

I recalled these old posts and I think it sums it up nicely.

  

On 3/31/2011 at 6:36 AM, MacNfries said:

During college we had a few MMF, MFF, and couple experiences. When we got married shortly after college, we tried the monogomous route for a couple years. About 2 years into our marriage Judy ran into her old beau (my x-roomnate), we had a small cookout at the house to reminisce, had a few drinks, and ended up having a MMF, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. I recall our lovemaking for the next month was awesomely charged.

  

On 7/27/2015 at 10:55 AM, MacNfries said:

My wife and I did our swinging in college, so it made it easy to practice after we married.