Pain in the Ass, Peace in My Heart

What do you do when your ass is all blue?

A whole lotta Arnica and extra padding on the desk chair. Forget the pain relievers. I don't want to relieve the pain. This pain is my inspiration, my incentive, my story. This pain is for you.

It had been a long time since I attended a sex party by myself. At least six months. In fact, it had been a long time since I had been to a sex party at all...about four months. I took care of the latter with a trip to Club Tantra with Charlie last weekend. We became members back in the fall, and finally, finally made it to one of these events, after they moved into a new space and changed their policies and inexplicably left us off the mailing list. Meanwhile Charlie wanted to explore polyamory and I wasn't sure because it was all so old yet frightfully new and every mention of the p word or a date with another woman were like little knives in my heart. After I realized this was not what I wanted, I uncharacteristically spewed out my feelings uncensored and raw, throwing my truth onto his highway in the middle of rush-hour traffic. I could've made it unscathed or crawled away broken and left a part of myself to die at the side of the road. When you're already trembling, the worst possible consequences don't seem quite as scary. You either close your eyes and jump, not knowing where you will land, or stoke the volcano inside, which never did anyone any good. My love was at stake. It was time to jump.

"I can offer you so much! I can offer you me and threesomes and group sex and parties and kink and fantasies and all the sexual exploration you desire and more, but if you want to date other people and have other romantic relationships without me, I can't handle that right now. If that is what you want I respect that and I support you theoretically, but emotionally I don't support it. I can't explain it, it doesn't make sense, but this is how I feel. If you want to date other people one-on-one right now, I'm removing myself from the equation."

Through the quakes of our breath he uttered, "Stephanie, I want to be with you."

You could say I gave him an ultimatum. I hate ultimatums. The person on the receiving end is trapped in the ultimater's either/or with no real choice. But the universe works in magical ways. Just as I was stacking my cards of clarity and desire, he was thinking about the tryst he had experienced the night before. Lovely, but empty. Functional, but uninspired. Our epiphanies converged with perfection. My truth clarified his truth so he did not have to stop and think and weigh the options before choosing me and everything else. If I had offered only me and none of the extras, I probably would have gotten run over. But our bodies buzzed for each other and we were merely on the phone. Our bodies knew the truth before our minds. We couldn't wait to see each other again. It seemed like three years, though it had been only about 24 hours. What better way to celebrate our reconnected bliss than with a sex party sealed with a kiss?

Old Flame, New Love

There's only one excuse for falling behind with this blog: falling in love. Actually, the fall began several months ago. I loved him, but he was still entrenched in a lustless marriage. He loved me, but I was not revealing my whole self to him. We loved each other through walls painted with pretty pictures of hot sex. Sometimes I wanted to peel off those pictures, throw them in his face, and leave him to his marital counseling. Instead I gave him compassion. So I peeled off bits of the pretty pictures for nearly a year while distracting myself with other lovers.

In my final column for New York Press, I wrote that this lover--I'll call him Charlie, and I rediscovered our joy together at a film festival. Yet the questions remained. Would he ever have sex with his wife again? How many more months would he work on his marriage? How much longer would I put up with the situation? Even if his marriage were to end, would anything change between us? I wasn't even sure we were compatible enough to sustain a passionate, intimate, soul-connected relationship. When an undeniable obstacle is present in a relationship (e.g. one person is stuck in a marriage), the mind tends to create other obstacles to justify the imbalance.

And the heart tends to look elsewhere. At another film festival, I met a guy (with a funny name) who intoxicated me with an openness and a depth recalling the mysterious layers of my first love. Then while I was at a writing retreat in Vermont, Charlie called to tell me that he was done with his marriage. I was genuinely happy for him, but what did it mean for us? Our relationship had improved during the film festival. But now that the wall was down, would we grow closer? This change came at a time when I was questioning polyamory and falling for someone else--the guy with the funny name, a.k.a. Mr. Monogamous.

Crushing passion deluded me into believing that Mr. Monogamous and I would merge our ideals into a dynamic fusion. I would either abandon my libertine lifestyle for the innocent bliss of monogamy or seduce him into a compromised version of polyamory. Either way, we would be passionately in love. But I was meowing up the wrong cock.

He was too much of a beginner. Intrigued, but not curious enough. I thought I could give up polyamory and sex parties for a chance at the perfect love...WHAT WAS I THINKING? I can never go back. I will never be twenty again. Once you taste the delights of group sex, especially when it lives within an integrity-minded community of sexy people who become your friends, your supporters, your lovers, your family, you cannot go back to a vanilla life. As heartbreaking as it was when he pulled away from me, I am so grateful now that he did. If he hadn't, I might not have seen the perfection of the relationship right in front of me...

A week after Charlie told me he was done with his marriage, he told his newly-ex wife about us. After a year of his living in fear that she would be crushed by this knowledge, and my living with the burden of being denied for the sake of another, she wasn't surprised. Not only that, she was totally okay with it.

So here we are, Charlie and me, completely free with each other for the first time in a year! Within hours of his disclosure, energy began to shift between us. My icy airs dissolved as his beastly lust softened. Restrained kisses melted into sensual exchanges of loving lips. His cock, which used to be painfully large, was now beautifully endowed, sliding inside me with lubricious ease. Our mutual climax propelled us to a higher plane of ecstatic love. Transcendentally moved, we looked at each other with new eyes.

I've experienced a similar transformation in previous relationships, after a period of separation, or following a confession of repressed information or emotion. Time apart often realigns bonded lovers who find themselves in disharmony. A positive disclosure has the same effect as a reunion; the release of tension breaks down the dam of disconnect, allowing pure love to flow through, resulting in a blissful balance of familiarity and newness. Yet those previous experiences, as intense as they were, involved lovers who either didn't know me well enough, or didn't see me for who I am.

Enter Charlie. I no longer push him away in annoyance or perform fellatio with a sense of obligation. I no longer delay returning his phone calls or ignore his emails. How interesting that it no longer seems like he calls too much! Are his kisses truly sweeter or is it only my perception that has changed? Probably a combination of both. He told me once, "I don't think I could domesticate with you." I didn't see that happening either. Yet he's been living with me for the past couple of months--a temporary situation until he moves in with a friend. Our cohabitation couldn't be more harmonious. And I couldn't be more thrilled...

Of course! After a year of experience together, I can relinquish my role as sex ambassador. Now he's at a place in his life where he has the freedom and desire to take his exploration further...with me as his partner in crime. Arrest me please, darling. This is only the beginning.