Papillon's Ponderings

Papillon

New member
Right, I said I wanted to start a blog, so here I go!

I suppose I should introduce the main players first, and give then all names...

Me - Female, 30, bisexual/bicurious/heteroflexible..? (I am consistently unsure of where I think I fit on that particular sliding scale - if pushed I tend to say I'm on the bi end of straight, or the straight end of bi, depending on how I'm feeling at the time)

Hunter - My husband. Male, 37, solidly bisexual.

Stargazer - My boyfriend. Male, 31, straight.

Pixie - My husband's girlfriend/my metamour. Female, 24, possibly bicurious.

(wow it took me a long time to come up with names I felt happy with!)

***

I think I'll go through my history a bit in the next few posts, but I feel like sharing right off the bat that I just had a very lovely weekend :)

Friday night I went to the cinema with Stargazer, and then we had an overnight together (Hunter was with Pixie). No lie-in though, as he had to work Saturday morning and I had to be up early to go & collect H&P from Pixie's house so the three of us could head our to the local wildlife centre. Hunter bought Pixie a falconry experience for Christmas and she had finally managed to book it. We watched and took photos, and then mooched around the rest of the centre and had lunch.

Saturday night Hunter was at a stag do, and Pixie & I went to the bride-to-be's house to keep her company and help design her wedding dress - which I have now agreed to make for her! The wedding isn't till next spring (no, I don't know why the stag do was so early).

On Sunday Hunter & I spent a lovely lazy morning in bed together ;) and a lazy afternoon on the sofa together, then we collected Pixie and headed over to Stargazer's house for a movie night. All in all a pretty fab three days :)
 
Backstory time I think...

My personal history doesn't involve many serious relationships, but does include a reasonable range of experiences that some 'normal' people (do they even exist?) might find a little unusual :rolleyes: Sometimes I think of myself as lacking in experience, and sometimes I reconsider that position... I guess I should share and then people can make up their own minds!

I was a late bloomer - didn't really hit anything resembling puberty till I was about 15, never really had massive crushes on celebrities or boys at school like all my friends. I kind of went along with who they liked but I do remember wondering if I was ever going to feel anything like they did, and whether anyone would ever find me attractive! (Eventually I did have a substantial unrequited crush on a guy who I did gymnastics with. We were very good friends but nothing more ever happened - not that I did anything to make it happen, I just pined. We haven't stayed in touch but I think he turned out to be gay!)

At 17 I was dressed up and taken out to a goth club by a friend, and discovered that I had good legs and cleavage and that suddenly all the boys were interested in me :eek: The next 18 months or so involved kissing lots of boys, occasionally going a bit further with some of them but nothing too dramatic (although I pushed my own boundaries a bit sometimes when drunk). I also kissed a number of girls during this time, all friends of mine - it was your standard teenage experimentation period.

Two major things happened during this timeframe; 1) I had a threesome with a close friend and her boyfriend (where I was only involved in the foreplay but they had sex), and 2) I slept with a girl.

She was someone my best friend & I had met online, on a message board, and she came on holiday from the US to the UK and went round the country visiting various friends, including us. Subtle flirting ensued, followed by a kiss prompted by a silly game we were playing where this guy in a club claimed he could set us up with anyone we wanted and she pointed at me. We were both staying in the spare room at my best friend's house, sleeping in the same bed, and one thing led to another! Neither of us had ever been with a girl before, but she very much took the lead - I was much more passive, although certainly not resistant ;)

So there I was, happily experimenting but never achieving anything resembling an actual relationship. I had a bit of a thing for my best friend's boyfriend at one point, which she knew about (we both liked him, he chose her), and a couple of guys asked me out but they weren't people I wanted. Two of them then 'stalked' me a little bit (not actually scary stalking, just kind of obsessive moping - I felt bad but couldn't change how I felt!). I was still pretty naive and unsure of myself, in spite of having a few less mainstream experiences under my belt.

Then I started university and met Hunter.
 
Hunter and I met and started seeing each other within two weeks of me starting university. Yeah, I know, pretty speedy! We sort of met in a nightclub, then again properly at a social event later the same week. He asked me out, and things developed from there.

Hunter is seven years older than me and has significantly more prior relationship experience (with both women & men). We were monogamous by default, and our relationship developed along fairly standard lines. We fell in love, we moved in together, we got cats (actually he had one cat already), and we'd been together for two & a half years when he proposed.

It then took us another three & a half years to actually get around to organising the wedding. Our ceremony was performed by a good friend, and contained a bunch of elements we'd pulled together and written ourselves (We popped into the register office two days later with a couple of witnesses to do the legal bit, but that's not what we count as our wedding day).

We were never one of those couples who weren't allowed to look at other people - we've always had conversations about people we found attractive (famous people & in real life), and we have/had a number of friends who are in open and poly relationships so it was never really a taboo subject. We talked about it on and off but never took the plunge.

I think we had two instances of major jealousy crop up over the years; from my end when a friend who had recently broken up with her boyfriend and had a crush on Hunter seemed to be trying to make a move on him and it pissed me off to the point of not wanting him to hang out with her (he rejected her advances and told me about it - this is all now in the distant past & we are still friends), and from his end when he was inexplicably concerned about my friendship with a guy on my postgraduate course at university (we were just friends and Hunter states now that he really doesn't know why he had such a problem at the time). The latter issue resolved itself when the guy I was friends with moved away after graduation.

Over the years there was the odd occasion where one or other of us stepped outside of the bounds of our relationship - mainly a few same sex kisses at parties, he went a little further with a male friend once. In all cases, we were either both there at the time or informed each other straight away afterwards, and it never caused us any problems. Even that time with him and our male friend (who incidently is poly himself, and his wife was there at the time - she thought it was hot!) didn't bother me - if you'd asked me beforehand I would have assumed it might upset me, but when it happened I just shrugged my shoulders & went 'ok, was it fun?' :rolleyes: So I guess maybe we were never as tightly closed as all that...

We had our ups and downs and issues to work through, like any relationship, but mostly we were good, and then in mid 2010 (after ten years together, four years married) we came back to our recurring conversation about being open and decided to try it on for size. Neither of us had anyone 'waiting in the wings' and it was a mutual decision - seems we were lucky and had a far better starting point that many of the married couples who come here... :)
 
So now we come to the past two years and our experiences with poly relationships, which is after all why I'm here in the first place :rolleyes:

We laid out a few ground rules/boundaries which I think should seem pretty familiar to many people here; complete honesty with all parties involved, always use condoms with outside partners, tell each other about new interests & sexual partners before doing anything with them (or asap afterwards if there should be something spontaneous - which hasn't happened yet), everyone has to be able to get along (don't have to be best buddies, friends would be nice, civil at a minimum)...and that's pretty much it!

We were pretty open with friends about what we were doing, and shortly after we agreed to be open a girl we knew approached Hunter and expressed an interest. She is a lot younger than either of us and was curious I think. She actually expressed interest in both of us but I wasn't interested in her in that way. Anyway, the two of them talked about it and then they slept together. And then they slept together several more times and started behaving like they were in a relationship.

So, at this stage a miscommunication came to light. Don't get me wrong, we hadn't put any restrictions on emotional relationships or anything like that. But we were/are open to the idea of more casual sexual encounters too, and I had got it into my head that this was going to be one of those rather than anything else, mainly because of an assumption on my part that the age gap was a bit too big and Hunter wouldn't really want that. I became very uncomfortable, for a number of reasons including a need for secrecy and that I felt we/he might be taking advantage of her. I expressed this to Hunter and he broke up with her. He would probably tell you I vetoed the relationship. I'm not sure to be honest, I think maybe I told him my objections and he made the decision, but it's probably a grey area :(

She was very upset, naturally. Hunter and I talked some more, and I began to feel more comfortable wth the idea, providing certain concerns I'd had were addressed. Shortly afterwards they began seeing each other again. After a couple of months, Hunter decided the relationship wasn't working and after some discussion with her, he ended it (again). This whole thing lasted maybe three to four months maximum, it wasn't particularly long lived. She is now happily monogamous with a boyfriend and as far as can tell has just chalked the whole thing up to experience.

A lesson in communication and not making assumptions if nothing else!

Our own sex life (which has ebbed and flowed over the years, mainly as my sex drive goes up and down) had improved when we agreed to open up, as many people experience I think - the new buzz of excitement that comes from the idea of poly, even if you're not doing it yet :p

Hunter was a bit impatient to 'get started' though. I think he felt he wanted me to jump in and start having experiences now that he'd had the first one. I even had to point out to him a couple of times that it almost felt like he was pimping me out, but thankfully he got the message and relaxed a bit!

Then we had the conversation with Pixie and Stargazer.
 
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