Taking one for the team..

When you date as a couple, and you date other couples,there is always the danger that someone may be taking "one for the team" so to speak. Or, in some other cases, a couple is very interested in one half of the other couple, but pretends otherwise. This is obviously, not always the case, but I feel like in our case, it has been the case more often than not. And while a lot of this may be my insecurities speaking, I do think there is a grain of truth to it.

Last evening, we had a couple over. We'd met them once before, at a bar, and things  seemed to be going swimmingly. We all seemed to get along, in fact, we did get along. We made a date to meet up a week later, and both sides were excited about it. We certainly were and they seemed to be, from the texts coming our way.

The evening started well. Good conversation over drinks, lots of laughs . Like I said, a great start. We decided to play a game, and picked Cranium. My wife and the other lady in a team and her husband and me in the other. There is often an awkwardness between the males, but in this case, there was none. We were high-five-ing our way to victory, motivated by the new rule that if you didn't get the right answer, a piece of clothing came out.

The game ended well, with the ladies in their underwear. Things between the ladies (who were on a couch together) heated up and soon there was steam rising from the couch. We moved the party into a different room with a mattress and there the ladies continued. Well, I don't need to make this into an work of erotic prose to get to my point.

Once the gents were asked to join, the lady and I spent a little bit of time together, but within a minute or two, she dis-engaged and went off to her husband, who at the time was with my wife. And stayed there. My wife didn't realize for a while. After a few minutes I left the room and went out for a smoke. I returned once they had finished. And they left soon after.

I, obviously, felt enormously hurt and angered at the end of the evening. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. And then, the patterns became clearer. How this scene had repeated itself with a few other couples we'd been with. And I had a face-palm moment.

Later this morning, after letting the emotion wash over me, I started thinking more rationally. I decided I didn't need to hate them; there was no real malice involved. Maybe they didn't realize it, maybe they realized it too late. Either way, it didn't matter. From my perspective, I needed to protect myself from such situations.

So, I've decided on a new rule. Before we date a couple, I'm going to insist that the individuals go out on a date by themselves - in whatever pairing makes sense. So, we can evaluate our individual chemistry and how attracted we are to the individual. If there is that chemistry, then dating as a couple is worthwhile. This, I think, is important to me because both of us value an ongoing relationship and are not interested in one night stands.

Ensuring that we can sustain a date individually will let us build a personal chemistry, an investment worth making if all parties are interested in an ongoing engagement. My expectations are low - most couples see this as an avenue for unemotional sex. As we have no interest in that, maybe this will also be a great filtering mechanism. And, the cherry on top of it all : the insecure ones will never agree. So hopefully, we'll get to meet the few serious, mature, adult couples where there is a real connection across the board.

The experiment begins.

Farmers vs. Framers

Given we'd plunged into the "lifestyle", we decided to open an account at one of the swing websites. We weren't really sure what we wanted, but we were willing to give it a shot and see what happened. To those that are not familiar with such sites, new meat on the market is always in demand. Within a day, we had tons of flirts and emails and such. Given we were totally new to this, we were suitably impressed with ourselves. I'll talk about two specific encounters that I felt were very good learning experiences for me and my wife.

One couple that got in touch with us, let's call them the farmers. They wrote us, invited us to see their pictures, we showed them our faces - y'know, the usual online dance. We then decided to meet them, they seemed nice enough, and the pictures, though grainy, indicated a reasonably attractive couple. As we walk into the restaurant, we look around for them. Our eyes scan the entire restaurant, and we find no-one that looks like them. So, we decide to just walk around, just to be sure. As we do, we notice a couple in a booth waving at us. To say that this couple had a passing resemblance to what were expecting would probably be an overstatement. Both of us were shocked - I mean these guys weren't hideous or anything, but they looked old , tired and very very unattractive. But we decided to do the polite thing and talk to them. And boy, was that a fun experience. These guys were farmers and horse ranchers from the south of Seattle and had many an interesting tale to tell us about horses and cougars and floods and rivers! That said, we knew we were never going to meet them again, they'd been deceptive and we don't do deception. Within an hour or two, we made some excuse and left. As we did, they indicated a strong desire to meet again and we made some noises about definitely doing so and left.

Now, another couple - the Framers as we'll call them here. These guys too reached out to us, and given they lived really close to us, we made a coffee date to meet them. The dude was a framer (hence the framers), the lady used to be a dental assistant ( met more than one dental assistant in our "travels" , which is interesting in itself). We had a good chat, and then decided to go get dinner. Unfortunately, we picked a Mandarin Chinese restaurant nearby. Now, I'm not sure if you are aware, but these restaurants are more about the boiled stuff than the fried stuff. Didn't know that. They are also about a lot of very raw looking sea food. And we are vegetarian. The couple we were with, ordered the Sunday evening special, which came with lots and lots of sea-food. And as we sat there, gagging on our food, the sight of the dude picking bits of sea-food from his mouth was , shall we say, less than appealing ? We left soon after, but we chatted online with them off and on for a while. In the course of these chats, a feeling in the back of our minds became clearer and clearer. The guy was a nut. An angry nut. His wife was terrified of him. And we were terrified of going anywhere near him!

These two, among other experiences, taught us quite a bit. First, we stopped trusting people to be honest about themselves. Rather unfortunate, because we normally like to take people at face value. But, when sex is involved (or money I guess), people reach levels of desperation that causes them to lie. Further, we realized that we had to pay a lot of attention to the dynamic between the couple. It was not enough to see if we liked them, it was important to see if they liked EACH OTHER! We did not want to add to an already dysfunctional dynamic. And lastly, we never, ever go for dinner with people we meet on these sites. We don't really mind that they eat meat and sea-food, but kissing someone after you've seen stringy bits of dead flesh in their mouth is a gross thought - to us.

Our first experience

In one of our earlier posts, I spoke about our CL experiences. Those were the days when we were looking for the single woman - y'know - the unicorn. One time, an Indian couple (we're Indian too) responded back to our ad for a woman. Various other times, couples had responded, but we'd not shown interest. I wasn't ready yet to see her with another man I think.

This couple seemed kinda ok - and they had a hot tub, so they asked us to come over and soak and maybe there would be some girl play involved. We thought about it .. Funnily enough, neither they nor us had exchanged pictures or seen each other. We took a risk and went over.

They seemed to be a reasonable couple - a little pretentious ( they were all about eating at "classy" restaurants and "classy" lounge bars) for our taste, but given it was our first time, we were still unsure about what worked for us and what didn't. An interesting observation made by the other lady was that they never went out with Indian men in general because Indian men were too clingy. I'll come back to this observation later.

We spoke for a bit, had a couple of glasses of wine and then proceeded to the hot tub. They'd been nice enough to offer us some swim wear (as we'd headed there right from work). Once in the the hot-tub, inhibitions dissolved a little bit - the ladies were trying to decide which of them would go topless first. Some flirting ensued. A little later, both of the women were topless, and my wife was making out with the other guy. So, I move towards the other lady and we begin a make-out session ourselves.

As we made out, I did what came to me naturally. I tried to kiss her.  And boom - no kissing on the mouth - she says. I had a hand on her breast and another in her pants and she was cool with that - but no kissing !! I was shocked - I mean.. talk of having your priorities backward. It's only later we realized that many couples have such rules - where they keep reserve certain acts for themselves. To us, it never made sense, because what we reserve for ourselves is the way we feel with each other.

Soon after, we headed up to their "play-room". Yes - these guys had a designated play room - with low beds and soft lighting and music! Wow ! By now, everyone is naked. My wife and me were on different couches - me with the other lady and my wife with him. This is where it started getting a little weird. Both of them (the other couple) seemed to have their attention on the other . And no, this wasn't them watching each other to see the other's pleasure. They were keeping an eye on each other !! The guy kept glancing over to me and his wife, to see what I was doing , so he could do the same !!! We weren't looking for penetrative acts, but  he was making sure I didn't "penetrate" - because if I did, so could he ! And she was looking to make sure he wasn't kissing my wife on the mouth !

Funnily enough, we didn't really notice most of this during the act - it was more when the two of us were chatting about our experience that we both realized that we'd seen the same things and felt the same way. Anyways, after a while, we decided to call it a night and went on home. On the way home we decided we were not going to be seeing these guys again.. It was just a little to weird.

Now I'll go back to the observation made by his wife - that Indian men were clingy. Guess what happens a few days later. My wife gets a call from the hubby (let's call him S) . S calls her, asks her is she'd like to meet. My wife politely declines. Around this time, I went to India on a vacation (alone). During this time, he calls her again and again .. one time he tells her he has bought a convertible and would she like to go on a ride with him? He tries to friend her on facebook ! And his wife felt Indian men were clingy ... I wonder where she got that impression!  Anyways, after a bit, me and my wife spoke about it and decide we won't be polite anymore. The next time he called, he was told - no way Jose!

Honestly, that experience soured us a bit -specifically with Indian couples ( yes, even though we are Indian). There just didn't seem to be a right level of trust or maturity between the two of them. Keeping an eye on each other, the desperate clinginess , the overall sense of unease we felt when we thought about them. I don't claim that all Indians are this way (obviously, we feel we are very different ;)) , and we've since met whites who are just as insecure or are using the idea of the "lifestyle" to prop up a dying relationship. But its also true that we are very unlikely to entertain other Indians in the future - there aren't that many of us that are non-monogamous and the risk of meeting another couple like them is way too high.

The only good that came of it was - we opened our mind to the possibility to meeting couples. It required me to make a leap - from a maturity perspective and I'm glad I did !

Atheism contd..

Those of you that are proponents of Intelligent Design should read the book - The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking. Actually, everyone should read that book. It is an amazing tome that tackles in a very readable manner, the origins of the universe. That said, I will admit that while I followed most of the book, I did get a little lost around the string theory aspect of it.

Here is the gist of it as I understood it : The universe has laws. We typically deal with Newtonian laws when we think about our universe. But, at the point of creation of the universe - just after the big bang , the only laws in effect were quantum laws. These are the laws that govern the behavior of sub-atomic particles. When dealing with quantum particles, it turns out that there is no one specific possibility. For e.g. the line from point A to point B on a graph, that on a newtonian scale looks straight, doesn't work that way in the quantum world. Particles take every possible path from point A to point B . The resulting line is not guaranteed to be straight, all that can be quantified is the probability of the end result. Well, the long and the short of it is, at the time of the Big Bang , on a quantum scale many many universes were likely created. Each one would have been ended up with a different set of laws and constants. Many of these universes would have not survived, because the resultant laws were not sustainable. Ours happens to be one where the laws were conducive to the growth of the universe.

All of this has been empirically proven - this isn't the word of God ! This isn't scripture. So, what you call intelligent design is really a roll of dice. If you want to call this cosmic roll of dice God, do so,  but then you are probably claiming that this mighty God has no idea what he was doing ..

How it all began

I woke up one morning and suddenly, out of the blue, realized that we (me and my wife) have had a rather interesting time over the last few months, and I felt like I needed to write it down, so I'd have something to remember when I'm old and dying.. It all started with CL, so I figured, I'll start there.

Well, our story kind of starts with a vacation my wife took with her folks, leaving me bored and alone at home for the first time since we'd been married. Having no idea what to do with myself, I started writing a story, and put it up in sections on CL. What I was hoping to get out of it, I'm not really sure.. or maybe I don't want to dig too deep there. Got some interesting responses, which as you can imagine, flatters one's ego ! Well, that got me reading through CL posts a lot more, and I even responded to some. Again, lets not go into why. I guess the most interesting thing to come out of it was the realization that though I loved my wife, I was definitely interested in other women. Oops!

A couple of interesting anectodes from that period... I once posted as a woman, a married woman, looking for a man on the side... I just wanted to see what the other side felt like, and boom, my mailbox was flooded with all kinds of responses and all kinds of pictures.. Kind of led me to realize... jeez, I don't stand a chance .. man.. the size of some of them.. there was one gentleman who had a nude pic of himself holding a 20 ounce coke bottle next to his you know what.. the bottle didn't stand a chance !!! One more of my posts (for a woman this time) got a response from a married lady trying to catch her philandeering husband! This was getting way too complicated and I decided to quit before I did something really stupid.

I got back to just posting interesting stuff - I once did a post advising the women of CL on how to post . Interestingly enough, one of my advise lines was to specify if they had a racial preference . One lady wrote back saying it was a great post blah blah and we got to communicating via a long email thread.. About 20 emails later, the conversation went like this :
me : Yeah, I don't care if women have a preference, why don't they just say it..
her: Yeah, I know.. dumb eh ?
me : Right... A couple of women I've corresponded with seem surprised when I tell them I'm not white..
her: LOL!!!! Thats so funny... but.. why did you say you were not white ?
me : Eh ?
me : You do realize I'm not white right?
her: LOL!!! Thats so funny..
me : Er... no.... I'm not white...
her: LOL!! Why are you bullshitting me..
me : {Tearing my hair out}

Anyway, suffice to say we didn't correspond much after that..

That was the end of my "single" days on CL. Vacation over, wife's back, not bored anymore.. But the thought of being with other women was not going away.. so one day, I asked my wife.. had she thought of being with another woman ? And boom !!! She says, not really, but she can see herself being attracted to other women. If you'd seen the grin on my face, you would have called it beatific or blissful.. We spoke a little bit more about it.. about how she'd react to me being with another woman, and she was enthusiastic.. Now the grin was ecstatic !!! jackpot !!!!!!

We went down immediately, and put in a CL post .. in the mw4w section. And there began my second incarnation on CL. I mean, how difficult could it be, right ? We ask for a bisexual woman, and one will show up on our door. Can't be any more difficult than that.. Well. it was. We got a couple of responses with young women in bikinis smiling at us. Heaven... Strangely, once we sent them our pics, all we heard back was silence.. Hmm..

Ok.. not giving up yet. Another post, more interestingly written this time.. a little funny.. come on ladies!! Got a response back from one lady , claimed to be Indian too .. My eyes light up !!! We correspond a bit, chat a bit.. says she is a nurse.. loves threesomes, does it all the time...but again, goes nowhere real fast. Then I get suspicious.. I know computers quite well, so I thought, why don't I try to see where she is.. is she even in Seattle.. And guess what .. "she" was a "nurse" at the software giant we all know and love in Redmond. And please, don't freak out.. I'm not capable of finding people by their emails - all I/you/anyone can do is figure out what city they maybe wrote from. Thats it.. I'm not a stalker... I promise!!

Well, still not giving up.. Even more interesting post coming up.. This one titled Alien Sex!!! Its a play on the word alien.. We are aliens (as in not citizens.. its kind of how the INS/BCIS/IRS/... refer to us). Got a response from one lady.. wanted to get on our spaceship she said.. Sent her pics and all. We sent ours back.. And we get back : "Eh? Why didn't you say you were not white ??" . .I even complain in the post of respondents being geographically challenged... What part of .. we are from South Asia/India made this lady think we are white !!!!! Arrrggggggg..

We also did get a response back from this really sweet Asian lady, even met up with her a couple of times, but this was a fantasy she wasn't quite ready to try out .. Bummer . Got one response from a lesbian lady, who wanted to try a man, had very clear directions on exactly what we could/should do to her and what she would/could do to us.. For e.g. oral on her was a no-no- that was only for her partner.. anal was a requirement.. So, we passed.

One other lady responded too, or maybe we responded to her post.. Either way, seemed really intelligent, fun .. interesting and was a very pretty lady.. But she bailed the at the last minute :(.

I think the final straw for us, atleast in terms of being regular posters/responders on CL was when we got a response back from "Sarah".. She loved our pics, said we should meet the next day.. in fact, why don't we cam today... And us... oh... us.. the beatific grins came on again. We got on our webcam, and there she was.. chatting with us, taking off her clothes, getting us to drop our clothes..ah heaven.. Suddenly, her mom comes, and she goes away.. This is one of those times where I got the feeling - you know , like in the science fiction movies, a burst of static, a disturbance in the force..I pondered.. And then realized we'd been played. I mean, literaly and figuritatively. "She" had played us a recording of some other woman..

Ok.. that did it, we kind of pretty much left CL after that. By then. we'd also evolved to considering going out with other couples, and we'd found a couple of sites, and we've met some that have become close friends..

So, why this posting.. I don't really know the answer to that.. I do know that we still look through some w4mw postings on CL and the single women out here; the dream hasn't gone away.. you know , the dream about meeting the unicorn, the unattached bisexual that gets attached to us... We also see the postings by couples, some new, just like we once were, and I'm sure they go through many of the same things we went through.. Starting with the feeling you've hit the jackpot, to the enthusiasm, to the heartbreak, to hope again, and round and round it goes..

Obviously, this is not all of it, we were regulars on CL for about 6 months, and a lot more happens, these are just some of the more interesting moments that still remain with us.. Also, I've told you about all the misses we've had on CL, but I left the best for last - we did find one lady, an Indian from Portland, who was returning back to India. She came to visit us the weekend before she left and that was.. I think the word she used was blissful. So, its not all bad..

All things considered, it has been tremendously interesting, made even more so by the people we've interacted with. Many of them, with all their lying and cheating and flaking and faking, have still left us with a set of memories that we still laugh about. The closest analogy we can think of is James Herriot's book - All Creatures great and small. Hopefully, you've enjoyed reading this as much as we've enjoyed living it !

Also, though this might tend to come off as a race sensitive rant, thats not the intention at all. I just relate those anecdotes because they were funny, they are hardly indicative of anything - other than, they happened and we found ourselves laughing later !

I am ... not a swinger

Neither is my wife. We made the decision sometime back that while the two of us love each other, we were both capable of expressing an interest in another person - where that interest could happen to be sexual. If you think about it, most couples do it. Were it not for the mundane crap that we all end up doing, we all fantasize . We all secretly want more. And yet, we will not talk about it, we will not act upon it. Except if we cheat - which it turns out many of us do. Some recent stats I saw on a web site ... Between 45 and 60% of married men and women admit to having some sort of an extra-marital relationship sometime during their marriage. 17% of divorces are caused by infidelity. 90% of Americans feel adultery is morally wrong!! Do these stats make any sense ?

You promise to live your life with another, until you cheat. That is the vow you've taken. Because we can't control our libidos. And yet we like to pretend that fidelity matters. Well.. it doesn't. Not the physical fidelity, definitely. Face it , when you see the same person day in and day out, there is an element of deja-vu. Been there, done that. What is the cure ? Let's have a BABY !! Let's have date night every week like we were teenagers. Let's pretend like we are not bored with each other, because if we pretend we aren't bored, we may forget we are bored.

I claim this is bullshit. In my mind, the important part is to love, respect, protect and stand by your spouse. But I didn't make a promise to not get bored. Nor did she !! We refuse to have kids out of boredom.. We do go on date nights (though we NEVER call it that - Jeez - what a corny concept !!) . When we do go on date nights, we talk about women we think are hot . We talk about men we think are hot ( Actually - while both of us talk about the women, I have not much to say on the topic of men).

So, we've done IT with others. Oh yes, roll your eyes, get that look of disgust going.. And then, if you have the guts, think about it. Seriously. Think about it.

But we are not swingers.

I am ... an atheist

I was brought up in India - where, religion, specifically Hinduism for me, was more a cultural link, than a religious one. I was also fortunate to be brought up in a household where critical thinking was encouraged. As I was growing up though, religion was a part of my life. I didn't really question it. But religious practices always made me uneasy. I went to a Christian school and singing those hymns never really made any sense to me. My grandparents ( on my paternal side) were quite conservative and were big into the whole caste thing. As an example, my grandmom would buy milk from a dude who came and milked his cow in front of her home - but he was NOT allowed in, because he was from a lower caste. We, on the other hand, were Brahmins - supposedly superior!

This is NOT me.

My first revolt against religion was to refuse to undergo a particular ceremony where I would officially become a brahmin of sorts. I'd get to wear a sacred thread around me that was representative of my brahminical status. Truth be told, I revolted because the ceremony required me to parade around in a loin cloth for the entire day - NOT HAPPENING! But as I grew older, my thinking congealed around the inequity of the entire caste system. I refused to be a part of it.

So, as I went through high school and college and work, I was comfortable calling myself an agnostic. It seemed safer to say I don't know. If there was a God, he couldn't really blame me for saying I don't know - can he?

Now, a window into my irrationality.. During the 1990's , India was shaken by the Babri Masjid issue. Hindus in the northern part of the country had broken down a centuries old mosque that they claimed had been built on the site of Hinduism's greatest king - Rama. I was on the side of the Hindus - totally. For one, I couldn't really identify with the muslims, and for another, I believed in the cultural superiority of my kind and I was ashamed of our supposed timidity. So, when the Hindus stood up to the Muslims, I was proud. To an extent, I still am..

Later in life, I began to recognize my rationality and I took pains to understand the rational basis for most of my beliefs and actions. One of the concepts I could not reconcile was the notion of the soul. This really came to me from another direction - vegetarianism which I'll write about later. But the concept of the soul made no sense. I continued to be uneasy around this concept. I then discovered the author Robert Sawyer,  a Canadian science fiction writer. One of his books, Factoring Humanity really made me think. It is a book about an alien lifeform that in opening up human consciousness to humans, shows humans of an inter-networked soul universe. While being an extremely interesting read, I still remained confused - why were humans the only ones with souls ?

Other questions plagued me too. Why did this god dude have to be vengeful ( I'm talking about the Judeo-Christian God) ? Why is he testing us ? Why did he give a crap if I prayed ? Is he so narcissistic that me, a little itty bitty creature among the zillions he has created, can cause him to get pissed because I didn't pray to him? Is he really benevolent or is he like those creatures at the end of Men In Black, you know, those creatures that are playing marbles with the marbles being the universe ?

More to come...