We never had another day as glorious as that first one. Wife continued to be married to me. (In fact, Boyfriend 1's older brother warned him, "If you love this woman encourage her to stay with her husband. Otherwise you will set up a pattern for her of leaving whenever things get tough.") But from time to time she continued to see Boyfriend 1. Sometimes he would visit us. Sometimes she would visit him. Mostly Wife was shy and embarrassed at letting one of us see her fucking the other one, so she tried hard to devolve the threesome into two twosomes. Ironically, this was the wrong choice on her part. What I found, speaking purely for myself, was this:
If there was a closed door—or thirty miles of freeway—between me and some place that Wife was having sex, I felt insanely jealous. But if she was having sex with someone else right there directly in front of me, I felt fine because I figured that it would be my turn in a few minutes.
I don't know if anyone else in the world feels this way, but I bet they do. I assume I'm not so unusual as all that. But this means that, ironically, Wife's shyness and embarrassment led to maximal levels of jealousy on my part … and probably on his as well.
I remember specific moments, but I don't know how many of them are worth telling as a story.
There was the time he visited and slept downstairs. I woke in the middle of the night to find Wife wasn't in bed, so I tiptoed silently halfway down the stairs to where I could see them fucking; then I went back to bed and sulked. The next morning I asked Wife where she was, and she resolutely refused to admit they had fucked until I told her I had seen her. Then she admitted it but claimed she never came.
At the time I believed her on that last point, but in retrospect I shouldn't have. What I should have done was to realize that she would say anything, and lie about anything, unless confronted with hard evidence to the contrary. (And of course how can anyone else know whether she really came?) But I didn't draw the broader lesson until many, many years later.
There was the time that we were going to go out for dinner on Valentine's Day and he showed up unexpectedly. So I was sulky and jealous and ruined the evening for everyone.
There was at least one other weekend when she drove out to stay with him all weekend.
And there were happier moments too, like when he came to see us for Christmas. I've got a photo somewhere of Boyfriend 1 cuddling with Wife, with a red ribbon in his hair.
Within a year, he and she had broken up.
This was another pattern that established itself, actually. Wife would have an affair with someone else, and then the two of them would break up, and I would be there to comfort her afterwards. It's a little pathetic to think that's the job of a husband, but not infrequently it was my job.
Oh well. Life sucks.
In some ways, Boyfriend 1 wasn't much of a threat. I certainly haven't talked about him a lot till now. But that one magnificent day the three of us had together did change my thinking around the ideas of sex and jealousy. So that's something.
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