Uno, dos, tres, ... part 3

Marie's next installment ran like this:

VERY interesting to read, my dearest! 

 

(stops and tries to compose self...)

 

Devolving--a threesome into two twosomes. Um.  Ulp.  Wait, I was the one who insisted on talking openly and honestly, right?

(Gods, how I love that I can with you, love! Oops, we'd recently agreed not to indulge in undue flattery, yes?)

"Partly I think this is because it really, really bothered her to be watched, even by someone she was fucking. So if one of us was fucking her and the other was hanging out — kissing, caressing, or just waiting — she felt on display."

Oh, Jesus, love. I really hate to admit it, but this is a lot of what I felt with Flora's D.    

Only... Wife had set up the threesomes, right? With three different people, and apparently on more than one occasion each. So... if she didn't like it, why did she keep replicating that setup? Weird.

 

Also... Wife was fanatically possessive of Girlfriend 1?  Set it up as look but don't touch? (What did Girlfriend 1 want, by the by?  Did she even want you there at all?)

 

And with the others... you're not into men.  So you weren't interested, I assume, in having sex with either of Wife's other lovers.  So it sounds like none of your encounters was really a threesome; it was Wife going to bed with two lovers at once.  

 

I mean, I've read fictional threesomes in which all the parties fuck each other in various combinations in random sequence.  And the one I was in, we did--but, huh.  I'd have rather not, and that's what made me uncomfortable.  Okay, one of the emotions I'm detecting in myself is jealousy.  Because I would have liked my threesome better if it had been like yours with Girlfriend 1,  with me playing Girlfriend 1's role. 

 

I'd have had conniptions playing Wife's.  Then, at least.  Oh, god.  But maybe Flora expected me to, or thought I'd want to?  We really did not talk about logistics or expectations beyond:  there will be these three people in the bed.  Agreed?  Agreed.  And I think I just assumed of course Flora would be the star, and the apex of everyone's focus. But just because I assumed that didn't mean anyone else did.  

 

Good god, what a thing to figure out 35 years later!  I always thought a threesome had to be roughly equilateral, not an obtuse isosceles triangle, much two intersecting lines without a base at all....  but what I really wanted and hoped for that night was not even isosceles.  It was really to be allowed to watch D. and Flora, and to join in timidly when I thought I'd least be noticed.  But I didn't ask for that, or even hint at it, and what I thought consciously was that a threesome was supposed to be equal.

 

(Oh, Marie, what an adorable little shy demi-virgin IDIOT you were....) 

 

I am conventional in my thinking, aren't I?

 

And ain't communication grand?

 

Huh.  And now I'm wondering something else.  Did Wife, perhaps, not really want threesomes at all, and just engaged in them to try to make her affairs more palatable to you?  To allow you to get something out of it?

 

Sorry, love, that I'm not responding till now.  I started to write, and then had to sleep on it overnight; I was a little weirded by some of what I found myself feeling and saying.

 

I love you dearly, my philosophic lover!

 

 

Your Marie

Uno, dos, tres, ... part 2

I replied to Marie's letter as follows:

Just home from the grocery store. I’ve been having troubles with my phone today because it will no longer download work emails. This means I’ve been over to IT a lot, which in turn means I’ve been shoveling your recent messages out of my Inbox and into a folder as fast as I can read them ... just in case his finger slips and he opens the home email folder instead of the work one. I know that if you work in IT you have to be immune to shock because you see everything. But maybe not while I’m standing there.

Thank you for this letter, though. You had alluded to the event before, but never really talked through the details and motivations, and it was really interesting. My only direct comment is that I absolutely 100% agree with your conclusion in the last paragraph. My own experience supports it, though in different ways.

So I’ve been in three different threesomes, each one with Wife and one of her amours. (This doesn’t mean three solitary events, but three casts of characters. In each configuration there might have been a small handful of events.) The third parties were, respectively, Boyfriend 1 (1986+), Girlfriend 1 (1990-1992 or maybe later), and Boyfriend 4 (maybe 2005?). Anyway, the details of particular encounters varied one to another, but a key part of the dynamic in all three cases is that Wife kept striving to decompose each threesome into two twosomes. Partly I think this is because it really, really bothered her to be watched, even by someone she was fucking. So if one of us was fucking her and the other was hanging out — kissing, caressing, or just waiting — she felt on display. And she kept coming up with excuses why “just tonight” she could be alone with the other person. (I forget if she ever offered to be alone with me, but of course I’d be there after the other person was gone.)

The problem is that what I found when I examined my own feelings was that if she was fucking someone else and I was locked out, it made me absolutely crazy with jealousy. You don’t want to see me like that, because it’s not a good time for anybody. But if she was fucking someone else and I could be part of the experience, my jealousy receded. When the Other was a guy, I was prepared to make the experience a mutual project for both of us to gratify Wife as much as possible. When the Other was Girlfriend 1 ... well, she was young and very pretty so I had a variety of totally unoriginal hopes; but Wife was fanatically possessive of Girlfriend 1, so those hopes were pretty much all frustrated. (“Look but don’t touch.”) (deep self-pitying sigh) 

And these experiences lead me to conclude, with you, that a threesome can work only if all three of you want it. If someone is actively trying to subvert it, the dynamic is all wrong.

So we agree, even though the particular details were a little different.

Loving you ever, in all ways (or from all ends),

Your Hosea

Uno, dos, tres, ... part 1

Shortly thereafter, Marie and I started a conversation about threesomes. This was a purely theoretical conversation, you understand, but it got interesting as it developed. I'll reproduce part of it here, in sections.

As an aside, Marie reminisces about an event in her past involving two people she calls "L" and "D". But they are emphatically not the blogger L nor my former lover D. Do I need to rename them? Or is it enough for me to mention this warning, this once, that when Marie uses those initials she means someone else? I'll hope it is.

[Update seven years later: I'm renaming "L" to "Flora." She comes back in later posts, so I think it's better.]

Anyway, Marie started off as follows:

Huh, my dearest.  Ever since you mentioned Girlfriend 1 [in an earlier letter] I’ve been thinking, off and on, about the one threesome I indulged in.  (You hadn’t noticed, right?)

 

And remembering, I’m remembering more my motives, and questioning them a bit. 

 

I think I told you most of this already.  I hope you don’t mind if I go over this again, since it’s been in my thoughts.

 

I think, if I ever do this again, I’ll want to be more careful about making sure it is a threesome, something wanted by all of us.

 

The one threesome I was in…

 

Well.  I’ve never regretted having done it, and I’ve never felt guilty.  (And of course there is the agreeable remembrance of having had a really sophisticated sexual encounter in one’s misspent youth!)  But I didn’t like it.  And afterwards, I felt that my motives had been questionable, and that maybe there were better motives for fucking (like, desire!)  than mine had been. 

 

I remember myself doing it for two main reasons:  because Flora wanted it strongly, and I very much wanted to please her; and because going to bed with her alone hadn’t worked out so well, and I was hoping that having a guy in bed with us would take the pressure off me enough that I could relax and function better sexually.  Both receiving and giving. 

 

(Huh—just realized, this having been on my mind is probably one of the reasons insecurities about being able to give pleasure have been re-surfacing.  Receiving being, um, no longer an issue.  Cough.) 

 

I was also rereading a LeGuin short story about a man very much in love who’s being pressured into marriage. And in his culture, it would be a group marriage, and he hasn’t even talked with (successfully) the woman who’s supposed to be his bride if he consents.  Egged on by a sympathetic outsider, he tracks her down and demands, “Is it honest to marry someone you don’t even like in order to be with someone you love?”

 

And I sort of feel that way about my having fucked D.  Not that I had lied to him, or him to me, or Flora  to either of us.  But I would never have fucked him on his own.  And it felt dishonest in some way to screw someone I didn’t really want to screw, in order to screw someone I did. 

 

Self-serving.  Even if it wasn’t strictly taking advantage of him, since he’d consented. 

 

(Snort.  Thinking about one of Peter Wimsey’s dicta now:  “The one sin passion can commit is to be joyless.”  Oops!!!)

 

And on the other parties’ sides…. well, I had the impression that D. would just as soon have been in bed with me alone.   That his interest in consenting to the threesome was, that was the only way to get me in his bed.  (I had expected most of his attention to be on Flora, and was taken aback that so much of it was on me.)  And Flora… well, she liked having me be in love with her, but she was very much in love with him and wanting to please him.  So I was never sure how much she proposed the experiment because she thought a threesome might work better than the two of us alone, and how much she just wanted to give D. a treat.   (And it was shortly after that that she decided, and persuaded me, that it would be better, and more of an honor and singularity, for me to be her One Best Friend than one among her lovers.)

 

If we ever do indulge in threesomes, love, I think I’ll be happier if we work it out that we’re all of us clear that we want to be in a threesome, at least on that specific occasion.  Not any of us harboring a secret preference to be in a pair.

 

Thanks for listening to me!      

Your Marie

Marie's insecurities and Hosea in bed, part 3

Here are selections from Marie's reply back to this letter of mine:

Good morning, my dear one!  Thank you for this response! 

Thanks first of all for answering so promptly; yes, your instinct that I would prefer you to answer SOON rather than to wait and think so you could answer with full consideration was correct.  I very much appreciated having this to read when I woke up.

A lot of what you said about your sexual response you've said before, but not together in one place.  So I hadn't applied it fully to the observations I was making that had me feeling insecure.  There was one thing new, however.  You'd told me before that for you the woman's enjoyment is the Main Event; but this time you added the detail, "When I masturbate, I always have to picture myself with a woman who is already farther down that road than I am."

THAT is an extremely reassuring data point, from my perspective.  Because it suggests that one way to look at this issue is, not that I have some unfortunate deficiency in my knowledge of how to arouse a man (you) by my touch, but that the pair of us have delightfully coincident mutual perversions.  Since when I masturbate, I always have to picture a man (or men) doing things to a woman to arouse her (usually against her will or better judgment, sometimes without her initially being aware of his manipulations).  And in my masturbatory fantasies, they might end by fucking, but they might not--sometimes he brings her to orgasm repeatedly without entering her, usually as part of a nefarious scheme to manipulate her feelings....    

So my standard sexual fantasy involves a man/men focusing intensely on a woman's pleasure.  He acts, she reacts.  That's my perversion.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that if that's your perversion too....

So maybe I can relax about that issue and not worry that I'm being selfish or an inadequate lover to you when I let you put my pleasure first.

We can talk about this more, but I already feel much more comfortable about the issue.

The other: we've also talked about your itchy skin (and not just your back) before, but this is more comprehensive.  It's good to know my observations are accurate, and very good to learn that these reactions pre-date me and are therefore independent of me.

Yes, that's what I thought you felt about cuddling.  That if you're on the outside, it's cuddling; if you're on the inside, it can feel like being trapped or something.  Which, as long as that's not a referendum on me, is mostly fine.  Since I like either position; I'm entirely happy to be on the inside.

Mostly fine... the only time I can see it being a problem is, that makes it harder for me to initiate cuddling.  If you're awake, of course, I can simply ask.  Verbally, or by bumping up against you suggestively.  

If you're asleep... sigh.  I can bump up against you, but I guess my instincts were right; if you don't respond by turning and cuddling me, I'm better off not trying to get grabby in hopes you'll respond in kind.  However, I will remember that that's not a personal rejection:  "Socks!"  will be my watchword in such circumstances, in future.  And I won't cheat myself out of hours of enjoying your warmth and smell, unless the urge to write really is that overwhelming.... (Which, of course, it sometimes is.  Some needs take precedence.)

God I'm glad I brought these things up.

Huh.  I just thought of something else.  I think I've told you this before:  I grew up sleeping with my sister, and [my home state] is cold a lot more of the year than it's hot.  So I grew up casually cuddling; if there's a body next to me, and I'm at all cold, I automatically roll over and grab onto it.  Or she would.  And when one first gets into bed the sheets are cold, so we'd normally start off in each other's arms.  

Only time we wouldn't, is hot nights in summer when each of us was instead skirting the edge of the bed to stay as far away from the other's body heat as possible.

Unless, of course, we'd had a fight.  Then we'd lie rigidly next to each other, not touching.  Cold with anger.

So for me, cuddling is the default if I'm in bed with someone, unless it's hot out, or there's something wrong.

Whereas, of course, as a child you grew up sleeping alone.  Didn't develop the same reflexes....   

Your last observation, that you've engaged in these behaviors/reactions for years and your other lovers haven't commented.... Huh.  Well, we'd been physically involved for 21 months before I did.  So that leaves Debbie out.  And of course, re sex, none of them had my reasons to worry about possibly cheating you of your due pleasure through simple ignorance.

And then, you sort of invited me to.  When you wrote [about an earlier topic], "If you get to the point that you can forget about it for a while, that will mean you feel secure. And that will be progress."

That made me realize, right, I don't feel fully secure.  So I started to explore why, and came up with these two related issued that had been niggling at me.  

Okay, my love, something to think about:  would you like it if our next vacation were to a nudist colony?  If you don't like feeling things on your skin, you might actively like having NOTHING on.....  I understand most of the beaches of Europe are clothing-optional--what a great excuse to visit the Riviera!  Haven't been to a nude beach in decades; clearly I'm overdue!


Loving you always,
Your Marie
   

Marie's insecurities and Hosea in bed, part 2

Here is the reply I wrote to this letter of Marie's:

My love, my sweet, my very earthy Nereid,

Gosh, those are very interesting questions! And no, I'm not being sarcastic. Part of me wants to think about them for some time before I reply; but another part of me thinks it's important to get an answer in the mail right away. So let me see what I can do off the cuff ... then maybe I'll think of something better later and supersede everything I write tonight.

At a high level of abstraction, all of your questions have the same first answer, namely, that your observations are detailed and exact (as usual) but you go astray when you speculate that they are your fault or about you.

More concretely:

I think there are at least two issues that contribute to my sexual responses that you describe so carefully. One is age: my libido is a lot weaker than it used to be. I used to get hard a lot more easily and a lot more often than I do now; and even when I do get aroused today, "hard" is a lot softer than it used to be. Also I'm taking finasteride to try to halt a formerly steady progression that made peeing ever slower for me, and what I read on the Internet says that it suppresses libido. So already — whether it's age or medicine behind it — this is a bit of an uphill battle.

This means that my very first (smart-assed, irreverent) thought when you wrote, ...

I would like to believe that I could, like you, arouse my lover in minutes by my touch and words. That I, like you, could bring my lover to orgasm with my hands and mouth and (most of all) mind.

... was, "Maybe you better get somebody younger on the side" — not instead, mind you!! — "to practice on." 😊

The second issue is that over the years I have spent a lot more attention on studying female sexual response than on my own. My lovers in the past have done to me whatever worked for them before with other men, and I guess I've never had complaints, but that's never where my mind has been. My reaction with all of them has been, in essence, "If you enjoy doing this, that's fine and it gives me a chance to rest for a few minutes; but then let's get back to the important stuff" ... namely her. You may remember that when we first started talking about sex, I said that in my mind the woman's enjoyment is the Main Event. (It's certainly the noisiest. 😊) And the most reliable trigger I know to arouse me is the arousal of the woman I'm with. When I masturbate, I always have to picture myself with a woman who is already farther down that road than I am.

Is this an immutable, permanent fact? Hell, I don't know. But as a biographical datum, it so happens that I have not yet learned anything that works better for me. That might be just because I haven't researched the question systematically, but it is as much as I know today. And of course this is why it is so important to me to get you going and keep you going: that's what triggers me.

Maybe it will turn out that a ripe persimmon on the back of my knee (or whatever) works even better, but if so I don't know it yet.

As for sleeping....

Again, your observations are spot on. But it's nothing to do with you.

There are times that I become very aware of my skin — for example, when I am getting quiet to go to sleep, so I'm not distracted by other things. And when that happens, I often don't want to feel anything against it. My mother says that when I was in the crib I always used to pull off my socks, and then my feet would get cold. And you have surely noticed that I often untuck covers at the foot of the bed so that I can stick my feet out into the open air.

It all depends, of course. If we are having sex and I'm hard, I'm very aware of the surface of my penis but I also very much want to feel something against it ... preferably your warm and wet insides, my love. 😍 And if it's a cold night I surely want a warm blanket. During the day I don't mind wearing clothes because I'm busy and not paying attention. But in any event this impulse to free my skin from whatever's on it is one among others, and I am more likely to be aware of it as other distractions fade away.

Cuddling is delightful, of course. But for whatever reason, my skin is more likely to interpret it as "cuddling" if I'm on the outside; and more likely to think "What's wrapped all around me?" if I'm on the inside. I don't claim this is logical.

This is my rapid first pass at an answer. I have not re read your letter to see if I addressed everything, because I want to reply promptly. Doubtless there are things I missed or could explain better, and maybe in the next few days I will think of something important that escaped me tonight. But please consider it a first installment. And please understand that none of it is about you.

You know what is really fascinating to me? All of the behaviors you describe have been in place for years. But you are the first lover who has asked about them. Wife, D, Debbie ... none of them ever said a word. Were they not paying attention as closely as you? Or did they choose not to speak up? I could try to guess but really I don't know the answer. But it's interesting....

God but I love being with a woman who is both alert and forthright!


Now and ever, my dearest, unto ages of ages,
Your Hosea

Marie's insecurities and Hosea in bed, part 1

Marie wrote me a letter today. [Well, I mean on November 28; I'm actually posting this in mid-December.] I'll put it here and then my reply in an adjoining post:

Hey, my dearest.

Sorry, I tried a couple of times to send versions of this message, but the internet was not cooperative.

So.

One thing that I’m still insecure about, my love, is sex.  Quelle surprise.

Oh, I’m secure now, as I never was before, about one half of my sexuality, my love:  that I can be aroused and can receive pleasure.  Abundantly, even!  You've seen to that.

I’m still not secure that I can give it.

You are demonstrably good at arousing me, at stimulating me, and at bringing me to ecstasy, Hosea.
 
I… am not confident of my ability to do any of these things with you. 

Not that you’ve complained, and I believe your protestations that you enjoy your ability to bring me pleasure.

But I—have the impression, often, that you prefer to touch than be touched.  Which would be fine, because I absolutely love being touched by you, except I want also to return the favor. 

More, I would like to believe that I could, like you, arouse my lover in minutes by my touch and words.  That I, like you, could bring my lover to orgasm with my hands and mouth and (most of all) mind.

Right now it feels to me more like, I wait for you to initiate, and you take pleasure in your power to make me incoherent with delight, and sometimes (not always) my ecstasy kindles your own arousal enough for you to pleasure yourself with my reactions and on my body.

I don’t feel that I know how to touch you to bring you reliably either to arousal or to orgasm, and I feel that I should have learned more of such skills by now. 

That I’m not yet a very good lover, looked at physically.

And.  Non-sexually, too, my dearest, it seems to me, it feels to me, as though you generally prefer to touch rather than be touched, prefer to hold rather than being held. 

In bed, settling to sleep together, sometimes you hold me tightly.  But if I reach to hold on to you, often you shift so that, at most, my arm is draped over you.  Not clinging to you, not pressing us together. 

Maybe I’m imagining that, but it has seemed like a real enough response to me that I’ve adapted over time by trying NOT to hold onto you at night when I might like to. Because it has felt to me, it has seemed to me, that you might prefer that I didn’t. 

And at night, when you’re asleep—sometimes when I wake up a bit and butt up against you, spoon against you or try to cuddle—sometimes you pull me closer.

And sometimes you don’t.  Sometimes you do the opposite, my love. 

And, just as I utterly love waking stretching against you to feel you unconsciously pull my body more strongly against yours, my love....

so do I react (in the other direction) to waking to feeling you unconsciously repulse me.

That last night [last month]:  I didn’t realize that you woke up a couple of times and realized that I was gone.  (If I’d thought you’d missed me I wouldn’t have stayed away.)  And it wasn’t the coffee I’d drunk to keep myself alert through the performance that kept me awake. 

I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.  And then when I crept back into bed, I tried to snuggle in beside you. 

And you flinched away from me, and pulled up the sheet between us.  Turning decisively from my touch.  Pulling up a barrier (the sheet) against me. 

I say "decisively,"  because that's how it felt to me at the time, but I didn't for a moment think your turning away represented a conscious response.  Only the truest unconscious one.

So I lay there for a while, bared and cold, and then I decided to get up and use my wakefulness in writing.  (On a story, as it happens, about a woman unexpectedly overwhelmed by the remembrance of the pain felt by her much-younger, besottedly-in-love self.)

So I wrote for a while.  Then, eventually, I decided that, regardless of your (unconscious) reaction to my touch, this was my last chance in a while to feel your body near mine, to enjoy smelling you and feeling your warmth and enjoying being near to your body. 

Even if I should not actually touch you. 

So I came back to your bed.  And lay myself down next to you, guiltily savoring your presence, and eventually slept until the morning.
 
So.  My insecurities, Hosea my love.

Any thoughts on how to address them?  Am I making all this up?  Do you have tips on becoming a better lover to you?  A chapter I should re-read in Joy?

Tips on sharing your bed?  Or—on not?  On how to reach out to you, and give you joy?  As you do me, reliably, when you choose to?

Tips on when to leave you alone?  On how to tell when I should?


Your Marie

Plato's Corner Deli

NOTE: I am back-dating this post to the month and year where it belongs. But in reality I am actually writing it more than five years later, the evening of January 13, 2023. I think I've got most of the details right, however.

Now that I've told you one really unpleasant story about our vacation in Greece, let me tell you a really pleasant one.

The day after Ohi Day, the day after my pocket was picked, we did a lot of things. We wandered around Athens. We went to visit the Piraeus. (Somehow in the last 2500 years it seems that somebody must have torn down the Long Walls, because we didn't see them anywhere.) And we took the bus out to visit Plato's Academy. As two erstwhile scholars, how could we do otherwise? 

Strictly speaking, of course, Plato's Academy was closed many years ago. But we know where it was located, and there have been archaeological digs on the site. Also, the site has given its name to a whole slice of metropolitan Athens, Ακαδημία Πλάτωνος (Akadimia Platonos), a grungy, working-class district northwest of downtown. So that's where we headed. We saw the place marked on a map, but weren't really sure what we would find.

When we first got to the district, it didn't look too great. There was litter and graffiti. (The photograph is one I took.) But soon we figured out that the Ακαδημία Πλάτωνος referenced in the sign here was the city district and not the site of the actual school itself. That was several blocks farther on, and so we started to walk.

And walk. 

It took a while to get there. When we did, we found that the site was enclosed within a metal gate that looked pretty uninviting. But there was an open door, so we walked in ….

… and inside the gate was a park. Yes, there were stone works that had been dug out of the ground. But nothing was off limits, and most of it was trees and lawn. (In fact we saw one person asleep on one of the ruined stone walls.) It was a beautiful spot; and if I were Plato, I would far rather be remembered by a gentle park where working-class children come to play than by the most perfect archaeological reconstruction of my school.

In the center of the park was a visitor center, which had some videos and instructional material. Everything was in both Greek and English. Presumably the tourist presence was not negligible. But it was also obvious that most tourists don't come this far out of town. The visitor's center was close to empty. And by mid-afternoon, they were ready to close.

That was fine, because Marie and I were hungry. We hadn't had lunch, and it was something close to 4:00 in the afternoon. So we wandered back through the park, and then—just across the street—we saw a deli (or something similar) that appeared to be open. It was called Ταβέρνα η γωνία του Πλάτωνα. Roughly translated, that comes to Plato's Corner Deli.

They had tables outside. It was still a glorious afternoon, so we wandered in and tried to ask if we could sit outside. We didn't find anyone who spoke English; but we made ourselves clear with gestures, and so found our seats. Soon a waitress brought us a couple of menus. But—oops! bad luck!—the waitress spoke no English either. However there was a party sitting at the next table over, who seemed to be regulars. She went and spoke to them, and they offered to translate. Working this way, we ordered a very plentiful lunch. (I'm pretty sure this served us for dinner as well.) And the food was wonderful. In general, during our whole trip to Greece, the quality of the food we ate was more or less inversely proportional to the price. This was close to the cheapest meal we had during the whole trip, and it was the tastiest and most delightful. It certainly helped that the waitress was charming and very pretty, though the food would have been great in any event. But the combination meant that the afternoon formed a warm, comfortable memory in the middle of the entire trip.

When we were done, of course, we did everything in reverse: walk and walk and walk until we came to the bus stop, then take the bus back into town to get back to our hotel. But we spent the whole evening in a warm glow from the afternoon.