Well, One Of The Secrets Anyway

English has got to be a clusterfuck of a language to learn later in life. How in the hell do you drive on parkways and park in driveways?? Jumbo Shrimp? Military Intelligence? I mean seriously, WTF.

Here’s another that while not linguistically problematic, is just as difficult a pill to swallow as jumbo shrimp: Giving your partner the space and opportunity to be their true selves, particularly in the sexual arena, while being able to give yourself the same space, is one of the biggest secrets of life. Who knew??

There was a comment on the Medium platform for last week’s post from Joe. He talked about sexual energy when you’re older, and that it’s just not he same as it used to be. I agree 100% with him. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing, it’s just the way life is.

Nothing today is the same as it was 5,10, 30 years ago. The struggle to cling and hold on to the “way it used to be” is a fools errand. Ya can’t go back. This is GOOD news.

That said, I do think it would be a trip if 40 year ago, young dumb and full of cum Private First Class Sam could have seen into the future to what 59 year old Sam had gotten himself into.

If you’re reading us for the first time……Kate and I are a married couple in our 50’s whose relationship is Ethically Non-Monogamous (ENM). We’re swingers, our marriage is open; we have sex with other people. We’re in a committed relationship, and somewhere on the polyamorous and cuckold spectrums; Kate has a boyfriend (or two) and is a Hotwife. It’s neither of our first marriages. We met in a 12 step meeting; we’re each more than a decade sober now. If you’re curious about how this all works, we talk about our relationship in varying degrees of depth in other posts. We have an email address listed in our “about” page if you would like to contact us.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve discovered the joy of Reddit. It’s a fascinating place. Among other things, I’ve discovered Led Zeppelin bootlegs that are just sublime (Tokyo 1971 is epic) and a fresh stash of memes to replace what I’ve lost from Facebook and Insta. Reddit on balance is a younger crowd, I like the energy; It’s kinda neat being the wise man on the mountain (well, when I’m not showing my ass by posting halfcocked) instead of the WTF is happening in my life right now dude.

The amount of heartache and woe that exists with the Reddit / in your 20’s crowd makes me ever so glad that’s far in the rearview. That’s the shit we old farts look back on and say “ohhhh…..the good old days…..*sigh*….”. No thanks. Tho there is an element of schadenfreude that triggers the occasional smirk while reading the tales of woe.

Sometimes I think about how the relationship Kate and I have would work if we were in our twenties. Try tho I may, I can’t get to a place where that looks anything other than a disaster. It’s hard, my Time Machine brain goes back to exactly how I was, and what I know of Kate from that era. I project my lived experience and try to imagine how it would look with a different cast. I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it.

There’s parts of my past that I’m not proud of, parts that I wouldn’t want to go back to. Kate’s the same way, I’d suspect you are as well. This kind of points the way to the trap of mental time travel.

Without all the shitshows, disasters and cluster fuckery of days gone by, we wouldn’t have learned the lessons that make us the people we are today. It’s not the rainbow and unicorn days in fields of daisies that cause growth. It’s the crash and burn bleeding in the dirt wow this sucks stuff that teaches us.

I’m comfortable in my own skin today. That’s a fairly recent development, happened over the last decade. I think the final piece, well, final isn’t right, the most recent piece, is how in sync Kate and I are with where our sexual relationship is with each other and others. Getting to this place with her for sure had its share of bleeding in the dirt moments. I wouldn’t trade a second of those moments for anything.

In one of those funny how life works out sometimes moments, I found myself on the phone talking about cuckolding and life with Michael C of the Keys and Anklets podcast earlier this week. It’s not much of a reach at all to say that we’re on opposite sides of the cuckolding coin, but our views of it are strikingly similar. Stands to reason, his voice via his pod colored much of my early (and current) thinking about it. We’re both also in the same ballpark age wise, and have a similar outlook on life it seems.

He’s been at it for a good bit longer than Kate and I have; none of us are virgins for sure. One of the big things we agree on is that cuckolding has gotten a bad rap, well, just about everywhere. “Cuck” is used as a burn or put down more often than not it seems, ment to imply weakness or wimpiness. Michael’s experience from the bull side, and mine from the cuck side are identical in this regard; nothing could be further from the truth.

For me, the process of breaking down millennia (yes, millennia….google the Cherry Blossom experiment) of social and religious conditioning was life changing. It’s one thing to recognize that society is one way, it’s something completely different to tear that down in your head and become at peace with what society views as a crisis; a woman being empowered with and in charge of her own sexuality….all the more so in the “confines” of a happy marriage.

I’m not intending at all to imply that our path is the one true way. It’s the way I know, the way I’ve learned and can talk about from a place of authenticity. If this path isn’t for you, Bob’s your Uncle. I’d 100% encourage you to explore and find your way.

In this change, I found the next pieces of myself. I was able to stop beating myself up for being who I am sexually; a submissive leaning male who finds nothing on God’s green earth more erotic than his partner being with someone else. When the tearing down of what and who I’m “supposed” to be met with who I am erotically, the result was feeling more alive that I ever have.

This, of course, happened with Kate. Without her being unapologetically her it would not have been possible. Kate is the final piece of me, she’s the connection to humanity that I was missing all these years. With Kate and our relationship I feel whole, I feel alive.

Something that I’ve been aware of for a little while now as it was creeping up has come to pass with the publishing of this article. This puts Sam and Kate at 100 stories posted. It’s been a great journey for us both, it’s really good to get this stuff down on “paper”; the process has been reliably good for us.

One of the tenants of our sobriety program is that you have to “give it away in order to keep it.” What this means is that when you’ve been shown how to get and stay sober, you have to pass that on to others who are looking for the same thing. That’s how we’ve approached this blog; we’ve learned so much from so many others, it just seems right to pass some of that along with our voice. Ironic that Michael C, who’s absolutely been one of those voices for us, shows up in post 100.

Thanks for reading!! Be kind to yourself and others….

Sam & Kate