“I think you should start dating,” my wife said simply.

“What?”

“You heard me. You should go out on a date. With a woman, even one of our manless friends, so you can find another wife, a new one.”

“Why the fuck would I want another wife? It’s hard enough living with one woman. Having two to gang up on me would be too much.” I asked, dumfounded. Hell, I’d had three before this one and Ginny now. But I knew why she had suggested a ‘new’ wife. I had been disabled due to a bad back the first year we were together. Then, several years later, she was diagnosed with cancer, then neuropathy (a condition I also suffered), then MS. She’d been talking ever since her diagnosis about her dying. I’m sure she thinks about it more than she talks about it. That’s only normal, I guess, and now she had begun to make plans for me after she was gone.

“I want you to get married again,” She’d said one day. Now, bear in mind that I turned 64 last year. For a lot of men that isn’t ‘old’. But with a fixed income, my spine and arthritis and neuropathy (especially with erection damaging medications), I was hardly a prize catch in any case. Add to that the fact that I’d had it with wives and monogamy. In my mind the predominant feeling was ‘no more wives’. Still, I could get lucky and die first.

But the night she made the comment about dating she answered my question. “I’d be in favor of a multiple relationship, even if I don’t die. Maybe you should have one or even two more wives.”

This was getting bizarre. Hell, we hadn’t had sex in over a year by then. I hadn’t stopped thinking about it or reading erotic stories about it. But recently I seemed to never feel like it in any sort of real way.

“Hell, they could help around here,” she added. That was a thought. Once I had told her we should adopt a teenage girl or woman. Then we could give her chores – like all the housework.

“I don’t think I would be allowed to have more than one, honey,” I smiled.

“Well, call them concubines then, or roommates. I’m just tired so much. I can’t keep up with it all.”

“You are the only one driving yourself here, Ginny. I don’t ask you to do what you do.” Besides housework, in spite of her health, Ginny went back to work after her treatment. She worries about money.

“Somebody has to do it! We’re both on a fixed income, and life isn’t getting less expensive.”

“Yeah, and we both did it before I had to stop working, and by then I couldn’t do more than cook. Now I’ve lost interest in even that. Then you got sick but, we can still make it on our disability payments.

“I’ve accepted that it takes longer to do things since I can’t stand or bend a lot all at once. I have to take frequent breaks. You have some of the same trouble doing that too. But you tend to ‘keep on truckin’ and wear yourself out and you end up in the hospital for a few days. You can still do a lot of things if you want, but you have to take things more slowly.”

She flushed and came back to the bedroom to stand in front of me. “I feel bad for you, John,” she said. “Here I got all fat and sick. Now you’ve lost interest in sex.” We hugged.

“I think it’s more like sex lost interest in me. I mean, I still think about it, just like I think how much fun it used to be to hike up a hill, or ride a bike. I just can’t ‘perform’ any more.”

“I think you’d be surprised, babe,” she said, fondling my limp cock through my sweats. It twitched and got slightly engorged, but that was all. She pulled my pants down under my balls to expose me to her view. “Maybe all you need is somebody thinner or younger.” She started fondling my cock.

“Well, even if it made a difference there,” I replied, “don’t you think they might want something more in return?” I asked. “Like a paycheck of some sort, other than my resurrected dick?” I asked.

“What woman would want more than your wonderful dick?” Ginny grinned at me and licked the head of my limp-ish noodle.

“Uh, most of the women I’ve met my whole life, even when that worked.”

“Ohh ... we could probably work out something,” she said with a grin. I shook my head and forgot about the subject. I kissed her and made sure she took her pills and got into bed safely then I returned to the kitchen desk and the computer. Her cancer was Lymphoma, one of those they could only slow down. It was due to return some day.

The thought of a new roommate was in my head now though. Like I’d told her, I did still think about sex – some days I thought about it a lot. We had met eleven years before that night. After being single a while, I had been so horny I was jerking off an average of three times a day. Before Ginny came along.

For the first eight years after we met our sex life was incredible. Ginny was nearly as horny as I was and we made love four or five times a week. Even after my problem started, that was the case.

When my back began to bother me, it was sudden. One day I found that I suddenly couldn’t do all the physical stuff my job required. It was like flipping a switch. The day before everything seemed normal, then it wasn’t. It hurt to do the simplest things and a weakness spread over me like a blanket.

But the medications began to do their job. My erectile dysfunction took a while to kick in as the meds began to build up in my system. It was simply a side effect.

The doctor was amazed I’d been able to perform as well as I had been doing because the tests showed that my condition had been there a long time – like years. His words were, “You have a good back ... if you were an eighty year old woman.” He prescribed both Hydrocodone and Oxycodone. He prescribed blood pressure meds. Over the first years things seemed fine then our sex life ground into low gear and our ‘several times a week’ became once or twice a month.

My erections subsided and died. No matter how much I wanted to make love to her I was just unable to do more than get her off using my mouth, fingers and her toys. I got some Viagra but it didn’t work for me. The doc said it might be unwise to use it anyway.

We spent a lot of time staring into each other’s eyes as I sucked at her pussy. My ears got sore from the pressure of her thighs, but I didn’t complain. Her plastic dicks wore out pack after pack of AA batteries Her nipples got chafed from my sucking them. With a lot of lube we managed to slip my ‘soft-on’ inside her once or twice. Her self esteem suffered, no matter how much I tried to assure her that she was still just as cute and sexy as ever; it was just the medication and the pain that made it not work.

She had been voluptuous when we met, but after the lack of sex robbed her of the confidence to make me hard, she started to put on extra weight and that made it all worse for her. I couldn’t hike any more so she didn’t hike either. She put on more weight. By the night she suggested finding another woman she had become what I finally would call fat – though of course I didn’t say it out loud.

That night I located a couple of online dating sites I hadn’t visited since we’d been together. I had never actually used them, just kind of looked into them for fun. That night I started looking for women who might want to share a man with another woman. As the pictures and profiles rolled along, thoughts of Ginny and other women naked and fucking next to me played in my mind. She had always denied she had any interest in activities with other women, but knowing how sexy and horny she could get, I thought it might not take much to trigger the sensuality of it in her. Especially with a little encouragement.

I naturally let my thoughts drift into scenarios of watching her enjoying sex with another man. After all, if she was willing to try to let me have other women, what could be fairer? In fact it would solve that missing ingredient in her life. We loved each other very much. I knew in my heart that inviting another woman into our lives – and bed – wouldn’t touch that, at least for me. What about seeing her with another man though?

In one sense the idea turned me on. They say that men get more turned on by visual stimuli than women. Watching porn videos online turned me on. Ginny claimed little interest in them though. She confessed that reading erotic stories made her wet, though. I shared that interest with her too. Would letting her have sex with another man damage us? I wasn’t sure. But that was only from my side of the fence. I didn’t know how it might affect her. For that matter, I wasn’t so sure that having a woman’s hands on me while she watched and participated wouldn’t bother her in a less than beneficial way either.

So for a while I read profiles and looked at racy photos of couples who were looking to ‘swing’. With my lack of abilities, however, I didn’t feel we were quite in the market for another couple though. Solitary women looking for couples were few. There were a lot of men seeking couples to ‘share their wealth’ though. Some even claimed to be bisexual and were interested in both sides of a couple. That thought brought me up short.

I have never been interested in other guys. The culture I grew up in looked askance at homosexuality. Lesbians or bisexual women were okay with most men but ‘gays’ were not. It’s only been in the last decade or so that homosexuality has emerged into the light of day. Now the Supreme Court has even decided that gay marriage is okay.

I shut down the computer and went to my recliner to sleep. Ginny and I had even stopped sleeping in the same bed. This is only due to my respiration problems and my snoring waking her up. I miss feeling her naked body next to me. Humans (and primates in general) need the touch of other humans. It’s a scientific fact.

The next morning Ginny asked if I had thought about her suggestion. “Yeah,” I said, “I even scanned some dating sites for prospects.”

“Did you find any? Because if you didn’t, I could make some suggestions.” I looked at her over my coffee cup. Was that it, I wondered? Was she just trying to steer me toward somebody she knew? Or was she interested in another woman now, too? Ginny is a very giving type of person. If somebody is in need and she can help them she’ll at least try. That quality has caused some disagreements in the past. It’s not that I disagree with her trying to help people, I just feel that there are more ‘users’ out there than she does.

“Are you going to tell me who they are?” I was curious. Since I had been disabled and we moved, she had taken several different jobs and interacted with quite a few people. I, on the other hand, knew absolutely nobody here, other than the people she had introduced me to from time to time. And even those, I might see only once or twice and then forget.

That morning she seemed flustered. She opened her mouth and then took a breath. “Okay, just listen and don’t say anything until I’m finished, okay?” I nodded my head. For some reason my dick twitched in my pants. “Okay, so there’s this girl at work who just broke up with her boyfriend. Diane is younger than we are, but she’s really nice and smart as a whip. Their breakup left her with an apartment she can’t afford and a dog she can’t give up. I thought she could move in with us and maybe stay if things work out with us.”

So far nothing about this seemed out of line with the way she looked at things. “So how is she supposed to be ‘another wife’? Have you talked to her about this yet?”