Chapter 1: Emerging Problem

Personals: Transcontinental Couple Seeking Similar

Couple for Unusual Relationship

Professional dual-career married couple (~ten years) has become bi-coastal for the indefinite future - him in Palo Alto, and her in Cambridge for work and Dillon, MA for home. We are early-thirties, college educated (MBA, Ph.D.), bright, motivated, go-getters, impatient to succeed, handsome, pretty, athletic, trim, shapely, sculptured, and very lusty (both of us). He’s in high tech. She teaches/research at nearby college.

We seek a couple that has opposite geographic problem to ours: she’s in near Palo Alto, and he’s in the Boston area. We opened our marriage because of our expected significant time apart. We aren’t into pick-up bars, clubs, or even internet dating (except for this), so this ad is a hope to meet some others with a complementary problem.

We have only a hazy vision of what this two-couple bi-coastal relationship might become; if you’re the ones, help us build this vision and become our intimate friends. We are still in love, want to be in touch often, plan to travel back and forth as we can to keep that contact and spark alive. Phone and video calls just don’t cut it (particularly in our love life!). Send pix to speed things along. COUPLES ONLY - married preferred. Box 5661403.

I looked at the ad that Russ and I had put in several Boston papers and at six Internet sites that seemed to carry similar ‘contact’ personals. I wondered if we would get any replies other than kinky men who wanted to expose themselves in dick pics. I paid extra for the ads because of the number of words, but I thought them important because they laid out our situation and our hopes almost perfectly.

I thought further back to the situation that brought us to the moment of placing our ad, a remarkable synchronicity of events in Russ’ and my meteoric careers plus deep connections on many levels and a shared sense of priorities about our lives and marriage.

We are both smart as Einstein and graduated from college (not high school) at age eighteen. Earlier than that, when we still considered in high school, Russ told me he loved me and gave me a friendship ring that I still wear. We became an item through the rest of high school, college, and got married the weekend after graduation – twelve years ago.

Being ‘brainiacs’ – very smart, we’d both skipped multiple grades in school, accelerated through college with overloads despite usually being the youngest in our classes, and graduated magna cum laude with our baccalaureate degrees at age eighteen. We wanted to get on with life and our careers. We were also driven to succeed. We competed.

We married with the blessing and support of our parents, since we were significantly more mature and motivated than other teens. He went to work, and also got an MBA at Boston University over the next year. I continued on at Harvard with graduate work too, finished my master’s degree in psychology, and then forged ahead a got my Ph.D. in the field.

From our first ‘I love you’ statements to each other there had never been any doubt about our deep connection on a physical and spiritual level. Our parents and many friends told us we were soul mates.

One thing about us from the time we started going together, we were damn near obsessed with sex. Neither of us were virgins when we met, but sex with others was infrequent. Once we committed to each other with love words, we were insatiable. We fucked incessantly, yet somehow managed our studies and then getting started at our jobs.

Russ and I came to believe we were part of the same ‘soul group’, and that we’d interacted in previous lives with each other in many other ways besides boyfriend-girlfriend and then husband-wife in this realm. The inevitability of our connection to each other and the stability of that spiritual connection had a lot to do with how we came to think about the situation that life presented to us.

Russ’ first job out of college was as the youngest techie for a dot-com company in Cambridge called GeoCast. He ended up doing all sorts of jobs for them: programming, product development, logistics, website maintenance, and marketing. As with many dot-comes, he was taking some pay as company stock, and they gave him a little time off to pursue his MBA.

Russ was Russell Pearson. He was incredibly handsome, and looked his age. He was younger than his college or work peers by about four years. He stood six-two, kept trim by running, swam like a fish, and had that square-jawed, bedroom eyes look- tall, dark, and handsome.

Russ found me, Julie Minton, when we were put together in an advanced placement class in early high school. I’d also matured early: cute, trim, slightly busty, and into yoga and Pilates, spirituality, and (later) sex. I could also be a flirt, a point that had gotten me in trouble with older classmates once or twice. I have long brunette hair that hangs down to the middle of my back, and is usually in a ponytail.

We started our marriage living in a pretty sad one-bedroom apartment in Roxbury. We were driven to show that we could t ‘to do it on our own’ and politely turned down parental support to see what we could accomplish.

While the apartment had many downsides, the upside was that it was cheap and we could save money like crazy. Russ’ job paid well, and after I started working even while on scholarship, we just saved all of my paycheck. Ultimately, we agreed that we wanted a really nice home in the suburbs of Boston, even if it was going to be a stretch.

We quickly became very career oriented and worked hard with our heads down. I was wrapped up in academics, and Russ with his dot-com business. He got a few promotions and raises, and still more ‘flaky’ stock shares – at least, I thought they were worthless.

Five years after we got married some good things happened in our life, although not all of them seemed like it at the time. One day, Russ suddenly lost his job, and for a short time we were devastated. GeoCast sold itself to another dot-com based in Texas, and they in-turn brutally cut the local staff.

Over the early years of our married life, we put in a lot of extra hours on our jobs – we made it a habit to work later than the magic hour of five o’clock, and often did work over the weekends. Those few extra hours paid off in money, reputations as people that accomplished great things, and helped us develop some great contacts. Even while losing his job, Russ has sterling references from both work and college. We were just twenty-four.

As it turned out the closing of GeoCast turned into a huge windfall for us. Russ got money for what I’d thought were the relatively worthless stock shares he’d been getting as part of his pay and bonus package.

Suddenly, we had $700,000 in our bank account after taxes were paid. We immediately bought a beautiful big home a little over a forty-minute commute north of Boston in a town named Dillon – four bedrooms, three bath, family room, two-car garage, cul de sac, pool, relatively quiet and private, with neighbors minded their own business.

Our initial furnishing for the house were a laugh. Most came from dumpster diving while we lived in Roxbury and were saving money like it’d go out of style. Others were bargains at used furniture stores such as the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Left-brain as we were, we immediately developed a structured plan to replace everything consistent with a decorating plan that a friend put together for us.

Another man that got also laid off with Russ was Brad Thurman. His wife Lindsey had also worked there as a secretary. They, too, were initially crushed by the closing of GeoCast.com, but their stock shares rescued them from destitution.

The couple were a little older than we were, and one Friday in early summer, they came out for dinner at our new home, despite our mix of new and rag-tag furnishings at that point. I guess I flirted with Brad, and Russ certainly had some appeal to Lindsey. The outcome of our dinner was that we discovered they were as horny and insatiable about sex as we were.

We had a bit of wine and then we suggested skinny-dipping in our new pool. Russ and I did that all the time. They liked that idea, and so the four of us got naked and swam. Soon after that, we had sex with each other’s spouses on the chaises beside the pool. We swapped. We became swingers. We had extramarital sex.

We didn’t plan it. The ‘swap’ was not premeditated. I flirted more with Brad, and Russ responded to Lindsey. Just somehow, suddenly, we were fucking with our counterpart, and then we did it again, and again. Young men have stamina and fast recovery times. We really liked each other.

Brad and Lindsey stayed over, and we fucked our way through Saturday too, getting into the concept of group sex in a big way – sex with each other’s spouses in each other’s presence. They liked what happened and so did we. We planned another get-together for the following weekend. The main agenda item was more extramarital sex.