Chapter 1: Discussion Promotes New Intimacy ... With Others

"Do you ever think you could share me with another man or woman?"

The question nearly stopped me in my tracks, and I physically and mentally froze. Stacy had a knack for asking tough questions that kept us always talking about interesting aspects of our twelve-year old marriage. Sometimes we'd go for a couple of months with no questions or discussions, and then she'd throw me a curve ball of some kind. After that, we'd have rich questions and long discussions every Saturday morning for a year.

Shortly before we got married the questions were about marriage and children. What would we be like as a couple now and later in life? Would we have kids? How many? What sex? What would I be like as a father? How would I be different from my father or hers? What if we had an autistic child? They were deep questions, and we talked for weeks about our responses to some of them.

Later, after we were wed and when she was getting into her pregnancy, the questions dealt with how I'd be in a sexless marriage or relationship? Why? Because we were about to hit that phase of pregnancy and post-delivery when intercourse was not an option. Oh, Stacy made it up to me in other ways, but for the most part I just cooled my jets and frequented the porn sites on the Internet, sometimes with her looking over my shoulder and egging me on or even helping with a handjob.

Another time, she asked me if I ever had the hots for her sister, Debbie. I admitted that I did, but that I also had no intention of being anything other than a gentleman in her presence. There were also test questions from time to time on Kate, Tina, Lisa, and a few other beautiful women in our neighborhood. I always gave the same response, and I meant it; I had no intention of straying or putting our marriage at risk.

My answer to this week's hypothetical question about sharing her came to mind after a moment of thought. "Stacy, I love you with all my heart. If the only way I could have you in my life was to share you with someone, I guess I'd have to share you. In return, I think I'd have to know that you felt the same way about me."

Stacy nodded affirmatively, "Good answer." She turned and started to prepare lunch for the two of us and our two kids both of whom were raising some kind of hell in the living room by throwing Lego blocks at each other.

After stopping the Lego War, I returned to the kitchen. Stacy smiled, "Follow up question, if I may. Could you love more than one person at a time, and if so, how many?"

I frowned. "I love you, and I love Megan and Chris; so there's three. I love my parents and your parents; that makes seven in total. I love Deb; so a total of eight." I paused, "I think that's enough."

She said, "You saw one episode of Sister Wives a year or so ago with me. Remember that show?"

"Yes, vaguely," I said carefully. I sensed a trap here some place; as in many of our discussions, the landscape could get rocky here and there, and Stacy was not above occasionally trying to get me in a bind just to push my buttons.

"Well, there was one guy and he had four wives ... or was it five. They had over fifteen children, I think, but I'm just talking about the guy and the plural relationships."

I responded, "Then I guess it's just you, babe."

Stacy nodded. "So, it's about being sexually exclusive."

I laughed, "Well, I've never thought of having sex with anybody else I named other than you."

"Deb?" She teased.

"Well, you bring that up every now and then in the heat of our passion. It's a nice fantasy now and then, but I love you."

At that point, Megan and Chris thundered into the kitchen like two freight trains only noisier. Megan was ten and her brother Chris nine; I'd reached the conclusion that kids that age did nothing in a quiet way except sleep. After they sat, the whole discussion went towards what they needed to do that Saturday afternoon.

These deep discussions seemed to be reserved for Saturdays when the kids weren't around, or were occupied elsewhere in the house. We both tended to be too tired for intellectual games after work, but now and again there'd be a teaser of what to expect on Saturday morning.

The following Saturday, after breakfast, Stacy hit me with another of her deep questions: "Do you love me conditionally or unconditionally?"

"Explain."

She went on, "Well, if you love me conditionally, it's like an 'if-then' statement in a computer program. If she does this, I love her. If she doesn't, I don't or won't love her. You could also carry it in the negative too. If she does this, I won't love her. If she doesn't do this, I won't love her. All that's conditional. In unconditional love, you just love me regardless of what I do or don't do. Got it?"

"Yeah, I think so." I thought for a moment. I was the kind of person that needed some serious think time on deep intellectual questions like these. The more personal and decisive they became, the longer I needed to cogitate on them, sometimes even days. Long ago we'd agreed to be totally honest with each other about any of this stuff.

I got up and moved around the kitchen, getting a third cup of coffee. I closed up my laptop where I'd been catching up on email.

I responded slowly. "I know you respect me. If you didn't respect me, I would feel it difficult to love you. We don't agree on a lot of stuff. Heck, we back different political parties half the time. Nonetheless, we both respect each other's views and the right to have those opinions. I guess that means that my love is sort of conditional."

She said, "So, back to last week's question; say I could love you and someone else, and I respected both of you to the max. Could you still love me in return?" There was both a teasing tone and a serious question there.

"I'd have to think whether you splitting your time with some other guy was disrespectful. I might decide it was."

"Because you were jealous?"

"You know I have a delicate ego. Thank you for always honoring my weakness and not berating me in ways that are ego damaging."

Just then there was a knock on the door. Stacy answered it, let in two more nine year olds, and aimed them into the living room. The noise level rose about thirty decibels, and discussion ceased for the moment.

I stewed about the conditional love question and the jealousy question during the week. The following Saturday we again had a discussion window open up after breakfast.

Before she could pose a question, I took the initiative, "Stacy, I didn't get to give you a very good answer last weekend about your question. In part, I have trouble thinking what it would be like to have another male sniffing around after you. Yes, I'd probably be jealous. I love you, and don't want to lose you."

Stacy said, "What if you knew and could trust that you wouldn't lose me?"

"Would I still feel jealous? Probably."

"You know that jealousy is a learned response?"

"How's that?" I asked.

Stacy said, "Well, there are different types of jealousy. You addressed one: fear of losing something, in this case me. There's also the type where you covet something that someone else has – I guess that's called envy too. For instance, our neighbors Bob and Kate are very well off, and I know you'd love to have a Porsche like he's got."

She paused to be sure I was listening. "Then there's what I might call dominance jealousy. This might be where you want to be everything to me, and not have anybody else helping in any way with my growth or happiness. In this situation, if you see me enjoying myself, and you're not the cause of that, then you get ripped."

Stacy looked at me as though I was expected to respond.

I started slowly, "OK. I'm afraid of losing you, but having you continually tell me you love me and so on makes that pretty moot. Your second kind of jealousy, about things, isn't something I think about a lot. Sure, I wish we had more money, but we're doing just fine, and I feel self-actualized in what I do for work and that I'm contributing, so I don't feel much of that kind.

"On your third kind of jealousy, I wish I could be everything to you, but that's totally unrealistic. We both have our circles of work friends and colleagues, and they all contribute to our growth and development in some way. They all give us fresh ideas. I wouldn't want to take that away from you by locking you up in some dungeon."

Stacy smiled, "The last part is called 'compersion.' Some people say it's the opposite of jealousy. You get joy and a jolt of happiness seeing me interact with someone else in a way that you know makes me fulfilled or that helps me have some kind of new experience."

I thought about that, "I like that concept. Compersion. Good."

Stacy teased and I should have been able to tell from her tone of voice, "So, if I have a girlfriend I get a lot of joy spending time with, and you know that person brings me great experiences and that we share a lot, you'd feel really good about that?"

I allowed, "Compersion comes into play. True. I would feel joy that you were having fun with her."

Stacy threw me a real curve ball then, "What if it was a guy?"

I balked, and Stacy laughed, inferring a 'Gotcha.' I had to admit that I walked right into that subtle bear trap.

I laughed finally, "I ... I don't know how to answer that honestly. This goes back to fear of losing you, and even what we talked about regarding conditional love and respect."

Stacy teased, "Would you like to do a little experiment?"

With great caution in my voice I said, "Like what? Am I going to like this?"

"I don't know whether you'll like it, but you can consider it a test of many of the principles we've recently talked about."

"What's the experiment?"

"There's a nice guy at work who lives near here. We work together, and have been looking for an opportunity to have a cup of coffee together. What if I called him up and suggested we meet down at the diner to have a cup of coffee and talk, maybe even have lunch?"

For some reason, I felt that I had to be magnanimous. "Good idea. Call him. Set it up."

Stacy smiled, "You won't mind babysitting the monsters for a couple of hours without me."

"I'll do fine."

Ten minutes later, I heard one side of a phone call from the next room. 'John, this is Stacy Cooper ... fine ... I don't know whether I'm interrupting your day, but I have a couple of hours free ... yes ... I was hoping we might meet for coffee down at the diner ... half an hour ... great ... see you there.'

Although the diner was only ten minutes away, Stacy spent the next twenty minutes getting dressed and making sure her makeup was just perfect. I watched, and we chatted about a birthday party Chris had to go to, and a play date down the street for Megan. Even as we did this, I got to thinking 'My wife is going out on a date. Holy shit!'

Stacy bounded out of the house, and was away before I thought much more about it.

I had developed some expectations that she'd only be an hour, so as time went on, I developed some rather far-fetched ideas of what she and this John character might be doing. After all, he didn't live that far away either. They could have gone back to his place to do lord knows what. I could feel the various aspects of jealousy rising in my bile.

After she'd been gone an hour-and-a-half, I took out a piece of paper. I wrote down the emotions I could get in touch with that were worrying me.

After I wrote all that shit down, I tucked away the piece of paper in a kitchen drawer and made lunch for the kids, who had told me in no uncertain terms that they were hungry and deserving.

Stacy had left at ten-thirty. She got home at one-thirty. Three hours.

I put on my brave face and smiled as she came in the door. She saw me; "Hey, can you come and help me with groceries from the back of my car?"

As I went out, she said, "I also got a case of wine at the liquor store. That's in the back."

She had well over two hundred dollars worth of food. She'd done all the weekend shopping; an activity that had to have taken well over an hour, and even longer since she also drove out to our favorite wine store. That meant that about the time I had started to panic, she was saying goodbye to her male friend and heading off to shop.

I mentally beat myself up as I lugged bag after bag of groceries into the kitchen from the garage. I lugged the case of wine in too, and put that in our pantry. I was a big schmuck. I hadn't trusted her. I jumped to conclusions. I'd made assumptions about her activities and her return time that were just wrong. I learned a valuable lesson.

I finally asked, "Have fun with your friend?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. We spent a little over an hour, and then he had to run. My cheeks hurt from laughing with him. He has a great sense of humor – lots of funny sarcasm. You'd like him."

"Bring him round for dinner or lunch or something," I blurted out, without thinking too hard about the situation. I was trying to be completely nonchalant and act as though I'd barely noticed her absence.

Had we not been having the kinds of discussions we'd had, I probably wouldn't have noticed her absence. Further, she told me who she was seeing and when. What she didn't tell me was that she was going to do the shopping; an activity one of us usually did for a few hours on Saturday. I beat myself up some more for my evil thinking.

The children went off to their grandparent's home for dinner and a sleepover that evening. I drove them over and dropped them off, saying hello to my parents in the process.

When I got home, Stacy had a plate of cheese and two wine glasses out. She said, "Grab a glass and the bottle and come in the living room. Dinner won't be for another forty minutes."

As we sat down next to each other, we both savored our first sip of wine.

Stacy looked at me and smiled. "When I went to see John, you were worried about me, weren't you?"

"I was cool," I lied.

"Then what's this?" Stacy laid out the sheet of notepaper I'd made my emotional list on. She turned it so I could re-read what I'd written just before noon.

"I lied. I wasn't cool." I then clarified, "Well, I was cool for an hour, and then the expectations that you'd come back didn't materialize, so I started to worry and make up stories."

Stacy leaned in and kissed me. "I love you more than life itself. I would never leave you. You'd better get used to the idea that I'm your sidekick until one of us kicks the bucket, and even then I can't promise I won't haunt you if I go first." She smiled.

She said, "Can we talk about what you wrote and felt?"

"If you want." I was really embarrassed by the list and what I'd allowed my mind to contemplate. I told her that, but she pointed at the piece of paper.

I glanced at the first item, "OK. I need to trust more that what you say is what you mean. When you say you love me and will never leave, I need the self-confidence and faith to believe that. When you tested that, I suddenly felt all wishy-washy about my standing in your life."

I went on, "I really did hope you were having fun with John, but I worried about the kind of fun."

"Did you think I might go back to his condo and screw his brains out?" She teased.

"It was a possibility," I allowed. "A dark thought."

"You're right, that would disrespect you unless you were part of the scene or had a role in setting up that situation. I wouldn't do anything like that otherwise."